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[Photo Credit: flickr user Dean Terry]

The post-recession trend toward smaller homes in suburban communities has grown over the past few years – and as the economy continues to lag, it’s likely these more modest homes will only rise in popularity. It remains unclear, however, if Americans have really begun to reevaluate the excesses of 6.5 bathrooms and a “celebrity-style media and screening room,” or whether they’re just putting those dreams on hold for the time being.

The building industry has certainly reacted to the American home-buyer’s current need for a more affordable, pared down lifestyle. A recent New York Times article featured Builder magazine’s 2010 “concept home,” a 1,700 square foot “Home for the New Economy.” A virtual tour of the house emphasizes the house's “roominess and livability,” low energy load and flexible interior spaces.

The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) has also released a report on the changing housing industry, focusing on consumers’ new demands for single-family homes. According to the study, “characteristics of homes started in 2009 reveal a marketplace adapting to tougher economic times with fewer luxuries, but also point to a few amenities that have been on the upswing despite the general retrenchment of consumers.” While new houses are getting smaller and cheaper, the number of bedrooms and bathrooms showed little change. The study also found that while amenities like three-car garages, fireplaces and patios have declined, porches have shown an increase in popularity. (The Home for the New Economy features front and back porches.) One luxury feature that persists in new home construction is the two-story foyer – 30% of homes started in 2009 had one. It appears American homebuyers are willing to give up almost anything before a grand entrance.

But perhaps it is more important to consider whether new communities of smaller homes can make up for the decreased square footage of the houses themselves. In the same New York Times article, New Urbanist founding father Andres Duany posits that “the sprawling homes of the last decade met a need, albeit imperfectly, by reproducing internally what suburban communities lacked: an exercise room substitutes for a park, a home theater for the Main Street cinema.” Regardless of your take on Duany’s special brand of small-town American urbanism, it’s comforting to think that an increased demand for porches (and their tendency to foster social interaction), is the first manifestation of Americans’ newfound desire to reengage with their communities. It remains to be seen whether Americans will continue to appreciate them when they can once again afford larger, more isolated properties.

To better visualize the changing features of new single-family homes, The Wall Street Journal has created an interactive floor plan comparison of boom-era and post-recession luxury homes. Read the accompanying article, “Builders Downsize the Dream Home.”

Sprawl, conformity, car culture, ennui, decay. These are a few of the themes Arcade Fire tackles in its third album, The Suburbs, released last week. At times nostalgic and at times cautionary, The Suburbs may be most notable (certainly in the realm of SPUR's blog) as an example of city planning commentary in pop culture.

As an NPR review put it, "the members of Arcade Fire have always been fascinated by the subtle ways geography informs our lives." Their newest album weaves a sense of suburban space and place throughout its 16 tracks. Band front man Win Butler sings of how "First they built the road, then they built the town. / That's why we're still driving round and round." Much of the inspiration for the album comes from Butler's youth spent in the suburbs of Houston in the 1980s. And as with Arcade Fire's other notable excursions into the memories of childhood on its first album Funeral, the tone is often wistful. Butler and wife Régine Chassagne sing longingly for the "wasted hours" of adolescence spent staring out the window of a car, riding bikes in the night to the nearest park, and waiting in parking lots under freeway overpasses. There are also more melancholic references to the impact of growing up in the built environment of suburbia — "all we see are kids in buses longing to be free."

But The Suburbs is not so much an extended story about suburbia in the "˜80s as it is about returning to those cookie-cutter communities today. Images of suburban decay ring throughout the album, as "all of the walls that they built in the "˜70s finally fall." The few redeeming qualities of growing up in the suburbs seem to be gone. As Butler sings in the song "City With No Children," all that remains is "a garden left for ruin by a millionaire inside of a private prison." Perhaps the most anthemic song on an album that on the whole is less filled with those big communal choruses for which Arcade Fire is known, comes near the very end with "Sprawl II (Mountains beyond mountains)." Sounding like ABBA or Blondie's "Heart of Glass," Régine Chassagne chants the chorus: "Living in the sprawl / Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains / And there's no end in sight / I need the darkness, someone please cut the lights."

Certainly, Arcade Fire is not the first band to sing a cautionary tale about suburban life. Rush condemned the stifling conformity of suburbia in the "˜80s with "Subdivisions," Modest Mouse has oft breached the subject on albums like The Lonesome Crowded West and Building Nothing Out of Something, and the Dirty Projectors' "Temecula Sunrise" is supposedly about a hypothetical future in which millionaires in mass move out of their suburban McMansions that then become colonized by bohemian artists. And these are just a few examples. It almost seems a rite of passage in rock music to vilify mainstream suburban culture. Arcade Fire's melancholic nostalgia probably goes easier on suburbia than most.

Nor is Arcade Fire the first notable band to breach urban planning issues and sing critically about our built environments. David Byrne, former front man of the Talking Heads, is a known bike enthusiast and advocate for more livable cities, having recently designed bike rack sculptures around New York City and written Bicycle Diaries about his observations biking in cities throughout the world. (You can also catch David Byrne's "Arboretum" series of drawings on exhibit at Electric Works through August 21st.) Perhaps my favorite Talking Heads song about urban space is "Nothing But Flowers" — a satirical inversion of Joni Mitchell's famous "Big Yellow Taxis." Rather than paving paradise to put up a parking lot, David Byrne sings in horror as our built environment — parking lots, factories, Pizza Huts, discount stores, and highways — gives way to "nothing but flowers."

