It might be unpopular here, and I feel slightly guilty saying it, but I like suburbia.
Mine has wide streets, plenty of tall trees, it is quiet. I like flowers in my yard, etc. I like my neighbors, but they are not within literally an arms length on each side of me every day.
Unlike probably most people here who grew up in suburbs, then perhaps started to hate it and moved to one of the coasts, to a city, I grew up in a city in an apartment. Proximity to stores, public transport and being able to walk is nice. But crime, full public transport during rush hour, noisy neighbors, or simply being flooded by neighbors from the top, crowding, dirty streets, etc. Even grocery shopping was annoying, yeah could walk to the store, but couldn't bring home a car trunk's worth and not worry about for another week.
So rationally, on a general scale, I can understand why suburbia sucks. But as an individual, I don't plan on moving to a city, the trade-offs are not adding up for me.
I agree. I have lived in cities and in the suburbs, and I greatly prefer the suburbs. I also feel that many of the points in the article make unwarranted assumptions about priorities, or are based on opinion. European cities feel “cozy” and “charming” is because they provide a feeling of enclosure, which humans want because it gives them with a coherent sense of place, like rooms in a house. You may want the feeling of enclosure, but I don't. Again, I've lived in both. I don't feel more "cozy" or comfortable in an urban setting. This is just one of several examples.
My biggest frustration about articles on this topic is how much they assume we all want the same thing, or agree on what is good and bad. Fact-based arguments like environmental impacts are great. But treating "ugly," "soul crushing" and "isolating" as absolutes isn't very productive.
"My biggest frustration about articles on this topic is how much they assume we all want the same thing"
It could be clearer but the opening paragraphs talk about how nearly everything in America is suburban. There is no choice for people that want to live in a city. That's because it's illegal to build anything except suburbia.
We'd all like a choice. Developers could build suburbia for you and a city for me. But that's not legal and that is what causes the problem.
A few older areas exist from before New Deal development laws mandated suburbia in the 1930s. And places like San Francisco and New York are insanely expensive because about half of us want to live there and they haven't been allowed to build any more of it for seventy years while the population tripled.
Author here - you nailed it. There's no useful discussing to be had about personal preferences when practically the entire country, notwithstanding a very small handful of places, is built as described in the artifice.
And as prevailing zoning laws, building rules and perverse government incentives currently stand, it is either outright illegal or massively uneconomical (thanks to the distortions) to build anything but Los Angeles.
When we have the option for urban living, then we can talk about who wants to live where. As it stands, the usual highway schlock is all the vast majority of us get.
As a person with a polar opposite background - grew up on 7 acres in the middle of nowhere - I completely agree. I enjoy living close to employment and services without being completely immersed in humanity 24/7.
This whole piece is an exercise in bias. I'm disappointed with Quartz.
I agree. I live in a small suburban development abutting several larger ones. There are miles of safe walking/jogging sidewalks and roadsides, I can enter the local mountain biking trails that go for miles just at the end of my street, and I can walk down to the small local lake to go fishing with my kid. Plus, the community is especially friendly and there are always neighbors outside chatting, having impromptu get-togethers, or planning the next community coffee or book club. A walk down to the mailbox on a Friday afternoon is as likely as not to have a neighbor hand you a beer or glass of wine while you have a chat and watch the kids practice riding their bikes where there's plenty of room for them to learn. There are downsides to be sure, like anything else, but I didn't grow up in the suburbs and I enjoy it.
Suburbia has many fine traits, but it also has a bunch of problems, first among them that it's generally financially unsustainable (not enough taxes raises to support large, sprawly infrastructure when it eventually needs to be replaced). Other issues include the way suburban residents frequently demand that urban centers design their transportation more around the needs of suburban commuters than people who live in the city itself, and how suburbs frequently use zoning restrictions to keep out lower income people.
Personally I'd love to split the difference and live in a European-style suburb. Something not in the main city, medium-density, lots of open areas nearby, good walking/biking, good transit connection to the city. Something like this, basically, except in the US: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Olching,+Germany/@48.20927...
Unfortunately, due to a variety of bad transportation and land use policies, this kind of town doesn't really exist in the US.
Oh, but it does exist. Inner ring suburbs in most major northeastern cities fit the bill. I live in a detached house with a nice backyard, built in ~1910. I can walk to my kid's school, the grocery store, bars, gourmet restaurants, shopping, arts, and a metro stop that runs 24/7 for a 15 minute trip into the center of a major city. I can get to the center faster than people living in the city itself.
