People Who Live In Suburbs: Classy, Icky, or Dudes?

Perhaps something in babydom encourages conservatism. Having briefly looked after a coworker's kids yesterday (and they're both cool, but a handful), it was quite tempting to boil everything down to narrow-minded sloganeering in order to get a point across.

There's something good about living right on the cusp of London, suburbia's a lot more peaceful and spacious. I like the freedom of being able to dip into the city as and when I choose.

I would absolutely *love* to live in London at the moment, but wallet wise that's a total no-no. At present there is only one borough in the whole of London where the average annual salary is sufficient to meet the average annual mortgage repayment. To say that all suburbia looks the same smacks of ignorance and upper middle class snobbery to me.

It is defined as housing to sleep in, which is oddly why nothing obviously exciting goes on there. Except those garage bands, those DJ's, those people making killing machines out of wheelchairs & flymo's to win on Robot Wars. Around the idea that most people who spend their time in suburbia are at school you might get a vague idea why less excitement is going on.

Your friends become inexplicably(?) conservative (small C?) and boring because now they just aren't interested in entertaining you anymore. They have something more important in their life - a baby.

If you don't live in hicksville, or suburbia then you have nowhere to escape from.

Well it all depends how much you value your job really, so that's another matter entirely. I *heart* my job, so if that means I'm lost then I can live with that.

Anyhow, speaking of Zone 6 the district line beckons me - can't wait to curl up in a comfy chair with my pipe and slippers - I hear there's a good film on telly tonight. ;-)

London alternative: move to Brighton instead. The glut of demi-trendy breeder-tendency kidult bourgie bohos MUST BE SEEN TO BE BELIEVED.

Eh? This is hard to get. But I *think* you're saying: people shouldn't move to the inner city, then leave again. Why the hell not? Who are you to tell them what do to with their lives, for goodness' sake?

Good points:
safe and suitable for walking, biking, and going on vacation without locking the doors
trees and grass
proximity to stores and other people

Bad points:
Not enough wilderness to be really gorgeous
lack of cultural events (school concerts are about it)

And worst of all, NO PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION. There is a lovely fun job I was offered today and I can't take it. Why not? Because the rest of my family has places to go and we do not have multiple cars or a goddamn BUS to get me there. I am really, really upset about this. The only place I can work anytime soon is the grocery store.

I grew up in a suburb (bordering city) which was multicultural and filled to the brim with Jewish intellectuals and faculty brats. You only went private if from out of town and/or you suffered from behavioural problems. 20/20 hindsight tells me it was great, but this was the exception.

Still, I moved to NYC and then to London at first available chance.

I HAVE WONDERED WHAT A CITY BABY WOULD BE LIKE?!?!?! City babies I met in college seemed well - adjusted though a bit boozy and promiscuous.

What all this says is that a lot of people in South Essex and North Kent - Richard Littlejohn country, the cliches are rooted in truth I'm afraid - are consciously reacting to the multiculturalism of the city from which they garner their wealth, and react by creating a kind of aggressive white English state, a recreation of an imagined monocultural outer London. And of course it's infinitely nastier and pettier than those London suburbs ever were. London actually felt no closer from there than it feels from South Dorset, which is a curious state of affairs.

However I know other suburbs are nicer and more civilised places: the parts of south-west London straddling the Thames (from blue to yellow in one glorious thrust in '97) seem lovely to me. Colindale is OK. Does Brighton count as a suburb of the "extended city of London" (cf Hywel Williams in the Guardian late last year). If so, it's GRATE.

I think that, broadly speaking, Robin's right - at least in terms of voting habits etc of suburbs east of London and those of the suburbs south-west of London.

I think (hope) that most of the NF activity was just a couple of nuts rather than typical of the people where I live. The stickering was quite frenzied (about 50 suddenly appeared over night covering Worcester Park station. I actually know for a fact that there is/was at least one active NF member who lived near me (I remember seeing a picture of him at an NF rally in Searchlight and thinking "Blimey - he went to the same school as me"). The NF opened an office in Epsom but despite me living quite near Epsom, I have NO IDEA what it's like (why would anyone get a train in THAT direction?).

Other scary far-right things that happened in my lovely south-west London suburb:

Crazed nut phoned police after Brick Lane nailbomb claiming responsibility (Edward Davey MP said the phone box should be "disinfected").

Asian guy attacked by ten drunken yobs a few weeks ago in violent racial assault.

On a more positive note, New Malden has something like the highest concentration of Koreans outside Korea in the world. I'm not sure why they love New Malden so much - it's not that good.

since moving to a semi-urban area (St Louis), i enjoy it a lot less. i'm hoping to move to NYC in about 2 or 3 years, and hopefully i'll enjoy that more. i think the main problem w/ St Louis is the lack of ANY type of worthwhile "scene", but that seems to be a whole new thread topic. i simply moved to the part of the city i liked best, and i'm a lot happier now.

while suburbans can be snobs, driving around in giant Sport Utility Vehicles and partaking in Lawn Wars, fighting over who has the bigger status symbol, most teenagers who complain about suburban life tend to be boring individuals inthe first place, no matter what setting you place them in. it's all about making the best of what you're given.