Pop culture has a way of providing insight into our changing desires about the spaces in which we live. In The Option of Urbanism, Christopher Leinberger uses the example of television shows to portray society's shifting opinion on urbanism versus suburbanism. He suggests that while TV sitcoms in the baby boomer era (The Brady Bunch, The Dick Van Dyke Show) are set in idyllic suburbia, shows beginning in the 1990's take place in cities (Friends, Seinfeld, Sex and the City).

A recent Slate article from Tom Vanderbilt would suggest that Hollywood itself drives popular opinion associated with car (and car-less) culture. In the article, Vanderbilt gives example after example of movies in which characters without cars are portrayed as "losers." An exception (and a possible sign of progress) is last year's 500 Days of Summer — a movie that romanticizes car-less life spent strolling the streets of downtown LA and admiring the prewar architecture. In a memorable scene on a bench in Angel's Knoll Park, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character Tom "Manhattanizes" the view in front of him, using the arm of Zooey Deschanel's character Summer to draw an image of handsome old buildings in the place of existing parking lots. Though the film conveniently ignores downtown's post-1950's iconic architecture, it remains an example of shifting ideals in pop culture. Even beer commercials are starting to highlight other modes of transportation, as Matthew Roth from Streetsblog noted last week in an article about a new Miller High Life commercial in which a blue-collar worker rides his bike through a snowstorm with a six-pack in the front basket.

Arcade Fire's The Suburbs isn't as much about suburbanism versus urbanism, or cars versus bicycles, as it is a question of "What now?" The album's vision of suburbia may not exactly be an ideal place to live — not in the 1980's and certainly not upon returning to it today. But the narrator of the album does return, nostalgic for his wasted hours of youth and fearful of what may remain for his children. If suburbia is no longer necessarily the dream, what is to be made of those communities we built in the 70s?

Arcade Fire's The Suburbs can be listened to in its entirety on the NPR website. But true to its theme, it probably sounds best through car speakers while driving on an empty highway.

They're small and individual in character — dare I say lovable? — like single-family houses. And yet they shelter several families under one roof: maybe two, three, six or some other small number. Lots of cities have single-family houses that have been split up into apartments, but San Francisco's wooden multifamily houses were designed to have multiple units from the start. "¨

When is the last time you saw a new subdivision made up of these kinds of homes? They occupy a nice sweet spot between the low density of single-family houses and the anonymity of large apartment buildings with their corridors, elevators, and stairwells. Is this form of housing, which we haven't built in large quantities in decades, worth reviving in the Bay Area as its suburban areas get denser? Could we dust off this idea for a new/old American Dream?

All daydreaming aside, small wooden multifamily houses built decades ago soldier on as a beloved fixture in our city, from the Ingleside to North Beach and a whole lot of points in between. I think they are unsung heroes in making San Francisco feel like San Francisco. Here are seven reasons why.

1. A little patch of earth. There's just something about having daily access to a secluded yard, even if it's shared with one, two, or five neighbors from your building. You can grow some vegetables, let the kiddies run free, or just look at it.

2. A whole community in one little house. Enrique and Clarissa own the house and live in the top apartment. Clarissa's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Velilla, help out with the mortgage and live in the second-floor flat. They're spry and they don't mind the stairs. Lana and Simone and their daughter Yvonne rent the ground-floor apartment. If they need something from their landlords — whether a dishwasher repair or a stick of butter — they just walk up two flights and knock.

3. A front door to call your own, and a stoop to share (just a little). It would probably feel strange to play guitar outside if the stoop were shared with 50 other families that you don't know instead of one or a few that you do know.

4. Pretty houses all in a row. Our classic San Francisco streetscapes are made up of tightly packed small buildings that express their individuality while more or less behaving themselves, at least most of the time. (Kind of like those of us who live in them.) Note the irregular rhythm of the placement of windows, entrances, and garage doors, not to mention the building heights.

5. An outdoor room of your own. Somewhere around 1:1 is a pleasing ratio for the width of the public street space to the height of the buildings (here it's 0.73). Too much more and you lose the cozy feeling of being in an "outdoor room," the Holy Grail of urbanism. Too much less and you feel like you're in a slot canyon. And if the buildings are modest in height, then the street can be narrow, and therefore neighborly.

6. If you simply MUST keep a car in your building "¦ and a lot of people do, then you'd almost certainly prefer to have your off-street parking in a small garage to yourself (like here) or shared with another family or two, rather than in a 50-car parking structure. That way you have space to fix up that old Schwinn, or turn the garage into a haunted house like they do on Fair Oaks Street on Halloween.

7. We're in good company. Most other cities don't have this kind of housing, but a few do. In each place, multifamily houses are built according to a local vernacular, whether we're talking about (from left to right) San Francisco, the "three-deckahs" of Boston, the "three-flats" of Chicago, or Istanbul.

Caseworker: Jake Wegmann works in the local nonprofit affordable housing development industry. For his graduate degrees in urban planning and real estate, he wrote a thesis about the ubiquitous wooden three-unit houses of Boston titled "What Happened to the Three-Decker?" While riding his bike down his SOMA street, Jake gets great pleasure from using his clicker to open the garage door so that he can ride right into the two-family house where he lives.

Photo Credit: All photos and drawings by the author.

[Urban Field Notes, an additive of cultural landscapes and observations compiled by SPUR members and friends, will now be a regular feature on the SPUR Blog. Urban Field Notes can also be found in the Urbanist, a monthly publication sent to all SPUR Members. Send your ideas to Urban Field Notes editor Ruth Keffer at editor@spur.org]