I work at home, so I rarely drive. When I worked in aforementioned city, I would commute by metro to my office. I probably drive less than 150 miles a month, mostly on long business trips.
Places like this exist, but they are hard to find and often more expensive for a smaller house. It's the perfect mix of urban and suburban for me.
This describes basically every town inside 128 around Boston, and the towns just outside 128 are mostly just a little more spread out. If you pick a town with a commuter rail stop, you can get more than 30 miles out of Boston and still have a reasonable public-transit commute to a job in the city proper.
The author does a decent job describing the suburbian plight, but doesn't delve into the reasons why deep enough. An older article ascribes suburbian development to peculiarities of US economic policy:
"The sad reality is that, despite the marketing, the suburbs were never about creating household wealth; they were about creating growth on the cheap. They were born under a Keynesian regime that counted growth from government spending as equivalent to that coming from private investment. Aggressive horizontal expansion of our cities allowed us to consistently hit federal GDP and unemployment targets with little sophistication and few difficult choices.
That we were pawning off the enormous long-term liabilities for serving and maintaining all of these widely dispersed systems onto local taxpayers–after plying municipalities with all the subsidies, pork spending, and ribbon cuttings needed to make it happen–didn’t seem to enter our collective consciousness. When all those miles of frontage roads, sewer and water pipes, and sidewalks fall into disrepair–as they inevitably will in every suburb–very little of it will be fixed. The wealth necessary to do so just isn’t there."
Interesting to see "conservatives" whining about urban sprawl and blaming it on Keynesian policies now -- while they had originally promoted it for nuclear survivability, improving the "feasibility" of a nuclear war.
American Conservative is a paleoconservative magazine. Paleocons aren't the same as mainstream conservatives; for example, they rail against globalization, they advocate an isolationist foreign policy, they're much more likely to be openly racist and antisemitic (American Conservative is, to its credit, the sole remaining paleocon magazine that refuses to endorse antisemitism), and they take religious conservatism to a farther extreme than most Republicans are willing to go.
Paleocons haven't been relevant in mainstream American politics for a very long time. After Robert Taft lost the Republican nomination in 1952, they took a backseat to mainstream conservatives, and since then they've mostly been relegated to third parties and fringe candidacies (like Pat Buchanan's 1996 and 2000 campaigns, and the Constitution Party). This may be changing, though, as Donald Trump's economic and foreign policy stances are straight-up paleocon, and his racism isn't a problem with paleocons because most paleocons are overtly racist (again, except the people who run American Conservative). The only reason Trump isn't 100% paleocon is that he's not nearly enough of a religious conservative; your average paleocon is at least as conservative as Rick Santorum on religious issues, while Trump has made few overtures to the religious right, and those few have all been empty platitudes.
In short: I wouldn't take an article in American Conservative as being representative of mainstream conservatism at all.
Everywhere in the rich New World suburbia came up. In Australia, Canada and New Zealand you also have suburbs.
US economic policy didn't have much effect there.
Suburbia is partly driven by people having cars and having wealth. It works fairly well as long as the city isn't too large and traffic and the problems of having efficient public transit and low densities come up.
Another thing that drove suburbs is that cities were not as good as they are now. There were lots of slums and problem areas and people didn't have much space. Living downtown appeals to young wealthy people now but it was less fun living with your parents and possibly your grand parents.
Whenever you see conservatives complaining about anything related to the Keynesian regime, you can bet you're reading a bunch of horse-shit with little if any basis in fact.
Government policies didn't create suburbs, people trying to get out of cities did, not everyone likes city life and it's cheaper to live further out than it is in the city. Suburbs are the natural result of a car culture and plentiful land to build on. No Keynesian conspiracies required.
Gotta disagree. The easiest example to look at is the Interstate Highway System. They busted up downtowns and put giant highways through them so people could get to and from the suburbs and the cities. Baltimore, Atlanta, LA, DC, Boston, DFW, NO, etc. all have peculiarly similar interstate structures.
I think you're confusing highways and freeways, the Interstate Highway System has nothing to do with suburbs, it connects cities to each other. And cities build freeways because locals demand them, because they don't want to live in the city. That's not government creating suburbs, that's government responding to the desire for suburbs. Suburban sprawl tends to happen first, and then freeways are built to connect them to the city faster.
