After the U.S. housing bubble burst, no part of our country felt the pain more than the suburbs. Headlines screamed of foreclosed homes, displaced families, and an upsurge of crime in the once bucolic subdivisions that for so long symbolized the American Dream. Even five years later, conventional wisdom seems to be that this is all temporary - that once the economy rights itself and home prices return to pre-recession levels, we'll go back to the lives we led before. But that's not true. According to Leigh Gallagher, the recession was simply a catalyst for a much larger trend. The suburbs may have represented the dominant pattern of housing and population growth in the United States for more that half a century, but powerful social, economic, and demographic forces - along with the suburbs' poor design to begin with - are converging to render them unnecessary, and even undesirable, for an ever-increasing number of Americans.