The areas I had in mind are, I guess, further from central London than the area where you live.

I have however always been struck by how much nastier and more aggressive Toryism is when it's actually facing multiculturalism in the face than when it's at a relative distance. So only very recently have West Country Tory MPs become quite as nasty as the south-east mob (Oliver Letwin and Adrian Flook are obviously far more right-wing and far easier to hate instantly than Sir James Spicer and Edward Du Cann were).

However all the points you make are true, and I only had a minority (albeit a particularly aggressive and vicious one) in mind. I just found it curious that the biggest Tory revival in terms of Westminster seats was in East London / Essex (rather than in the outer shires as had been generally expected) and was throwing a few thoughts, perhaps overt generalisations, around.

Of course, when I'm thinking of "suburbs" I'm thinking of places where all the houses look exactly the same -- Levittown-style stuff, where people give the streets fancy names to hide the fact that they live in an utter and total corporate contrivance. But not all towns near to cities are like that, of course, and it is not for those that my withering stare is intended...

My mom, as always, is an excellent example. Before she got married, she was a woman so steeped in Italo-American Catholicism that she sincerely thought she'd get struck by lightning if she committed one measly sin. Moving twenty miles away from her parents, her family and neighborhood allowed her some breathing space to silently question the dogma she grew up with. Ten years later, she stopped going to church, took birth control pills and started to think about divorce. I bet something analogous is probably occurring right now to all the new Indian and Asian immigrants (and their families) who now call Long Island home.

I have no problem with non-urban living, but the slavish attentions suburbanites have paid to the dubious convenience of the automobile have made humane suburban living well-nigh impossible. None of the Long Island towns that essentially did not exist before William Levitt are as anywhere near as lovely or even useful as the ones whose layout show little influence of the automobile, such as Babylon, Islip, Port Jefferson, Sayville, Montauk, Garden City or the Hamptons.

I want to believe.

Where I live is in the official city limits. I need only walk a couple of blocks in one direction before I hit a major, well-traveled thoroughfare, and a few blocks in another direction before I hit a highway. Therefore, one could consider my neighborhood an "urban" one. Yet, all of the residences on my street have large front and back yards, are houses, are pet-friendly, and are largely quiet and separate entities from one another. Plus, we've spotted deer and peacocks around the area and have even had a deer come into our back yard. Therefore, one could also classify my neighborhood a "suburban" one. To complicate matters further, the actual suburbs that border San Antonio were largely rural towns in the not-too-distant past and do still sometimes have that countrified feel to them.

Maybe it's because I live in an area with a lot of growing pains and a heck of a lot of space to move around in (the city as of 2000 had an area of 333 square miles and it just keeps on growing outward). Approximately 50 years ago, the neighborhood I live in now was largely rural itself. But then the hospitals came, and the home builders decided to construct neighborhoods, and demand for housing in the area skyrocketed, and things just snowballed from there.

Hm. How fascinating do you guys find me? Maybe not at all, maybe somewhat, maybe very -- I have no clue. I would like to think I'm an interesting person who is worth getting to know, and I am a product of an environment that is a mixture of "urban" and "suburban", not to mention one that is purely driver-friendly (which is the case for the whole of the city, really). I drive a (small) SUV (a Chevy Blazer, a model of vehicle which existed L-O-N-G before the term "SUV" came into being), was educated on how to drive starting at 17, got my driver's license at 19, have never lived in an apartment before in her life, like gardening, love dogs, and sometimes harbor fantasies of living in London (where some of my fondest life memories took place).

Just stuff to think about, 'tis all.

Case in point:
http://www.west-point.org/users/usma1981/38405/graphics/Highlands_Ranch1.jpg
By the way that's not my house.

I haven't been there in just over ten years.

This is outside of saint louis. The 'Laumier Park' mentioned is a sculpture park.

I live on an old city street, but we have old, grand bungalos built in the 20s. And some stupid asshole "custom builder" just put up a travesty in an empty lot a few houses down from us. It's a big fucking garage, with 5 bedrooms and a greatroom. Stupid fucks. It doesn't match the neighborhood at all...

Legacy Village- east side

http://www.legacy-village.com/images/gallery/1.jpg

It would be nice if there were buyers out there who were actually interested in building homes like that instead of the ugly, elbows-to-assholes mcmansions that are invading the suburban countryside and gentrification projects around the country.

This statistic kinda blew my mind...

Though its gotten alot harder to meet people in St. Louis: The city lost half of its population due to outmigration between 1950 and 1990. Once the fourth largest city in the country, St. Louis was ranked as the 49th largest after the 2000 census.

