I wonder what today's children will look for in a home.
The "Greatest Generation" and Baby Boomers built / bought the suburbs and they were obsessed with 2 things: cars and race. It makes sense how suburbs were built to be car-centric and to use distance as an intentional tool to keep away pedestrians who could not afford cars. The consequence was a society where the old city was for "the poors" or "the blacks" and the suburbs were for the successful class who could make payments. There was also a bit of frontier nostalgia going on in the age of Western movies at drive-in theaters. The pioneers of the 19th century escaped the overcrowded slums of early American cities for hopefully more prosperous lives "out West", and 20th century suburbanites imagined they were making their own pilgrimage. They were escaping desegregation and relatively small inner city homes which were built in the era before mass production of consumer crap. The sprawling "ranch" style house was developed to engage this fantasy, and came complete with a decorative yard meant to evoke farmland (even requiring physical labor to maintain!). People raised dogs instead of cows, and mowed grass instead of plowing fields.
If you were born after about 1995, this probably sounds like an alien culture. This mindset was specific to a certain generation, a certain time, and a certain place. It will be gone someday. When the Boomers are gone, their architecture will still be with us, but will their mentality?
So far, millennials and generation Z are showing relatively less interest in cars, lawn care, or self-segregation. They've piled into cities, making what used to be known as slums into HCOL neighborhoods (e.g. Compton, Harlem, The French Quarter, Deep Ellum). They are renters instead of buyers, prioritizing geographic flexibility over the pride of owning a fake farm in the suburbs. They grew up in subdivisions where each house was isolated from its neighbors, and now they are obsessed with staying connected via social media. One gets the sense that if they were to build a city, today's 20-somethings would create something similar to the old cities of Europe or old neighborhoods in Chicago or Philadelphia.
What will happen?
1) Prosperous millennials and generation Z couples pay off their student loans in their 40s, and then purchase existing suburban homes. They get over the urban phase of their lives and settle down, adopting their parents' lifestyle. Inner city communities react to the reign of Trump the same way they reacted to the reign of Johnson, Nixon, and Ford - by reverting back to being impoverished ethnic enclaves people dream of escaping. American patters of economic segregation maintain a 100 year streak, as enduring infrastructure decisions, interests, and perceptions keep things that way. Meanwhile, a steady stream of new addictive drugs make pedestrians seem more suspicious than ever.
2) New inner-city developments pop up to address younger generations' need for social connection, walkable experiences, and geographic/financial flexibility. These places, with their vitality and hustle, seem like paradise to a generation which has come to associate the suburbs with the dissatisfying experience of living with their parents. Meanwhile, the suburbs rot as elderly Baby Boomers fail to maintain their detached homes. Suburban prices plummet as their expensive connecting infrastructure (roads, utilities) decay. An equilibrium is reached in which some suburbs become rental slums, some become ethnic enclaves, and others are inhabited by people nostalgic for a 20th century they never lived in.
3) In a transformative eight-year span, the rise of full-suite augmented reality work-from-home software makes it possible for 35% of workers to stop commuting. Traffic starts to resemble weekends, even during rush hour. Freed from the constraints of commutting, some people buy home/offices even further out in the country. Others locate themselves near shopping and cultural attractions. In the middle are the suburbs, which lack both the fun of the urban setting and the peacefulness of the rural/small town settings. They are also physically decaying by this point. As the political equilibrium shifts, car-centric infrastructure is defunded and the suburbs become a place of potholes, sewage floods, and blackouts. Nonetheless, suburban infrastructure limps along for the remainder of our lives, as driverless vans shuttle the poor back and forth between suburban rent-houses and areas of physical economic activity.