The Exurban Metropolis

Cities and close-in suburbs have evolved to be somewhat sustainable. As they grow in popularity, can the exurbs do the same? Or will they be stuck forever as "truck-oriented communities"?

Mountain House was supposed to be the next great “new city” in California.

Located near the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the 5,000-acre community was first approved in the 1990s on the condition that many of the planned houses couldn’t be built unless jobs also materialized. It was an attempt to make sure that Mountain House didn’t just become another affordable bedroom suburb, with commuters driving west to places like San Francisco’s Financial District and Palo Alto’s Silicon Valley, both of which are 60 miles away.

Almost nothing has worked out as originally planned. Today, Mountain House is neither a job center nor affordable. Incorporated as a city earlier this year, it now has close to 30,000 residents but only 1,500 jobs. Median home price is close to $1 million.

But the fact that Mountain House hasn’t worked out as planned may not matter much at all. Because after COVID, Mountain House is part of Northern California’s emerging Exurban Metropolis.

“Exurbs” are communities located not just outside the city buy beyond the suburbs – on the fringe of the metropolis, usually 40 to 60 miles away. They’re generally a low-density affair, consisting mostly of large single-family homes on large lots. Community amenities can be spotty, as the exurbs are often dependent on closer-in suburbs – often 10 or 20 miles away – for hospitals, major supermarkets, community colleges, and other such facilities.

An exurban neighborhood in Maryland

And politically they are usually red appendages to blue cities. Most jobs are still located in big cities or employment centers in close-in suburbs, where most residents are Democrats. Indeed, cultural clashes are not unusual – as when a 16-year-old in exurban Waller County, Texas, outside of Houston was charged with assault with a deadly weapon after “rolling coal” on recreational bicyclists from Houston and then plowing into them with his pickup truck because he couldn’t see.

Mountain House aside, Waller County might be Exhibit No. 1 for the emerging Exurban Metropolis. Take, for example, Oakwood Estates, a new development in Waller put together by Ashton Woods, a homebuilder that works across the Sunbelt. Oakwood Estates advertises homes in “Houston”, but they’re really in Waller County. They’re brand-new homes with fancy finishes aimed at what is, today, the lower end of the homebuying market: 1,600 to 2,700 square feet for $300,000 to $400,000. On a per-square-foot basis, that’s a fraction of the cost of new homes in Houston and affordable to a household making the median income in the metropolitan Houston market.

The “Rolling Coal” incident in Waller County, Texas

They’re also a long way away from anything. Oakwood Estates is 45 miles from Downtown Houston. It’s 36 miles from the fancy new Exxon Mobil headquarters near the suburban planned community of The Woodlands. It’s even 20 miles further out from Bridgeland, the master-planned community being built by the Howard Hughes Corporation along “The Grand Parkway,” Houston’s third (and often advertised as last) ring road. It’s so far out, in fact, that it’s only an hour’s commute in the other direction to Texas A&M University in College Station.

There’s nothing new, of course, about “driving till you qualify”. But, increasingly in the exurbs, the issue is not the qualifying but the driving.

A fancy Ford F-150, popular in a place like Waller County, can cost close to $10,000 down and $1,000 a month – almost as much on a monthly basis as a house in Oakwood Estates. Exurbanites often get caught up in a vicious cycle: They move farther out in order to buy a bigger, cheaper house – and then spend most of the savings on large and very expensive trucks in order to drive back to the more expensive areas for work.

That’s part of the reason why local politicians in Waller County fight so hard for a big share of Houston’s state and federal road money. With a population of only 56,000, Waller County has two seats on the regional transportation council that decides what roads will be built, while Houston – population 2 million – has only three. In fact, there is a huge debate in Houston – and in some other places – as to who should control funding for roads: The blue urban areas that have most of the population or the red exurban areas that want more growth.

Even with more road money, it’s not clear whether or how the Exurban Metropolis can grow into a real, full-service metropolis – admittedly a metropolis with ubiquitous auto dependency and long drives required to go almost everywhere. The best older suburbs – Irvine, Reston, The Woodlands – did do this successfully. They are largely auto-dependent, but distances aren’t far and they now have almost everything you would expect in a city – somewhere. (Admittedly Irvine’s home prices are out of sight, though prices are still reasonable in Reston and The Woodlands.)

The Grand Parkway outside of Houston

It’s hard to imagine the Exurban Metropolis maturing in the same way.

Some time ago I was visiting Redding, a metro area of 180,000 people halfway between Sacramento and Medford, Oregon – three hours each way to both. Redding has its issues, but the civic leaders were boasting about its assets, not the least of which was the four-year state university so vital to educating their kids and providing upward mobility.

I looked around town and although there was a community college, I saw no four-year university. Finally I realized they were referring to Chico State University, located 75 miles away on the edge of the Sierras. People from Redding seeking college degrees regularly drove back and forth to Redding for class, often at night.

A generation ago, I would have said this kind of exurban metropolis was unsustainable – things are too far apart, the cost of moving around is too much, the risk of being too far away from a hospital or a university or some other necessity is too high. Now that we are living in the online age, I am not so sure.

You don’t need to work in an office if you use Slack and Zoom. You don’t need to live near a hospital if you use telemedicine. You don’t need to live near a university if you can get a degree taking online classes. And you don’t need to live near a shopping center if you use Amazon.

But those are all big ifs. Telelearning is well established; telemedicine is still in its infancy. Amazon is convenient, but WalMart is cheaper. And, of course, working remotely only works for people who do office work. More than half of American workers can’t work at home. They work at factories and stores, restaurants and construction sites. They tend to be more working-class in their approach to life and often – thought not always – are not well paid. 

And the whole lifestyle depends on driving your expensive Ford F-150 – not to the corner store, but long distances: to the WalMart 10 miles away, the hospital 20 miles away, the construction site 40 miles away back in the deep blue city. In Waller County, about half of the workforce works in retail, food service, construction, or manufacturing. The average commute time is higher than the national average. Almost half drive 25 miles or more to work.

It was axiomatic in the suburban era that suburbs thrived because people were running away from things – crime, bad schools density, diversity, whatever. But of course, all those things followed people to the suburbs, along with many of the good things (such as culture and food) that cities provide as well.

It’s probable that the bad things – the crime, difficulty keeping schools good, etc., -- will follow people to the exurbs as well. But what about the good things? When you have to drive 10 miles just to get to the store or even to a local youth soccer field, what are the odds you’re going to get anything other than a fancy high school football stadium to enrich your community? And, of course, even if you do have a youth soccer field, who’s going to coach the teams if half the people in town are driving an hour or more just to get to work?

Traditional suburbs work better than most urbanists are willing to admit because, although you’re tethered to your car, distances aren’t far. And rural areas work too, because even though distances are long there aren’t all that many people clogging the roads.

But can the denizens of the Exurban Metropolis ever experience anything other than the inside of their very comfortable F-150? I’m afraid the answer is probably no.