RESTON, Va. – At lunchtime, workers from Microsoft might walk a few blocks to the fancy Morton's steakhouse, perhaps stopping in at one of the tony boutiques nearby. Corporate tech headliners like Google and Oracle have offices here, along with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Accenture. After work, young professionals pack the tables at Jackson's, a popular local restaurant.
"This is a place that has everything for you," says Joe Knapp, 47, who lives in another suburb of Washington, D.C., ( Alexandria) and makes the easy commute to Reston for his video production job. From hiking trails to fine dining, Reston, he says, has enough to spare locals from dealing with the hated, heavy traffic to the District.
It feels like city living, with its high(ish)-rise, multifamily apartment buildings, walkable streets and vibrant social scene. But Reston, 24 miles from the nation's capital, is part of America's new suburbia -- hipper and more diverse than the quiet, car-dependent suburbs of the past, with amenities that make trekking into the big city for work or play a choice and not a necessity. The trend is changing both the face of the suburbs and their politics, presenting new challenges for city planners and for candidates for elected office.
"A lot of suburbs are urbanizing" as millennials move there and demand city-like benefits, says Hamilton Lombard, an analyst at the University of Virginia's Demographics Research Group. The influx of younger residents has made the suburbs themselves more ethnically, racially and economically diverse. Far from being enclaves of white picket-fenced yards on quiet streets, they are rapidly becoming destinations of their own.
While the U.S. Census Bureau does not define "suburb," demographers have looked at the communities that lie outside city lines and agree they are growing. The nation's fastest-growing counties are in the lower-density suburbs of major urban areas, calculates demographics expert Jed Kolko, chief economist at the jobs site Indeed. And many have a more urban vibe than the cities nearby.
Hoboken, New Jersey, for example, is far more urban-like than its New York City borough neighbor, Staten Island. Stapleton, a neighborhood of Denver far enough from the city itself to be considered a suburb, according to the real estate marketplace Zillow, has parks, biking trails, yoga studios, community gardens and a thriving restaurant scene. The Nashville suburb of Franklin, Tennessee, has a quaint downtown, a farmers market, and is home to the corporate headquarters of Nissan North America, which has helped make Williamson County, Tennessee, one of the fastest job creators in the nation.
Plano, Texas, a suburb of Dallas, has come into its own, attracting retirees as well as families with its stylish downtown, arts center and job opportunities that come with being home to U.S. company headquarters for Dr. Pepper, Frito-Lay, J.C. Penney and Pizza Hut. "Plano even 10 years ago was pretty far outside of Dallas. Now it's all filled in, in terms of housing and retail and commercial property," says Lloyd Potter, the Texas state demographer. "It has high-rises and big office complexes and various kinds of warehouses."
Plano and other American suburbs, Potter says, "used to be bedroom communities." But they're not so sleepy anymore.
Part of what's driving younger people to the suburbs is the fact that major cities are becoming more crowded, says Skylar Olsen, senior economist for Zillow. But it's not simply a function of wanting more space in which to settle down and have families; many also move because the cost of living in cities is too high, she says.
Members of this demographic group, Olsen says, "have a taste for connectivity" and are fueling the trend for suburbs that feel more like cities, with multifamily housing units and bustling arts and dining scenes.
"It's been a humongous change here" in Reston, says Larry Butler, senior director of land use and planning for the Reston Association. A half-century ago, the community was a typical suburb, with parkland and open spaces. Development really ticked up in the 1990s and early part of 21st century, Butler says, and while Reston has retained its parks and quiet appeal, it has evolved into a community with big employers, big apartment buildings and big-name retailers.
Suburbs also have begun to attract demographic groups once seen as city dwellers, Kolko says. The influx of new residents has increased diversity of race, ethnicity, age and income and, in the D.C. area, the suburbs are often more diverse than the city itself.
In Prince William County, Virginia – two counties away from the District of Columbia – 25 percent of the population is foreign-born, according to the most recent American Community Survey estimates. In the District of Columbia, 15 percent are foreign-born. In Alexandria, closer to the District, around 30 percent of people are foreign-born, and in Arlington, right over the Potomac River from the nation's capital, nearly 25 percent of residents were born in foreign nations.
Of residents born in the U.S., Latinos and Asians are more dominant in D.C. suburbs than in the nation's capital. About 24 percent of residents in Prince William County are Latino, compared with 11.5 percent for the District. Manassas – an independent city of fewer than 38,000 residents, according to the 2010 census – saw its Latino population more than double between 2000 and 2010, going from 15 percent of the population to 31 percent. The town of Annandale, in the D.C.-border county of Fairfax, is 25 percent Asian, and home to several Korean language newspapers as well as a shopping mall filled with Korean stores and eateries. The District of Columbia's Asian population is about 3.6 percent.
Nearly half of the District's population is African-American, but that's a dramatic drop from about 70 percent in 1970. Meanwhile, 66 percent of residents of suburban Maryland's Prince George's County are African-American.
The changing demographics mean changes in suburban politics, as well, since people don't alter their political views when they cross a city or county line, notes Bill Frey, a demographics expert with the Brookings Institution. The growing number of Latinos and unmarried women in Northern Virginia, for example, is one explanation political analysts offer for the state's blue-ward trend. Republicans also saw an erosion of support in suburban areas in the 2017 off-year elections as well as in recent special elections, particularly the Alabama U.S. Senate race and a suburban Pittsburgh congressional election, both of which Democrats won in upsets.
In urban areas, "people [tend to] want more from the government, want more government services," and they bring that perspective with them when they relocate to suburbs, says Lombard, the University of Virginia demographer. Suburbs, he notes, that are looking a lot more like cities these days.