Correction noted, but the funding source doesn't change my point. Demand drives the building of city freeways, the freeways don't create the sprawl, the sprawl creates the demand for freeways.
It is exactly the opposite. American suburbs were created by goverment policies (specifically, by certain tax breaks for development industry and by tax breaks for home owners, not to mention housing subsidies)
...To give whites a place to go to git away from them coloreds.
Racism, or more broadly classism -- the refusal to come together in community and the tendency to draw bright lines between self and other, and order society so as to only have to deal with people like self while avoiding other -- is at the very heart of American social structure, at all levels.
Minimum parking mandates are the law most forceful in mandating suburbs. National finance regulations contribute. Concentration on freeway funding is part of it. Setback requirements and floor area ratios require suburbia also. Single use zoning adds up, too.
It's only cheaper because it's heavily subsidized by the rest of us. Imagine if you only had toll roads, and there was no subsidy on gas. If you like suburban living, more power to you, but don't pretend that it's inherently cheaper when your lifestyle is being subsidized.
Where exactly did I say anything about my preferences? Nor did I say anything about subsidies. Of course cities subsidize suburbs, so what, not in the least bit relevant to any point being made. Subsidies or not, land/house outside a city will always be cheaper than land/house inside the city, that's the cheaper being referred to and that applies with or without subsidies and with or without mortgage deductions.
Beyond that, we live in an age of remote work, don't assume suburban living requires commuting to the city, it doesn't.
I'm not assuming it's inherently cheaper, it is inherently cheaper and always has been. City living always costs more than living more remotely and that's unlikely to change.
You say that it is inherently cheaper, then acknowledge that it is heavily subsidized.
And remote work is nowhere near the level where you could bring that up. The vast, vast, vast, vast majority of jobs still require you to go to the office.
To each their own. I've lived in cities and suburbs, and I personally greatly prefer the latter. I'm not alone - I promise.
It's fine if some, or even most, think that suburbia is hell on earth. Criticize suburbia all you like. Don't live there. Go someplace you enjoy. Also, try not to assume that your feeling on this matter is objectively correct.
My biggest problem is that I like neither very dense urban living, nor low-density, car-dependent suburbia. Thanks to poorly-designed zoning, the US doesn't have much "in-between" housing or density, and that's a shame. See: http://missingmiddlehousing.com/
Suburbia is popular because people enjoy living in suburbia. It's annoying when people write articles like this and don't bother to talk to people who live there and find out why.
Whether they enjoy it or not, I don't think many people have had an actual real choice about whether or not to live in suburbia.
For one thing in most North American cities it is the default and inescapable urban planning norm. There's no alternative. If someone cloned a dense and walkable European town nearby I'd choose to live there, but most towns around me are the same generic strip mall suburbs.
There are a handful of North American cities with vibrant residential cores or inner neighbourhoods that one could choose to live in, but ultimately for most it's not sustainable. In cities such as SF and Vancouver, attainable housing is in the multi-unit condo form which is not often suitable for growing families. What ground oriented housing exists is for multi-millionaires. Inevitably if one chooses to have a family the suburb is a forced choice.
Many of suburbia's problems do not originate from the free market or individual choices. Many come from top-down mandates. For example, until recently, all the state and federal road design guidelines were completely about 'Level of Service' (read: how fast cars move), and thus car throughput was optimized over safety, or the use of streets by other modes of transportation.
Classic suburbia was desirable because it promised living in a newer house with a private yard and a garage, on a low-traffic street, in an ethnically and socioeconomically homogenous neighborhood zoned to a well-performing school. Automobile dependence was a feature to empower the car-owning suburbanite and to restrict the casual exfiltration of people from the city into the suburbs. (These fears, that good-for-nothings will take public transit to cause trouble in the suburbs crop up to this day.)
As suburbs age, their advantages decline. The houses are no longer new, traffic (on all but the leaf-node cul-de-sacs) has increased. When one suburb is built out, the urban area spreads outward, and newer suburbs and exurbs are created. Those that can afford to move do so, slowly decreasing the average income of the neighborhood, which correlates strongly with school performance. Desirability keeps declining in turn.
Some suburbs can avoid this fate by becoming large employment centers, and then we call them edge cities instead (e.g. Irvine, Tysons, Bloomington).
As someone who lives, and prefers to live, a car-centric lifestyle (as opposed to walking or taking public transportation), most of the points in this article don't bother me. I think this is just another rehash of the "cars are bad" argument that keeps making the rounds.