This is what's been happening in Hinsdale, IL for years now (a few other older suburbs in the chicago area, too). It's completely retarded. People are attracted to the town and willing to pay relatively high real estate prices in large part because---unlike most other cookie-cutter suburbs in the area---there's a lot of neat, differentiated old houses there, and then they move in, tear one down and put up a "modern" gray monstrosity that sticks out like a sore thumb and barely fits in the lot. I just don't get it.

The faux-downtowns are everywhere now. There was an article in the _WSJ_ last week quoting a shopper in one of the ones in Dallas -- 'I don't go downtown, there's too much riff-raff down there'. There ya go -- The Urban Experience w/o all those pesky minorities and poor people!!

Legacy Village -- if the sterility doesn't scare you away, the lack of parking will. At least the Crocker Park developers mixed in a parking ramp.

And yes, let's hope some preservationist with deep pockets befriends the StL house.

i've spotted a few in LA but thankfully not THAT many -- probably more in OC.

The whole house is vaguely reminiscent of my grandparents' friends' house on LI.

/pedant.

Sprawling on the fringes of the city
In geometric order
An insulated border
In between the bright lights
And the far unlit unknown

Growing up it all seems so one-sided
Opinions all provided
The future pre-decided
Detached and subdivided
In the mass production zone

Nowhere is the dreamer
Or the misfit so alone

Subdivisions ---
In the high school halls
In the shopping malls
Conform or be cast out
Subdivisions ---
In the basement bars
In the backs of cars
Be cool or be cast out
Any escape might help to smooth
The unattractive truth
But the suburbs have no charms to soothe
The restless dreams of youth

Drawn like moths we drift into the city
The timeless old attraction
Cruising for the action
Lit up like a firefly
Just to feel the living night

Some will sell their dreams for small desires
Or lose the race to rats
Get caught in ticking traps
And start to dream of somewhere
To relax their restless flight

Somewhere out of a memory
Of lighted streets on quiet nights...

(cue some guy posting about how he hates reading lyrics, how i'm thirteen, how i wrote these lyrics myself, how this is a serious post, etc......)

The Chicago suburbs have a lot of really cool houses from that era that I would hate to see torn down, including my grandparents' former house, which my Grandma just sold. The lot is pretty small so I'd be surprised if it gets torn down.

If you really want to be pedantic, not according to Wikipedia:

Suburbs are inhabited districts located either on the outer rim of a city or outside the official limits of a city (the term varies from country to country), or the outer elements of a conurbation.

The presence of certain elements (whose definition varies amongst urbanists, but usually refers to some basic services and to the territorial continuity) identifies a suburb as a peripheral populated area with a certain autonomy, where the density of habitation is usually lower than in an inner city area, though state or municipal house building will often cause departures from that organic gradation. Suburbs have typically grown in areas with an abundance of flat land near a large urban zone ...

Not the same thing as "the suburbs" I realise =) But here, unless you actually live in "Melbourne, 3000" as your postcode, you live in some suburb or other - some are innercity and old, some are new and sprawled and a long way out...

When I was younger I used to spend my summers with my grandparents on Long Island. I remember them taking me through Levittown once and pointing out the houses that still looked original from the outside. I didn't really appreciate it at the time, but now I realize that they were showing me the genesis of all that I despise about my culture.

the problem i have (if the issues of white flight, sprawl, land use, and inner city/inner ring suburban decay are put aside) is an issue of personal taste. from what i've seen, it really doesn't matter how much money you plow into new construction currently. you end up with basically the same thing (at least from the outside view) as your neighbors. perhaps you have a wine cellar and someone else has a pool or an in-law suite above the garage, but the building styles are pretty indistinguishable.

that, too. the house i largely grew up in was built in the 50s. it had italian marble in the front hall and a sandstone fireplace in the family room, and it was a 3-bedroom split-level in a working/middle class community. you could spend hundreds and hundreds of thousands in a gated development today and not get that.

OK, now TOMBOT can show up and call me prejudiced for thinking the rich guy is a dolt and doesn't deserve what he has.

8Versailles pronounced correctly. No points deducted there.

Dave, I actually doubt dude is really rich. These ppl all be doing this by putting themselves into tremendous debt. At least from the ones I know buying into suburban monstrosities and middle-of-nowhere "luxury condos" etc.

I guess that's the thing I don't understand, going into tremendous personal debt to have...the same exact identical poorly made house as everyone else?

My wife was at a meeting (after getting lost in numerous cul-de-sacs) at someone's house in the suburbs (for work, not PTA, nor Pampered Chef) and someone in the group said, "I was in this house last week." My wife was the only one who did not understand that the person meant the same model of a house in another subdivision, and not the exact same house.

