Suburbia Presents A Challenging Problem Author Douglas Kelbaugh Says Our Lifestyles Are Using Up The Good Life We’re All Pursuing

“Common Place: Toward Neighborhood and Regional Design” by Douglas Kelbaugh (University of Washington Press, $35)

We’ve been fooled into thinking we can afford suburbia. Lulled into nonchalance by cheap oil, subsidized city services, an expanding economy and the good luck to have ancestors who grabbed the best part of a big continent, we’ve spent the past half-century spreading our cities like brushfires. We’ve consumed farmland and forest in frenetic pursuit of the presumed good life a hurriedly built balloon-frame manor on a third of an acre, surrounded by similar abodes inhabited by similar people.

But we can’t go on like this. Douglas Kelbaugh, professor of architecture and urban design at the University of Washington, argues that the suburbs as we’ve built them are card-house neighborhoods, impossible to sustain into future generations without sweeping reform. His new book, “Common Place: Toward Neighborhood and Regional Design,” will be released this month by the University of Washington Press, and while it isn’t exactly summer beach reading, it deserves attention.

Kelbaugh kicks suburbia in the already sore places - wasteful sprawl, automobile addiction and architectural banality - explaining yet again why there are few postcards of suburban scenes. Scores of articulate critics have been here before. What feels different in Kelbaugh’s book is the close-to-home message and the uneasy feeling that time and land are running out.

Kelbaugh’s answers mostly have the clatter of familiarity and are likely to strike the average ear as heard-it-before or can’t-be-done.

Concentrate on in-fill housing. Tax the hell out of gasoline. Make suburban development reflect the real costs of bringing roads, utilities, and fire trucks out to it. Liberalize zoning and encourage mother-in-law apartments over the garages and hardware stores in walking distance of the homeowner who breaks a drill bit on Saturday morning. Nothing is wrong with any of this, but the problem is bigger than the sum of solutions. Kelbaugh touches on these fundamental issues but then veers off into a string of chapters on design charrettes - illustrated brainstorms, essentially - conducted in the UW College of Architecture and Urban Planning. The charrettes propose solutions to urban design problems around the Puget Sound region. The value of this book, though, is in the provocative direction it will shove the alert reader.

The very long horizons of this continent have shaped America’s culture of growth and consumption for more than 200 years. They are not closing in, and we remain deep in denial. Yes, political bodies are debating and sometimes even doing, like enacting the Growth Management Act, but our personal agendas still reverberate with Manifest Destiny. As long as our dreams and our households continue the old patterns of relentless expansion, how can our cities do otherwise?

I survey my personal sprawl and see a metaphor for suburbia.

The first house we bought more than 20 years ago was a modest 1,200 square feet. The second was 1,440, the third, 2,000 and the fourth and incumbent house on the Sammamish Plateau, 2,200. Through this time the household body count has remained constant at just two, but the inanimate stuff has metastasized. There are a dozen boxes we have not opened since the last move, a couch no one sits on and a thousand second-rate books that have little reason to stay but inertia. As E.B. White once wrote, “It is not possible to keep abreast of the normal tides of acquisition. A home is like a reservoir equipped with a check valve; the valve permits influx but prevents outflow.”

We pay the punishing bills to keep all this stuff warm and dry and do not consider reversing the valve. Less would not be more; less would be a bore. This is the gospel of our culture. The voluntary simplicity movement remains on the fringe, an offstage whisper to the drama of the American Dream.

To Americans, smallness has always been equated with cheapness. When Cadillac finally produced a small car, the Cimarron, in 1982, the automaker based it on the dismal Chevrolet Cavalier. The implicit message to the Cimarron’s few and foolhardy buyers was, “OK, we’ll sell you a small car, but we’ve made sure you’ll be punished for it.” Some suburban home builders today are butting against buyer resistance as they’re squeezing houses onto the smaller lots mandated by the Growth Management Act. People don’t feel like they’re getting enough for their money. The builders are experimenting with more surface content in the houses - better cabinetry, wainscoting in the den - while still finding ways to squeeze in the three-car garage that buyers contemplating $300,000 price tags demand.

That isn’t going to work. What we’re going to need is a new way of valuating our living environment - a paradigm shift in the popular buzz.

Kelbaugh posts some signs that lead to worthwhile avenues of thought, but he doesn’t pursue them far enough. He snipes at the value system that lays more importance on a good CD player than a house built with craftsmanship and permanence. “For the public’s dollars,” he writes, “architecture also has to compete with ever-cheaper consumer items, such as televisions, cars, clothes, travel - all of which continue to become cheaper in real dollars. Most Americans will choose - sadly but understandably - a $400 CD player over a solid-core oak door.” The result, as Stewart Brand wrote in 1986 in “How Buildings Learn:” … Our buildings look and feel increasingly like movie sets: impressive to the eye, flimsy to the touch, and incapable of aging well.”

Sounds like my house - and my whole suburb. It’s still building as if this were 1957 and the imagination could manufacture infinite horizons of land, gasoline and money to abandon the mistakes and keep on pushing farther out, rebuilding and expanding forever.

What we need to do can be expressed very simply: begin to substitute quality for quantity in our whole built environment - our houses, neighborhoods, shopping malls, office parks and entertainment palaces. How to do it could be the tight focus of Kelbaugh’s next book. Or someone else’s.