Moving the Urban Experience to the Suburbs

In its most recent quarterly virtual discussion, this time on the future of cities, Coldwell Banker Commercial senior vice president and managing director Dan Spiegel spoke with Greg Lindsay, a senior fellow of MIT’s Future Urban Collectives Lab, and Dr. Tracy Hadden Loh, a fellow with the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Center for Transformative Placemaking at Brookings Metro.

One development that Spiegel asked about was attempts to recreate an “urban environment in a non-urban setting.”

According to Loh, the phenomenon is at least a couple of generations old. “I do think it’s something that will be supercharged by the pandemic,” she said. “It kind of makes sense that suburbs 3.0 might be the last dimension of creating a live-work-play environment. It’s good news, really, for the United States because the alternative is suburbs that don’t have a complete land use mix and that involve huge amounts of car travel. So. urbanizing suburbs is really good news for climate change, and it’s really good news for equity and inclusion because most Americans live in the suburbs. This is how they can get access to urban experiences, urban opportunity, urban prosperity.”

Lindsay noted Loh’s research in the area and described sitting in the George Washington University office of developer Christopher Lineburger, who had worked with Loh on some of these reports. “He told me about Craig Hall, the billionaire developer of the Dallas arts district who’s now turning his old suburban office park, Hall Park, out in Frisco, Texas into one of the fastest growing suburbs, metro fringes of the metroplex there, and turning it into a millennial playground of, you know, mixed use development, housing, hotels, etc.,” Lindsay said. He also mentioned that Mark Turo in Atlanta has been developing similar projects. “Avalon, a very successful, walkable urban environment. I believe it’s in Alpharetta, which you know is nowhere near the Atlanta core. There’s all sorts of incredible opportunities here to take this overbuilt 80s and 90s suburbia and build the kind of walkable amenities that people want even if they have to drive there from the exurban fringe to slightly closer in, versus going all the way downtown.”

“What they are is new communities,” Loh added. “They represent a response to the cost of living in the urban core and to constraints on growth in the urban core. I think there’s a full arc throughout history of people saying “I need somewhere I can start cheaper and fresher.”

Other data backs up the desirability of the approach. The number of apartments in live-work-play buildings has quadrupled over the last decade, while mixed use is the biggest asset class for design/build projects and may help solve retail and office challenges. Reframing them as providing an urban experience outside of a city would be an additional way to promote the concept.