Those metroplexes confuse me, especially around Arlington. The developers completely turn away from an existing city and build a planned shopping/living center with underground parking that exists in its own little orbit.

http://la.curbed.com/archives/2006/06/local_man_makes.php
http://la.curbed.com/archives/2006/06/northeast_la_go.php
http://la.curbed.com/archives/2006/06/beverly_grove_g.php

og i miss the greenery

the parks where like no one goes for some weird reason when you decide to go to the park

just empty

i miss the trails in the woods, the delis where the highschoolers would pull up in their cars and like get a soda

get a blog dude

Are you in NYC? I lived there for just 4 months once and I remember flying home to Texas and it was just so totally alien, looking out the window on approach seeing sky and green and open space between buildings and all those cars, none of them yellow!

This thread has some bad US/UK disconnect. Suburbs are for the rich!

i'm in NYC. everytime i visit Nashville i'm awed by all the oxygen.

Gardening while visiting my mom's house...birdsong everywhere, huge trees rustling in the breeze, big cornflower blue sky with big ol' white fluff clouds hanging around, green and sun, green and sun, green and sun. Serene backyards with late-afternoon shadows, rabbits, cardinals, honeybees, beetles, sun and green

Surmounter otm

I try to remind myself that most of the things I find great about suburbs -- the sun and lawns and sometimes idyllic coziness of them -- is totally based on them triggering the experience of suburbs as a child. And while those things remain good as an adult, they leave out all the stuff that would be tiresome about maintaining an upscale suburban lifestyle as an adult, even apart from making the money to do it: mostly the weird neighbor relationships of competitiveness and enforced lawn-care and the way your life is observed and scrutinized and needs to fit within certain parameters to have any kind of social clout.

But there are pockets lots of places of a less upscale but no less nice suburban-feeling lifestyle that doesn't have those weird regimented drawbacks, I think; I remember plenty of people I knew finding places in the nearest Chicago suburbs (or places like Skokie) where they could step into little-lawn pleasantness and avoid the strangeness of strict subdivision stuff. (Actually I think the single thing that makes this difference is still being on some kind of gridded street arrangement, rather than the cozy cul-de-sac subdivision thing where it's suddenly like you live in a 20-family village and are all responsible to one another for stuff like what color you paint your door.)

(I should note that I didn't live in a "suburb," as a child, but in a planned subdivision in a town of about 100,000 -- i.e., basically the same as a suburb except you don't hear about cool new stuff from people in a nearby city.)

This thread has some bad US/UK disconnect. Suburbs are for the rich!

Haha wow, not here (Aus) they aren't. The outer burbs are where all the lower middle class families go, because theres no way in hell they could afford even an apartment closer to the city. Inner suburbs here have students in rental, and extremely wealthy ppl in all the older homes/mansions/fancy condos. No one chooses to go live in the sticks, its just all most can afford if they actually want a house and a yard.

mostly the weird neighbor relationships of competitiveness and enforced lawn-care and the way your life is observed and scrutinized and needs to fit within certain parameters to have any kind of social clout.

Remind me to link this thread next time an American poster points and laughs at British class issues.

Back in the day, I would have agreed with the UK/US divide, and explained that British cities don't really map onto a straightforward urban/suburban plan, but since the outer boroughs of London elected Boris I don't feel remotely inclined to do so.

nabisco, as ever, otm

the suburb i grew up in was decent enough. it wasn't at all planned; our house was built in like 1940. there were no brown people (or non-catholics, really, except for me) but i think i largely emerged unscathed by the endemic racism.

cities are grebt and really the only place i wanna live. but there's certainly something to be said for having one's own green space as a child. even if you just turn it into a hockey rink/ballfield/football pitch in your mind.

thank god you emerged unscathed from that anti-catholic endemic racism, must have been terrible for you!

oh look, I found a dickwad on the internet.

dude in basketball huddles when everyone's like 'forgive us our tresspasses' and you're all 'forgive us our debts' it can get pretty hairy

xp

? at my CofE schools we said trespasses

sure, but do you say pop or soda?

pop

No-one says soda here unless they're talking about sodastreams or cream soda

"Forgive us our debts"? Wait, is this in the lords prayer or something else? "And forgive us our debts, as we forgive those who debt against us" doesnt seem like it works. Sorry, I'm very obviously not catholic (in fact I know sweet FA about catholicism tbh)

Well I assumed Mookie meant the catholics say "trespasses" and protestants say "debts" unless I read it wrong. This isn't the case here AFAIK everyone says "trespasses"!

http://www.spiritheart.org/chapel/lordpryr.htm#matthean

Religion: It's not all fighting with people over translation.

I lived in the suburbs (VERY BRIEFLY) but I'm black and they were like 99% white so those days were more amusing than some of the experiences I'm reading here.

xpost so according to that site we were using the catholic version? Weird. Especially considering my secondary school was so protestant we had smashed up statues from the reformation in the school hall!

I guess technically I grew up in a suburb as it was on the edge of town but it was a council estate so not really.

^^Hahahaha.

