‘The great suburban build-out is over’, declares James Howard Kunstler in his scathing indictment of post-war sprawl The Geography of Nowhere, published in 1993. Kunstler is just one of a chorus of voices proclaiming the end of the era of the American suburb. Largely inspired by the work of new urbanists Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk in the early 1990s, Kunstler's invective holds the unchecked suburban growth of recent decades to be economically and environmentally unsustainable, and calls for a return to the traditional, pedestrian-friendly, mixed-used neighbourhoods of pre-war cities. Economists such as Robert J. Shiller have asserted that the massive residential dispersal of the post-war period– stimulated by the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration loan programmes– was historically anomalous; Shiller further argues that there is no long-term future for exurban growth following the collapse of the housing bubble in the mid- 2000s and continually escalating fuel prices. A few years earlier, the architectural critic Herbert Muschamp insisted that the post-war mass-produced suburban house was in any case only ever able to remain standing for a few decades before the cheap materials used in its construction, such as plywood, inevitably peeled, buckled and split, with features such as doors and windows ‘morph[ing] into trick or treat versions of themselves’. Muschamp outlines some proposals made by planners for the ‘recycling’ and repurposing of declining ‘first-tier’ suburbs, and in subsequent years interest in redesigning or ‘retrofitting’ older suburbs has grown. Over the last three decades, however, individuals have been taking matters into their own hands. The apparent obsolescence of the housing stock of many ‘inner-ring’ suburbs, coupled with the increasing desirability of living in closer proximity to central cities, has fuelled the ‘teardown’ phenomenon, which involves older properties being bought with a view to demolishing and replacing them with a structure more suited to the needs or status of the new owners. Teardowns have proven controversial for an assortment of reasons, environmental, socio-economic and aesthetic. Indeed, ‘historic character’ is an attribute frequently mobilised to bolster competing claims about what constitutes appropriate architectural form in suburban and urban neighbourhoods across the United States that have been affected by teardowns.