Come Tour America’s Iconic Garden Communities

For 250 years now, we Americans have been a nation of fast-thinking, fast-moving people — but we’ve long understood the value of green space in our daily lives. More than that, we’ve taken action. As cities became overcrowded and chaotic by the late 1800s, garden communities were born, an idyllic-sounding housing concept centered around shared lawns and landscapes.

British architect and planner Ebenezer Howard provided the vision. He elevated the idea of communities arranged in concentric circles with homes, industry, and agriculture separated by green belts. This fed into the turn-of-the-century Garden City movement, which inspired dozens of communities that incorporated and celebrated natural areas into urban design. Join us on a tour of some noteworthy examples, and see how our expert rates them.

As New York City became a concrete jungle, Sunnyside Gardens pushed back. Built by the City Housing Corporation with plans by architects Clarence Stein and Henry Wright, this low-rise neighborhood was designed to help working people enjoy a bit of nature. Blocks of neat brick townhouses were built around shared green space in the middle. Pathways cut through the gardens, where neighbors could chat while tending their flower beds or playing ball with their kids. These landscaped courtyards comprise a whopping 72% of the land.

“One of the ways to evaluate the success of these designs is seeing when they entered the canon of preservation, such as being listed on the National Register of Historic Places,” points out Susan Kern, Ph.D., Director and Associate Professor in the Historic Preservation Program at the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at the University of Maryland. Sunnyside Gardens earns an A in this department: It was the first of the garden cities to be listed on the National Register in 1984.

As cars became a fact of American life, towns had to try to solve “the automobile problem,” as Kern describes it, by separating pedestrian walkways from streets. Three “green towns” funded by the federal Farm Security Administration (Greenbelt, Maryland; Greenhills, Ohio; and Greendale, Wisconsin) met the challenge. Instead of the typical street, the superblock was born, with buildings facing inward toward shared green courtyards instead of outward to the road. Want to visit a neighbor? Just stroll across a lawn. 

“Children walked to schools and parks without crossing roads,” explains Kern, noting the upside of these communities. But these verdant developments had a major drawback. Kern notes that all three began with restrictive racial covenants — so their “idealism” was not originally meant for everyone.

These cookie-cutter postwar homes created some of America’s most quintessential suburban garden communities. Levittowns — built by developer William Levitt (hence their name) in New York and elsewhere — brimmed with mass-produced single-family homes, arranged on curving streets with uniform lawns.

Gone were the shared courtyards of previous garden communities; in came private lots delineated by the white picket fence, and a distinct lack of sidewalks, Kern notes. While Levittowns are “undeniably influential,” she describes their design as ultimately “banal and environmentally destructive.” Plus they uproot the social side of green spaces.

Freshly minted places like Serenbe, Georgia (less than an hour outside Atlanta) and Mueller, Texas (in Central East Austin) push the garden-community concept ahead with an emphasis on walkability, community, sustainability, and ecological preservation. Costing on average over $1 million, Serenbe homes lean toward modern farmhouse styles, with pitched roofs and porches; miles of nature trails connect the residences, restaurants, and businesses, and the development even has its own organic farm. 

Mueller, on the other hand, mixes price points and styles, from Craftsman to contemporary, with weaving greenways and 140 acres of parks and open spaces, including a bountiful community garden with raised beds amid the homes.

Looking good. The success of these projects lies in the acknowledgement that “humans are part of nature, not separate from it. Sustainability has become the larger project.” And that’s a vital thought for America’s next 250 years.