Saving Suburbia

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Everybody, at least once in his life, wants to live in a nice small town, right? One with sidewalks, neighbors waving from their porches and a bustling central square within biking distance of your house? Trouble is, despite the growth of telecommuting, most jobs are still in cities and suburbs. That's why the late-'80s experiment of building cute little instant towns in places like Seaside, Fla., never really caught on: many of the communities were too far from major job centers. So now developers are chasing a new fashion. Rather than offer an escape from the suburbs, they're struggling to reinvent them by building cute little instant towns near major cities.

They're finding eager pioneers among couples like Amanda and Michael Hale. The Hales think sprawl is too kind a word for conditions they rejected around Atlanta. They call it suburban blight, a strip-malled world void of rituals like walking to a store or enjoying an attractive building. "We want our four children to grow up in a community, not at a highway exit," says Amanda, 33, a nurse. Michael, 34, director of a charter school in Durham, N.C., says their yen to escape grew urgent this year as alienated kids shot up suburban schools in Colorado and Georgia.

This summer the Hale family moved to a 300-acre development in Chapel Hill, N.C., called Southern Village. Here, as in other neotraditional neighborhoods, residents accept smaller lots than they might find elsewhere, in return for shared amenities like parks and day care, and a livable scale to things. Conveniences like a dry cleaner and cafe are but a stroll away in the village center. Southern Village's public elementary school sports a columned red brick facade and gabled roof. The homes, built in a variety of styles, from Charleston single to Georgian town house, have porches reaching out to tree-lined sidewalks and narrower streets with slower traffic. It all invites suburbanites to get out of their Toyota Camrys and interact for a change.

If this sounds too much like Mayberry to be practical, think again. The environmental and cultural damage caused by sprawl has become an issue in the presidential campaign. And the idea behind Southern Village--traditional neighborhood development, or TND--could reshape the outskirts of cities from North Carolina to Oregon. "I've had to relearn everything we've forgotten since World War II," says D.R. Bryan, developer of Southern Village. "But I do want to start building communities for people instead of for cars."

Five years ago, few neotraditional neighborhoods existed in the U.S. Today more than 100 are up and running, with an additional 200 on the drawing board. The movement's journal, the New Urban News, says investment in them has nearly doubled, from $1.2 billion in 1997 to $2.1 billion last year. Moreover, local planning boards in sprawl-plagued areas like Miami's Dade County are creating zones dedicated solely to such development.