I don't think he's saying cars are bad, he's pointing out lots of flaws in the design of roads and living areas. He's bringing up the inefficiencies that lifestyle has, suburbia he argues brings a lot of inefficiencies.
I LOVE driving. But Los Angeles is complete shit due to the suburban sprawl, lack of a well designed connectors and ramps, lack of well designed roadways for the throughput, etc. Los Angeles is a prime example of why Suburbia sucks. This article hits all the right points.
There's a lot of artificial inefficiencies we've imposed on ourselves due to lack of forethought, stubbornness, resistance to change, or many other reasons. Sadly, it's impossible to fix anything in a quick manner.
It's not that cars are bad overall. It's that cars are usually mindlessly chosen as the 'default' or assumed mode of transportation, even when they are poorly suited and very expensive to support. Parking minimums are a good example of this. If people want to choose cars, that's fine, but parking minimums mandate that we reserve large portions of cities for people to park their private property on, thus heavily subsidizing that choice. Maybe that's okay in rural areas, but it makes little sense for denser urban or even suburban areas.
Similarly, roads usually prioritize speed of cars over safety of everyone, particularly people walking or on bikes.
When I was single-ish, I loved living in the heart of Seattle.
Now that I have a family, I really love living in the burbs, for pretty much all the reasons that irritated me about living in the heart of a big city. Having a young infant really changed my priorities.
Sorry, but I prefer suburbia over everything else, and I can't stand to live in a city.
I like wide-open spaces, a lack of noise, and cheap spacious housing. Cities just make me claustrophobic, and I can't stand it. I absolutely cannot tolerate having anyone else live above or below me, and noise drives me up the wall like nothing else. I've got a big-ass house for considerably less than $1 per square foot per month, I have no noise, and I like the aesthetics of the area around me. Also, the crime rate is very low, and I don't have homeless people constantly demanding I give them money and then shouting epithets at me when they find out I don't carry cash (that happened multiple times a day back when I used to work downtown; it hasn't happened even once since I started working in the suburbs again).
All in all, cities are nice places to play tourist and visit in small doses, but I'd rather live in the suburbs.
Edit: I'll also add that I'm openly LGBT, and I've heard horror stories from other LGBT people, even those who live in very liberal cities, about some of the things that get shouted at them on the street in urban environments. Even in a liberal place like Boston, you're going to have punks shouting slurs at you on the street if you're openly LGBT, yet I live in suburban Texas and nobody has shouted a single homophobic or transphobic epithet at me in the suburbs. Everyone is polite and friendly to me. I feel safe here. I don't care if it's just an act and they're just being polite to my face because they're taught to be polite to everyone even though they're going to talk about me behind my back; just as long as I don't have to hear the abuse, I'm fine.
Suburbia represents a few trillion dollars worth of malinvestment, IMHO. You can even trace the spread of suburbs back to the subsidies and incentives that created them. The tax deduction on mortgages, along with Fannie Mae et al, were explicitly designed to increase home ownership. Extraneous housing will get built in that environment, and the only question is where. Undeveloped areas have a much easier time giving concessions to developers, so that's where they're going to build.
Overall, the fix is some combination of a land-value tax, anti-NIMBY ordinances, subsidy removal, and infrastructure downgrades. Explanations for each:
Land-value tax: the unimproved value of land is approximately equal to the value created by building infrastructure and creating valuable economic areas. This aligns incentives better than existing tax structures, and has various other benefits that economists really like.
Anti-NIMBY: the overall effect of NIMBY policies is two-fold - it makes undeveloped areas relatively more attractive, and it enriches current residents of an area at the expense of society as a whole.
Subsidy removal: often, when silly things are happening, it's because there's a subsidy or tax reason that boils down to "we are willing to pay you to do silly things". It's just as true for building suburbs as it is for removing windows from vans, shipping them from Germany to the US, and then re-installing those windows.
Infrastructure downgrades: a certain intensity of land use makes only so much infrastructure make sense. If there's not enough people benefiting from a road to pay for asphalt, it needs to be gravel. Sucks for the people there, but it's even less fair for everyone else to pay for their asphalt privileges.
"Reasons that this particular author hates cars" is a bit more like it.