My experiences were similar but different because I do live in England? Does that make sense? It wasn't wildly different it was typical classist bullshit and freaky neighbours that you can bet your sweet indie record collection were swingers and bible bashers at the same time, one of mine was this alcoholic typical absent father and he used to show up wasted and yell at his ex on the front lawn late at night.
I got both 'trespasses' and 'debts'.Parents are protestants, school was catholic. FUN.

xpost

My non-denominational, probably CoE leaning schools used "trespasses". When I hear the Lord's Prayer in a Catholic church I'm pretty sure they don't say it. Can't remember what they use instead tho.

where i grew up the FUCKING MICKS said trespassing whilst the FUCKING APOSTATES or whomever said debts. although i think the methodists might have said trespassing as well? maybe it was just the presbyterians. jesus christ.

as to why any of this came up in the huddle of a public-school basketball team is a whole other thing

Yeah I skipped over that whole basketball huddle thing

I do have a pretty sweet indie record collection though.

actually, my childhood catholic pplz were polish or otherwise eastern european, not irish. indeed there was a big hubbub when someone made a statue called 'hunky steelworker' cause so many people could remember when 'hunky' was a slur.

when i was in grade two everyone else went to ccd for two weeks and i got to just sit there reading. awesome

(I should note that I didn't live in a "suburb," as a child, but in a planned subdivision in a town of about 100,000 -- i.e., basically the same as a suburb except you don't hear about cool new stuff from people in a nearby city.)

er, yeah. that was my experience, as well. but i lazily think of it as "suburban"

but it was really more of a small subdivision outside of a small-ish town

i got lots of love for the suburbs

but i guess princeton doesnt really count as a 'suburb'

actually, my childhood catholic pplz were polish or otherwise eastern european, not irish. indeed there was a big hubbub when someone made a statue called 'hunky steelworker' cause so many people could remember when 'hunky' was a slur.

when i was in grade two everyone else went to ccd for two weeks and i got to just sit there reading. awesome

-- mookieproof, Saturday, 12 July 2008 01:20 (2 days ago) Link

you from picksburgh?? a couple of years ago, my brother was in the hospital and some relatives from western pa. came out to visit him. during a visit, my cousin turned to me and said, 'he'll be all right -- he's a stubborn bohunk!!" truer words were never spoken.

I think what people are largely glossing over here is that, at least in a lot of places, the suburbs aren't economically homogenous. There are upscale suburbs and downscale suburbs.

For real – there's a big diff between McMansion Playland and Levittown.

I think my favorite thing about the former incarnation of suburbs IS: archaeologists determined Mesopotamia was a well-formed society bcz of their logical, grid-based roads. What will THE FUTURE think of all the random twists & turns peppered with cul-de-sacs?

sure, but do you say pop or soda?

-- mookieproof, Friday, July 11, 2008 7:50 PM (Friday, July 11, 2008 7:50 PM) Bookmark Link

tonic.

and tresspasses which, in northern mass speak came out as "tresspuhsez".

my mom's neighborhood consists of all these four-digit house numbers which bear no logical relation to one another-- like, 6837 is next to 2339...

Poor pizza delivery people.

club soda innit

council estate represent, it doesn't get realer than the Scott

someone got their bike stolen, like, last month

xposts

not that we care about xposts, on the estate

Do people really feel less spied-on when they have neighbors who they share walls with rather than neighbors 20 feet away?

It's not a matter of spying or privacy, it's that ... when you're in a dense rental area, people mostly just expect you to be non-annoying and otherwise treat you like a near-stranger in a dense area, doing whatever it is that you do. In an upscale ownership-based subdivision where real estate values and people's sense of the American dream is at stake and people's kids all play together, you are policed and confronted with a lot of expectations about how you're fitting into things -- socially, professionally, etc. It's fundamentally a fake scale recreation of a "village," and you're known to all and carry all the responsibility of a good villager, only more so.

The suburbs of major cities are getting the opposite these days, though -- people pushed out of gentrifying city centers, winding up very isolated and shut off and non-villagey in the kinds of strip-mally suburban spaces that don't jump to mind when we talk about "suburbs" in the leafy-subdivision middle-class sense.

otm

... But a dense rental area that's largely populated by students who grew up in strip-mally suburban spaces is the worst kind of hell.

The Suburns are Euro-american living pods popular for their isolation and seclusion, allowing a social interaction -free life. This prevents minorities from seeing them and vice versa. The television acts as the survelince monitor for world events and to have social times. No more apartment neighboors, a welcome sight to the easily annoyed and annoying American stereo owner.

― Mike Hanle y, Thursday, August 30, 2001 5:00 PM Bookmark

Gah. Reading this made me so angry that I have to rebuke it even nine years later. As a minority who grew up in the suburbs, the suburban county where I was raised had a rather wonderful diversity: the largest Korean-American community in the state, larger concentrations of Latinos than the central city, a well-established black community in the county's largest town (which I was born out of), growing South Asian and African populations, a thriving Russian community, many other Asian ethnicities, a large, well-populated Indian Reservation, and more.

Which leads to my problem: some white guy is denying that me and millions of people like me exist, just so he can set up some easy narrative that makes him cooler than some other white guy. This pisses me off indescribably.

