This is how the suburbs die

In 1974, corporate behemoth GE moved its headquarters from Manhattan to the suburban Fairfield, Connecticut. Last week, it announced that it was leaving Fairfield for Boston's waterfront district. And as GE goes, it has people wondering whether the suburbs are going to lose their economic lifeblood.

Mad Men reminded us that mid-century advertising executives worked in the heart of Manhattan, but slowly began their retreat to the burbs as crime exploded in New York City. The corporate offices followed them and their growing families in the 1970s and 1980s.

It created an environmental effect. Westchester, New York, has IBM, Pepsi, MasterCard, Atlas Air. Fairfield has Time Warner Cable, WWE, Ethan Allen, Priceline and many more. This diffusion throughout the suburbs allowed executives to keep their family in one town for years, but still be able to change companies throughout their career.

That trend is reversing in a major way. Violent crime has fallen for two decades, faster in some of the cities than elsewhere. Connecticut has really been hammered by the trend away from suburban campuses. Aetna demolished a 1.3 million-square-foot campus in Middletown in 2011. That site is vacant. Pfizer dumped a research campus in Groton after that. The suburbs around Chicago, which once gladly received Sears' corporate headquarters, may be hit next.

Many trends could push corporate headquarters back into the cities and begin the impoverishment of suburbs. Environmental concerns may shift public policy to reduce subsidies to the high-carbon lifestyle of the suburbs, or further subsidize the the lower-carbon lifestyle of mass-transport living in big cities. Younger people are overall delaying marriage and childbearing even further, and expressing their preference for the big cities over the suburbs.

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