The white picket fence, single family home and 2.3 children no longer seems to represent the typical aspirations of younger generations, Brookings Institution researchers explain. Now young people moving into  midlife are looking for an urban setting that reduces commuting and isolation.

Christopher Leinberger, the University of Michigan urban planning professor who has been documenting the downscaling trend, says that young professionals are now looking for rich, mixed-use, easy-access environments, encouraging a revitalization of downtowns. He predicts that suburbia will fall out of favor, culturally and economically, until zoning regulations catch up to the demand for more creative, sustainable, smaller-scale communities. 

Leinberger predicts that large-lot, single family homes are becoming passé; that the once desirable badges of wealth are not only seen as over-the-top, in an era when millionaires arrive for work in t-shirts and flip-flops, but also as necessitating an increasingly unsustainable, oil-dependent lifestyle. Furthermore, most young professionals simply can't afford to buy into the mansion market. He anticipates that powerhouses or “McMansions” will soon be converted into affordable, multi family housing: "The result is an oversupply of depreciating suburban housing and a pent-up demand for walkable urban space, which is unlikely to be met for a number of years.” Leinberger says.

I already see this trend around me in Jamaica Plain, MA, a neighborhood in Boston. Jamaica Plain once housed Boston’s 18th-century affluent in their “country homes” -- actually gigantic pondside mansions, some of them the size of a modern city block. The homes line Jamaicaway, Jamaica Plain’s central thoroughfare, and are suffering from varying degrees of dilapidation and neglect. Inheriting families are slowly selling to entrepreneurs, who have been renovating the mansions into apartment complexes.

The mansions evoke a fairtytale-like quality, offering a glimpse into the materialism of our predecessors (and how little has changed in us). Those mansions have never really represented New England, which is famous for its dense urbanity; its tenements, now ritzy brownstones, colorful triple-deckers, narrow brick buildings or the ramshackle digs they have always been. Mansions have always represented America in the extreme, far away from the experiences of most people. It feels like poetic justice to watch these mansions turn into dense, practical housing.