Of course, if you pick the worst of everything of suburbia, you can "prove" that it sucks. But the author utterly fails on a large number of points, such as proving that humans like to feel enclosed by buildings on both sides such as on Saint-Germain, and that they utterly hate being able to actually see the sky like in the "middle of nowhere". And hey, he hates GarageHouses because they worship at the altar of the car. How terrible. Tsk, tsk. Of course he hates that ugly house's façade, but he's unable to prove that tacky design is a necessary consequence of suburbs.
I live in a suburb. The houses are not all the same. I love cars and motorcycles; we've got 4 motorized vehicles at the moment. None of them fit in the garage because we don't have some absurd cookie cutter house. We don't have an absurd cookie cutter house, because that doesn't fit our aesthetic.
We live in a relatively quiet neighborhood that is, yes, zoned residential, but we're also a block from restaurants and a bar and a grocery store. We don't have winding meandering streets that get you lost; we're literally 2 blocks from the freeway.
Oh, and I can and do bike a few miles to work despite the fact that public transit sucks.
I love visiting cities, but could never live in one. Guess what? I don't want shared walls. I don't want to have to worry about where I'm going to park my cars or whether the windows will be intact when I return, or whether I'll be kept awake by the sounds of mixed-use blissful commerce happening beneath me.
He's right about so many things but just falls victim to boring old tropes. I also lived almost-spitting-distance to a grocery store in an apartment once. Thanks to a 10ft high brick wall, I had to walk 5 minutes out of the complex, 5 minutes around, and 5 minutes back in the direction of the store; 15 minutes to go what was really a few hundred feet as the crow flies. Of course it's absurd, so I didn't keep living there. But this does not make suburbs hell. It makes poor design choices hell.
> "Reasons that this particular author hates cars" is a bit more like it.
Yep. Reading the article, every time I read one of his numbered points, I just thought "But that's a good thing". They only make sense as negatives if you already have an irrational hate for cars.
> And hey, he hates GarageHouses because they worship at the altar of the car. How terrible. Tsk, tsk.
On a related note, I found the author's rant about alleys utterly nonsensical.
I live in the suburbs of Dallas, where alleys are everywhere. Most suburban neighborhoods here have large networks of alleys where trash cans are located and garages empty out.
If, out in public, you feel uncomfortable when someone you don't know stands close enough that you could touch elbows with them, you may prefer suburbs to density.
If, when you hear someone unexpectedly yelling nearby, your first reaction is "let's see what the trouble is" rather than "let's see what the excitement is", you may prefer suburbs to density.
If you would prefer scheduling to spontaneity in interactions with people you don't live with, you may prefer suburbs to density.
If you would like to avoid learning to sleep through sirens and yelling, you may prefer suburbs to density.
If you laughed when you read "People feel vulnerable and uncomfortable in open areas with ill-defined margins.", you may prefer suburbs. ;)
On that last: I think it really sums up the whole article that they present those two images in section 6 and then try to explain why "people" feel more at ease with the Saint-Germain photo. They don't try to explain why some people prefer wide open spaces, and I get the impression it's because they don't really believe anyone does. All these people are really seeking out homes to buy in places they know they'll be unhappy? But maybe that isn't it.
Oh, wait, they do consider that people actually say they like having more space, in 7. They don't seem to believe it, though, remarking that it's important how usable the space is. But it really isn't: in fact, for those of us who like lots of personal space, having large nearby areas which are clearly unsuitable for most human activity helps put us at ease. If you see an adult in a drainage ditch, there is a short list of reasons why they'd be there, and any of those reasons justifies becoming involved to see if they need help, or whatever. If you live in a dense city and someone is hanging out next to your window, which is an arm's length from the sidewalk, they could be trying to open it, or... it could be any hour of any day. If you live in the pictured suburbs and someone is hanging out next to your window, there's less uncertainty.
> useless frontages, pointless greenspace between compatible land uses, as well as chain-link fences, concrete barriers, and drainage pits
Complaining that the moat isn't chlorinated and has smelly monsters in it misses the actual purpose of the moat.
There's a lot to like about cities, but a lot to dislike as well, and those things push a lot of people to the suburbs.
His last point about regional planning can't be emphasized enough. The city I live in is entirely independent of its surrounding county, which itself is a patchwork of incorporated and unincorporated municipalities (and where the vast majority of people choose to live). This bifurcation causes all sorts of fundamental planning issues that harm the region.
You know, I've never liked articles which take the position that X sucks, or tries to say that X sucks. There are some things that don't really have any redeeming qualities, but those things are few and far between. Most of the time it's just that this person doesn't like it. I'm not much of a fan of suburbia either, but there are plenty of others who do like what suburbia offers, and don't like densely urban areas.