I really shouldn't have clicked on this thread, it was only going to make me mad.

My suburban street had a black family, a chinese family, and a gay couple, so I feel you Rev. But really everywhere else it's just whites.

My point is (well, maybe depending on where you are) that isn't really true at all.

I mean, there were definitely pockets where I grew up (my own neighborhood, unfortunately) that were super-white, but at the sametime there were other areas that were anything but.

rev's point is kinda that sweeping, superior, judgey-judgey generalisations about what "kind" of people live in a place are duds.

rev and lex otm.

pretty sure my parents are the only asians living in our suburb. have made it out to the north jersey suburbs which are pretty heavily asian and south asian dominated. and to the northwest philly suburbs which are pretty russian dominated. but yeah, it'd be nice to see some more integration.

I was trying to joke lightheartedly to Rev. The.overgeneralizations abt.race in the suburb are retarded.

Looking at wikipedia, it looks like my home county is about 15% minority, but that includes the rural parts too, which really were that white (except now lots of Latinos live in those parts too and you have ignorant white folks complaining about all the "Mexican gangbangers" in Monroe).

So, I'd guess it's more like 20% in the more urban/suburban parts of the county.

kkvgz: I gotcha, but sometimes jokes are hard to read on the net.

Actually, another gay man (I strongly suspect) moved nxt door to my folks, but he's a bit of an asshole about his lawn and nowhere near as cool as Bill and Pete.

(Especially when I'm kinda worked up.)

Understandable, Rev.

suburban makeup is changing quickly in a lot of places. comments 9 years ago are starting to look more like 19 years ago.

Suburbs are still dud imo

at this point it seems that a lot of the chicago suburbs are more ethnically/racially diverse than most parts of the city itself

suburban makeup is changing quickly in a lot of places. comments 9 years ago are starting to look more like 19 years ago.

― 156, Tuesday, June 8, 2010 1:43 PM Bookmark

Yeah, but my family's been there for 50 and a lot of the black families in my hometown have been there for longer (Although it should be mentioned that this is an old 19th-cen. mill town that got sucked in by conurbanization). Obviously, the makeup has changed due to successive waves of immigration. But most of these communities have been in place for as long as I remember.

there are suburbs that are super diverse and there are large american cities that are not. suburbs are dud for other reasons.

Sure.

what is the best kind of community

humans only obv

Suburb-bashing is superdull and I will probably think you are a moron if you (not you personally) engage in it, though.

"How can I be folk? I'm from the suburbs you know" -- John Fahey

i got to say they're still a pretty bad scene around here. mostly middle and working class white-flight havens (which will eventually become more "diverse" - thereby leading to another exodus ten years later to a farther outer-ring development of zero-lot-line boxes), and scorched-earth McMansion developments for a tacky, aspiring upper-middle class who have lots of Palin stickers on their SUVs.

at this point it seems that a lot of the chicago suburbs are more ethnically/racially diverse than most parts of the city itself

it seems like this is happening in a lot of major cities(?); not so much down here.

Suburbs are dud for a lot of reasons. Cities are dud for a lot of reasons. Rural areas are dud for a lot of reasons. Seems like city folk are the only ones that get off on looking down on the others. (the "ugh city folk" lament of rural peeps is just a reaction to urban snobbery).

again, I'm only speaking for what I see in a 20 mile radius of moi

*Suburb-bashing*
"The suburbs aren't all bad."
"How can you have anything nice to say about suburbs! They're horrible!"

Cause I spent the vast majority of my life there and I probably know a hell more a lot about them than you, you condescending twat.

well I've spent the vast majority of my life in a suburb too - and it sucked.

I really, really hate cars though.

chuburbs

xp to Grany What? Please. The country people I know LOVE looking down on urban peeps because we live "all smushed together on top of each other" plus we don't have the American dream of enough space not to care what anyone else thinks of how you live. And, you know, attics and basements and garages. Plus the country smells better plus lake views plus the beach plus they really love their lives there and it's the opposite of here so pretty much they're nice about it but they escape back to their private, individual houses with great relief.

(the "ugh city folk" lament of rural peeps is just a reaction to urban snobbery).

ugh, I once spent a week visiting a country cousin who insisted on calling me "city boy" the whole time I was there, which wasn't even accurate

Also they think the city is too fast and too worldly and too coarse.

i'm sorta of the mind that if i ever move out, i'm moving waaaayy the fuck out. like can't-see-nearest-neighbor's-house out

Just about to start reading this book, which looks like it addresses whats being discussed here, rather than an out-of-date popular image of suburbia

http://www.amazon.com/Suburban-History-Historical-Studies-America/dp/0226456633/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1276030940&sr=8-1

I should add that they like Trader Joe's and triple-cream brie, though, so I will be filling a cooler with strange and wondrous foods next weekend and sending it home with my country people after their visit to the great grey city.

