The Radical 'Burbs

Tracing the surprising roots of social experimentation.

Jesse Walker from the January 2003 issue

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Differences aside, the new towns had a legacy larger than the individual suburbs themselves. In the early days, they inspired similar projects, most not nearly as successful. For the most part, these lie outside the scope of Suburban Alchemy, and while Bloom's reasons for excluding them are understandable, they still add up to a tale worth telling. General Electric briefly planned to build 20 such towns around the country, and it seriously considered acquiring Reston as part of the project. It changed its corporate mind when one executive blackballed the purchase on the grounds that Reston was integrated. This scuttled the whole project, since G.E. wasn't about to embark on the P.R. disaster of building 20 exclusively white communities.

With the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1970, the government began underwriting new towns as well. These were built by private entrepreneurs, but the feds offered financing, and with money, naturally, came strings. Simon, fired from Reston in 1968, was briefly associated with one of those projects, a New York community called Riverton. "The relationship with the government was really hideous," he recalls, "because the people administering it were constantly dreaming up things that they thought would be fun." An example: The feds decided that every new town would have to present a budget for the next five years, with the first year broken down into monthly budgets. If any of the items in the budget deviated from the projection by more than 15 percent, the entire forecast had to be done again. The practical result, Simon reports, was that "every developer had to do a five-year projection every month."

Most of the federally financed new towns failed. The most successful was The Woodlands, near Houston. The most infamous was Soul City, launched by the Black Power leader Floyd McKissick in the North Carolina backwoods. A rural town in a depressed area, Soul City never stood a chance of attracting the 55,000 citizens its founder forecast. Today it holds just a handful of residents, unless you include the tenants of the county prison.

The idea of fusing social idealism with profit-seeking suburban development persists today with the New Urbanism, a philosophy favoring compact, mixed-use neighborhoods modeled on the small towns of prewar America. (See "Room to Grow," February 2001.) Both Bloom and Simon criticize the new movement, Bloom contrasting its "upper-class reform spirit" with the "social and cultural idealism" of the earlier movement (while conceding that the new towns were "elitist in their own way"). Simon is even harsher. "I don't know if you've paid any attention to the New Urbanism," he says. "Well, that's not a walkable community. There's a cross street with cars every block. So the idea that you can send a 5-year-old out to get his popsicle, which is what the self-appointed emperor of the New Urbanism, [Andres] Duany, says he can do, is just ridiculous."

Reston, by contrast, has pedestrian underpasses (and, to a lesser extent, so does Columbia). They don't cover the whole town, Simon concedes: Most notably, Highway 267, dividing the north part of Reston from the south, cannot be passed on foot. But someone in the Lake Anne Village area can get to work, school, or the grocery store without a vehicle. The New Urbanists, for their part, criticize Reston precisely because it segregates pedestrians from cars.

The new towns today are not identical to the blueprints that birthed them. In 1967, when Reston faced the threat of bankruptcy, Gulf Oil took it over. (The town's current corporate parent is Terrabrook, a land development company.) Simon was soon ousted, and his more radical plans for the town were reined in. Lake Anne still reflects Reston's founding ideals, more or less, but the other village centers don't, especially on the north side of town. "We were supposed to have seven town centers," recalls Simon, who left Reston shortly after he lost his job but returned when he retired in 1993. "Well, what we have is one village center and six shopping centers." The attempt to mix the housing stock -- and, as a result, to mix income levels -- was also dropped.

It isn't just the financiers who have moved from the new towns' original principles. Real communities evolve over time: They are settled by actual people, and their desires do not always coincide with those of the founders. The interfaith centers are still there in Columbia, but so is a recently built synagogue. Rouse thought his town would attract blue-collar workers; instead, he got an inordinate number of psychologists.

If the towns were known in the 1970s as hotbeds of social experimentation, that had as much to do with the liberal sorts who moved there as it did with the innovations programmed into the cities by their creators. The new suburbs were open to mixed-race couples and liberated women; and so mixed-race couples and liberated women came. In the '80s, Irvine -- the only one of Bloom's three subjects to become an incorporated city -- elected a government well to the left of most of America, even as its commercial centers seemed more influenced by nearby Disneyland than by Berkeley. (Its governments in the '90s have been more conservative.)

Four decades after they were begun, the new towns are half-breeds; their founding visions have been crossbred with the territory around them. In Bloom's words, they are "landscapes that are similar to the mainstream yet strategically different" -- though the similarities and differences are sometimes less intentional than that word "strategically" implies. It's the citizens who make a city, shaping it to their individual needs even as the city, in turn, shapes them. Columbia isn't as integrated as it used to be, and there are those who worry that Rouse's dream of racial harmony has failed. Then again, the nearby suburb of Crofton was built to be an exclusively Caucasian enclave, a destination for white flight. Today, blacks and other racial minorities live there freely. If Columbia hasn't lived up to the idealists' expectations, then Crofton has exceeded them. Both were built to realize particular dreams, and both, without losing their distinct identities, have moved toward the median.

Now Simon sits in his high-rise apartment over Lake Anne, reflecting on the ways his garden city has both held to and drifted from his vision. Duany cries foul whenever a New Urban colony fails to conform to his blueprint, blaming any subsequent problems on those deviations from the philosophy. And in Reston and Radburn and Columbia and Crofton and Irvine and all the rest, it is the citizens who push their towns in new, unpredictable directions, influenced but not bound by the founders' ideals.