Everything that people "like" about American suburbia, rural Germany (for example) is better at. Big houses with big yards, but just a quick trip from an actual town, and not much further from some kind of city.
It's a garbage design in just about every way. A huge mistake.
I visited rural Holland as a teenager and my mind was blown by the fact that you could live somewhere rural yet get around by bicycle. Most Americans don't know what they're missing.
I love the netherlands! It's a lovely country, full of fantastic people and tasty treats. I lived there more than 30 years ago, and I still miss poffertjes and lament to all and sundry the lack of fresh stroopwafels in the US.
But it's roughly the size of the Front Range in Colorado. It's tiny. Serious question: how many places in .nl are > 10km from a city of moderate size? I'm going out on a limb here and suggesting "not many".
Absolutely correct, but modernity has elevated convenience to the level of an unassailable requirement of life.
Rural areas are superior to urban areas by nearly every possible measure, but the decreased convenience makes them instant no-go zones for most in The West.
"Rural areas are superior to urban areas by nearly every possible measure"
No, they aren't. I value access to culture and having many different types of restaurants available to me, so I can eat many different types of food. Rural areas absolutely fail at that.
Accusing suburbs of being lassez-faire is quite a miss, I think. There is quite a bit of subsidy, there are lobby groups for it, the very act of zoning itself is extremely political and the rents exploitation arrangement is quite...vivid. Throw in HOAs ( which are written into deed contracts ) and it's significantly less than free.
The George Romney inspired expansion away from the 20% down, 30 year mortgage to what ended in 2008 was an effort to tie people down to a mortgage for reasons of, roughly, social control. If you read Haber & Calomiris "Fragile By Design" - they're quite conservative - you get a better picture of it.
I love the suburbs. Because if I play my cards right, I get to be a beneficiary to much of all that.
This almost exactly mirrors the points made by _Suburban Nation_ in 2000. If you're truly interested in this topic, I highly recommend reading the original instead of the online Cliff Notes.
Suburbia is a defensive design. Big houses & lots, and lack of public transport, means that it tends to be more expensive and requires reliable access to a car. Low density means that blight doesn't spread as quickly, and geographically-selected organizations (in particular school districts) don't change as quickly, and they're also selecting membership from the same groups that can afford the real estate and transport. HOAs explicitly prioritize maintaining property values.
This all selects for higher-quality neighbors.
There are ways to achieve this in urban settings, but it tends to require more direct, onerous, and legally iffy regulation.
No, I didn't. The salient aspect is "nice" neighbors; people like poor teachers, or unemployed kids of existing residents, are just fine. Things like HOAs are particularly brutally enforced in poorer neighborhoods attempting to become or stay "nice" (eg, in black but predominantly middle class neighborhoods).
Large houses on large lots, quiet neighborhood, good schools, low crime. Essentially people raising kids. It's a paradise for some, pure hell for others. It's a shame that some, such as the author, believe their opinion is somehow superior. The reality is that is more about where someone is in their life (age, kids) that might drive where they might choose to live
"Choose" is an interesting word. School funding is largely based on district property values in the US, so when you build enclaves of $400k homes that ends up being where the only good schools in the area are. Hard not to choose that if you have kids. Mortgage interest deductions also encourage the choice. The development model for suburbs also passes along the cost of infrastructure, so that it isn't necessary for buyers to pay for it in the form of property taxes. Local governments just approve more suburbs to pay off old infrastructure debt, until they eventually default and leave the state with the debt. It's easy to choose infrastructure someone else pays for. Roads into and through suburbs are paid for out of states' general funds to the tune of 70+%, again, easy to choose that.
I grew up in the suburbs and have as an adult lived in everything from traditional suburbs to a dense inner city. If I had the choice, I'd happily move back to the suburbs. Suburbs are easy to get around (assuming you have a car) and there's plenty of privacy. There's little of the cheek-by-jowl cramming together of people that you find in dense cities.
I don't really know what people mean when they say suburbs are dull. There always seemed to be plenty of options everywhere I lived, conveniently accessible by car. Are the people who complain about this stuff real oddballs who need weird stuff you can only find in the biggest of cities, or are they congenitally hostile to driving?
> There always seemed to be plenty of options everywhere I lived, conveniently accessible by car. Are the people who complain about this stuff real oddballs who need weird stuff you can only find in the biggest of cities, or are they congenitally hostile to driving?