Wow this thread is fucking infuriating

xxp: Looks interesting.

iatee: Never mind me. The guy I had that convo with is a certifiable dumbass in general, and I'm kinda taking my angst about him out on you by proxy, which is unfair.

y'all may be right. I always interpreted rural disdain for city life as reactionary, though. It just feels different in tone.

I don't even know where to start, but it's tough to see some generally smart ilx peeps pulling a "why don't black people ever want to rock" level of analysis here

Found it kind of weird that I'd just bought that book, and then not only does the suburb thread get revived, but talking about the same thing!

they both boil down to one group not being able to grasp that the other group has different priorities, values, and preferences.

The expression of it is kinda reactionary but they're not really sorry they don't live in a city, ime.

granny otm

Like I picture city folk coming to a charming rural town and annoying the residents with their complaints about lack of this and that and their high-strungedness, and that causing the "ugh city folk" feeling. Whereas city folk don't get intruded on by country cousins on their turf the same way?

City fork who would do that are d-bags who deserve whatever they get imo. If you are going to go out to the country, you should be prepared to enjoy it for what it is.

Whereas city folk don't get intruded on by country cousins on their turf the same way?

Have you tried to walk through Grand Central lately?? Jesus. Also I have survived over a decade of my parents secretly and not so secretly feeling sorry for me that I don't live somewhere "nicer" or bigger or quieter or in a neighborhood where there are fewer crazy/drunk/high/seemingly unemployed-looking people walking around and standing on the corners. That last category may or may not include a subtext about minorities; I don't encourage that conversation.

I do have to say though, that the last time I encountered someone in a city who was rather conspicuously from the country, he addressed me as "Hey, nigger faggot."

Basically they'd like me to be someplace where none of the visible population is ever lower than middle-middle class regardless of race (best possible interpretation) and the stores are full of pretty things you want to buy to make your life prettier. I understand why they want this for me but it's a fast route to misery afaic.

Rev, I am tempted to joke, "sorry about my dad," but not even my dad would say something that fucking evilly hateful to someone's face.

everyone watches youtube

what I dislike about suburbs isn't really cultural. I dislike that the american suburb is structured in a way that allows people to blissfully ignore their externalities - the fact that people believe that a car and a large house are their god given rights as an american citizen. suburbs should be EXPENSIVE - they should be a luxury because in an environmental and social sense, they are.

My dad is straight country, though. He told me he was surprised people on the Tube in London were acting "weird" around him when he started cleaning his fingernails. What you have to know about my dad is he cleans his nails with the 5" pocket hunting knife that is on him at all times.

Last thing re city vs country: Oh and the buildings in a "nice" part of the city should be historical and architecturally attractive and vermin-free and feel like you're not actually in the city until you go outside. But nothing should intrude on your home life once you shut your door. Which basically explains why they live somewhere that you can't hit your neighbor's house with a rock while standing on your own porch.

Also: You have a porch.

Abbott, you are straight cracking me up.

How did he get a knife on the plane, can you check that shit?

So you are obv talking about outer ring suburbs here, right iatee?

Laurel, this was in 1999.

Lauren, I guess I don't see that as "looking down on", it doesn't seem based on snobbery? The rural&suburb-bashing city folk act like those people just haven't figured out how to be able to live in the city, or couldn't make it there once they did even though they obv must desperately want to.

whoa xposts

meant Laurel obv, sorry!

It's based on the "master of own domain" idea that iatee referred to up there. The American dream, doncha know. If you can't have that, they just feel gently sorry for you...UNLESS you have enough money to live as insulated from the discomforts of a city as if you WEREN'T in a city.

I've reached the conclusion that I'll never buy a house if it doesn't have a good-sized porch I can kick it on. Porches are very important to me, for some reason.

what I dislike about suburbs isn't really cultural. I dislike that the american suburb is structured in a way that allows people to blissfully ignore their externalities - the fact that people believe that a car and a large house are their god given rights as an american citizen.

This is just as much of a baseless generalization as what I was railing against upthread.

Yep.

last city i lived in most houses had porches

"suburbs require cars" is not really a baseless generalization

But nothing should intrude on your home life once you shut your door.

^major peeve of mine about the suburbs. sometimes it doesn't even have the "once you shut your door" caveat. "I don't want to have to smell your food, hear your dog or your music, see your unkempt lawn, or otherwise be made aware other people exist". Seriously, an apartment lease I signed a few years back had a "must not cook with pungent spices" clause in it.

Yeah, a lot of the nice, old homes in my current city have dope fuckin' porches. The house I live in, however, does not.

xps

that's not really what you said though xxpost

"suburbs require cars" is not really a baseless generalization

― iatee, Tuesday, June 8, 2010 2:44 PM Bookmark

It's kind of a major stretch from "suburbs require cars" to "[suburban] people believe that a car and a large house are their god given rights as an american citizen". Sure, some do, but that hardly characterizes even the majority of people who live there.