What's funny is that, in Dallas, all the interesting restaurants in the suburbs.
Want an authentic Sichuanese restaurant? Looking for a Cantonese barbecue joint? Or maybe an Indian place that serves real chaat? Or how about a nice steaming bowl of pho? In Dallas, you'll find all of these in strip malls in the suburbs (in fact, we have a pho joint on almost every street corner in some parts of the burbs), while food in the city core consists of a mixture of yuppie bars, restaurants that only appeal to white hipsters, and fast-food joints aimed at the people who commute to downtown.
Every single Asian demographic in the Dallas area has chosen the suburbs over the city, leaving Downtown and Uptown to white yuppies and hipsters.
"Suburbs are easy to get around (assuming you have a car) "
So, not really, then.
"I don't really know what people mean when they say suburbs are dull."
There's very little going on in them. Most of the culture options are in the cities. Most of the live music is going to be in the cities. Suburbs tend not to attract the new, experimental restaurants, preferring instead the safe predictable chain restaurants. Suburbs tend not to attract museums or traveling Broadway productions.
"There always seemed to be plenty of options everywhere I lived, conveniently accessible by car"
And where are they? Usually in the city. And you have to have a car.
"Are the people who complain about this stuff real oddballs who need weird stuff you can only find in the biggest of cities, or are they congenitally hostile to driving?"
They like new things. They like experimental things. And they don't always want to deal with the pain of driving (traffic and parking).
The article goes on about how the problems are mainly caused by government regulation. You don't have a choice. Zoning laws forbid living close to businesses, forbid streets that are too small for cars, mandate space for parking, forbid spacing houses to close together, forbid housing for the poor, etc.
If we eliminated these rules and people still chose to live in suburbs, that's fine. Choice is great. Let others live differently.
Those rules (which vary from suburb to suburb, and are by no means a hard rule) are, more often than not, a large part of WHY people choose the suburbs.
Another question - how do we differentiate between suburbs?
I grew up near Kent, WA in a suburban area as described in the article (windy non-grid roads, houses with 2 or 3 car garages, no bus service except a single commute bus at a park and ride accessible only by car or walking on the shoulder)
Now i live North of Seattle in an area with single family homes, grid streets, public facilities, busses, bike trails. You know the... Suburbs
These two places are nothing alike to live in. They need different names...
Fwiw the article only spoke of tearing down the former to me, though with an overloaded term who knows for certain
To a first approximation, if you are living in an area where most people live in separate single-family homes, but you are not surrounded by fields or orchards, you are living in a suburb.
If you are surrounded by fields, you're in a rural environment. If people around you live in multi-family structures, you are in an urban environment.
Ok I am in them, and it doesn't suck that much. Sometimes I wish there were more fields though, and other times I'm glad to have a grocery store nearby.
Suburbia is too broad a category for meaningful conversations to happen around. I assure you the low crime/good school stereotype for instance is not universal.
Why do I prefer suburbia? Because I found out that my family life was more peaceful when each child had their own bedroom. I can't afford that downtown.
I'm not usually a fan of articles about "Why X Sucks", because almost invariably I think X doesn't suck as much as the author thinks. It's like I'm hard-wired to disagree with any headline that tries to make an assertion. But this is one case where I think we can all unequivocally agree that suburbia sucks in a way so profound that it escapes description.
This reminds me of one of Paul Graham's essays, "Made in USA," http://paulgraham.com/usa.html, where a friend visiting from Italy remarks that American cities are so ugly. He goes on to explore what America is good at and what it is not so good at.
As I ponder the suburban/urban/rural matter, I come to a pretty blunt conclusion - in order to have a functioning society over the next 150 years, we need to effectively outlaw exurbs and suburbs or make them prohibitively expensive.
We need to prioritize solving climate change; prioritize effective resource distribution; prioritize central management at the provincial/federal level; prioritize integrations of humanity into high-density regions. This will boost effectiveness of the tax dollar per square mile, as well as collocating more tax dollars in census zones, so having more dollars per mile. Vast amounts of functionally unsustainable infrastructure - from roads, to schools, to governmental structures have been built that is not fundable at the level we are asking it to perform at.
This needs to change at the federal level, and aggressively.
Fundamentally there are repeated precedents in US history for this kind of centralized planning: the two big waves previously are homesteading and suburban funding via Fannie/Freddie and post-WW2 home loans. The US needs to do it again.
Having lived in the suburb and rural worlds, I understand their viewpoint - and it is valid, but doesn't have the mathmatics to sustain it - but my perspective is that a profound slow-moving crisis is upon us; the only real solution is to start shutting down the suburbs and urbanize as hard as possible.
We're not in the 1890s or the 1950s anymore; our housing policy needs to address the functioning reality of 2016 and the challenges we face today.
I don't believe the free market is the solution to everything, but in this case the market already solve this. As suburbs age and become crowded people move further out, or back into the urban core. If a particular local government jurisdiction doesn't have enough revenue to maintain or expand roads, schools, water and sewer service, it will try to annex more land, or change its zoning and offer incentives stimulate higher-revenue uses than residential. If the concern is about agricultural or forest land being taken for development, perhaps our economic system doesn't sufficiently reward those land uses (yet).
You're right that the suburban unsustainability will eventually solve the issue, but it'll cause a lot of misery in the meantime. Better to have avoided the problem in the first place.
To be honest, I don't have a list of citations. But I have spent a lot of time reading the New Urbanism materials. I have spent a fair amount of time taking in the comments of the Green movement. I also have spent a good deal of my life in the rural/suburban state of Idaho. So collecting that experience, I will say: it's not sustainable.
It's so not sustainable that it's abusing the environment; so not sustainable that small cities are struggling; it is so not sustainable that low-density economies are collapsing e'er so slowly but visibly in real time. The social costs of isolation and low density living are taking a toll - the empty suburban life is cliche; the rural world is becoming linked with meth addiction to stave off the issues.
It's not just market forces; it's market forces plus governmental help (there's no "free market" in the US when it comes to housing), and tremendous environmental issues.
If you really want, I can spend a few hours collating references and send you an annotated bibliography. It won't be complete, and it certainly won't be able to capture my experiences living out of the city.
I'm not going to tell you what to do, but if you want to convince other people of your opinion I suggest writing up your argument into a well-cited article.
Personally, I'm skeptical, but I'm willing to consider what you have to say. Specifically, you have twice mentioned the environmental impact of low vs high density living and I'm curious to know more about that.
I'm going to try to scrape this together as an actual article/essay and put it on my fine website. It'll be a week or two in coming, I think(a software engineer just made an estimate, insert lols as appropriate). I'll email you when I'm done.
Leaving it purely up to the market doesn't create an effective resource distribution either. It creates a profitable resource distribution for those in charge of the capital. Sometimes that might correspond with an effective resource distribution for society, but many times doesn't.
I think one reason that suburbia exists in America in its present form is that local politics is corrupt everywhere. The two-party system degenerates into a one-party system in any city where local public opinion is strongly left (most coastal cities) or right (Deep South) of the American body politic. There are some advantages to two-party systems, but the consensus opinion among political scientists is that one-party democracy is a lie. The result is balkanization, as dissatisfaction with local politics causes large municipalities to decline as wealthy individuals move to smaller municipalities with more responsive governments. You can watch this happen in real-time if you pay attention to discussions on NextDoor or participate in local politics in most other ways.
For an example I'm familiar with, let's look at San Jose. It starts with this unelected guy:
"They say San José is going to become another Los Angeles. Believe me, I'm going to do everything in my power to make that come true."
This led to a huge backlash in 1962 and the eventual election of anti-development mayor Norman Y. Mineta. As people fled San Jose, revenues declined; in 1983, the San Jose School District went bankrupt.
If you go to any city in the country -- San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Miami, New York, Austin, whatever -- you'll hear constant complaints about corruption and a lack of effective political participation. It's everywhere, and it's been getting steadily worse since the Southern Strategy created the modern two-party miasma.
Mine has wide streets, plenty of tall trees, it is quiet. I like flowers in my yard, etc. I like my neighbors, but they are not within literally an arms length on each side of me every day.
Unlike probably most people here who grew up in suburbs, then perhaps started to hate it and moved to one of the coasts, to a city, I grew up in a city in an apartment. Proximity to stores, public transport and being able to walk is nice. But crime, full public transport during rush hour, noisy neighbors, or simply being flooded by neighbors from the top, crowding, dirty streets, etc. Even grocery shopping was annoying, yeah could walk to the store, but couldn't bring home a car trunk's worth and not worry about for another week.
So rationally, on a general scale, I can understand why suburbia sucks. But as an individual, I don't plan on moving to a city, the trade-offs are not adding up for me.