(this apt building w/that clause inthe lease was in an area that was historically upper mid class white but seeing an influx of people with an Indian/Pakistani background btw)

Also, GD, I never lived in a suburb or somewhere that my peers shared a dream of moving closer to the bright lights of the nearest high-density urban area; it was pretty much us and the lakes and the trees. So I have different sensitivities.

Keep in mind my entire multi-generational family, every single one of them, cannot fathom how I can live in NY -- they all sort of congratulate me for navigating it but they think I'm crazy. One of my cousins moved out of Seattle because it wasn't green enough for him. They don't envy me in the slightest although they are very nice about not saying so specifically.

xp haha, good luck with the pungent spice clause

suburbs are complicated

so ignore the american dream aspect - doesn't particularly matter. suburbs, almost by definition, create massive externalities and allow people to live without having to confront them. that makes it inherently a more selfish lifestyle.

yeah Laurel can totally see how that could be every bit as annoying for you as city folk snobbery can be

iatee, this may amaze you, but a rather big percentage of people in my hometown were poor and lived in apartments and rode buses (at times, myself) and not really plugged into this whole white picket fence American Dream thing.

I always wished I lived in the suburbs when I was a kid. I was so jealous of kids who could just walk a few houses down to play with their friends, rather than ride bike 5 miles into town.

i think you should write a thesis on this, iatee

What exactly do you mean by massive externalities?

Assuming everyone in the suburbs is an upper-middle class homeowner is as much a fallacy as assuming everyone is white.

Me too, Abbs. I didn't know suburbs existed, I just wanted to live somewhere with a sidewalk, like they had In Town. I was sure I would have had more friends that way.

suburbs are complicated

― harbl, Tuesday, June 8, 2010 2:50 PM Bookmark

^!

at this point it seems that a lot of the chicago suburbs are more ethnically/racially diverse than most parts of the city itself

― hope this helps (Granny Dainger), Tuesday, June 8, 2010 3:51 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Do you mean more diverse, or more integrated?

iatee, this may amaze you, but a rather big percentage of people in my hometown were poor and lived in apartments and rode buses (at times, myself) and not really plugged into this whole white picket fence American Dream thing.

no, that doesn't amaze me rev, I grew up in a suburb that is basically 50% poor hispanics. I'm not making any arguments about race or income of people who live in suburbs. the poor are seriously underserved by bus systems. transportation-wise, suburbs are a horrible place to be poor - that doesn't mean that there aren't lots of poor people.

(and it's not necessarily their fault that they live there either)

yeah Laurel can totally see how that could be every bit as annoying for you as city folk snobbery can be

I'm totally prepared to live and let live with all my extended family who are bros, they aren't superior or inferior about anything plus they have much lower standards for like physical comforts and what is "good enough" than my parents do. And even my parents mean well...but their baseline for an acceptable standard of living is way out of my reach in this city. Maybe in Chicago or St Louis my salary would look shinier, but here it doesn't stretch that far, and they feel sorry for me and think that my life must be very "hard".

Iatee, you are making some sweepingly dumb generalizations here.

anyway I gtg for now, but I leave you with wikipedia graph on per capita electricity use -

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/Electricity_use_kwh_per_customer_2000-05.PNG

Being poor in the city often sucks a lot as well. Last I checked, being poor pretty much sucks everywhere.

agreed

iirc this book was good on this topic too but i can't remember which chapters, looks like 4 and 5

and i don't think the whole thing is on google books

In an upscale ownership-based subdivision where real estate values and people's sense of the American dream is at stake and people's kids all play together, you are policed and confronted with a lot of expectations about how you're fitting into things -- socially, professionally, etc. It's fundamentally a fake scale recreation of a "village," and you're known to all and carry all the responsibility of a good villager, only more so.

― nabisco, Monday, July 14, 2008 10:39 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark

You could say exactly the same thing about living in the city.

Anyway, I think most people only move to suburbs for the sake of their children. There's a point where school districts become more important than your proximity to the best restaurants, cool clubs, etc.

Oh nevermind I didn't see that you specified transportationwise

Do you mean more diverse, or more integrated?

specific parts of the city are less diverse than many suburbs as a whole, the city as a whole is less integrated than many subrubs as a whole.

the cool people i know here who live in suburbs usually cite property taxes and crappy/unsafe public schools in the city as the biggest reasons, not necessarily selfish imo

i mean i would much rather live in a city but don't really blame individuals for their decision to move out if they have kids to worry about, it's not their fault, more like everyone's fault

breaking down these overarching, structural problems inherent in most suburbs to saying people who live there have a selfish lifestyle is totally fucking foolish imo.

strikes me as a way to pat yourself on the back for being some sort of humanitarian while not having to do anything more than live in a place you desire to live in

bingo

strikes me as a signal that a lot of people on this thread are working out a lot of baggage from their childhood

breaking down these overarching, structural problems inherent in most suburbs to saying people who live there have a selfish lifestyle is totally fucking foolish imo.

Well, in terms of use of resources, suburban living isn't very far-sighted. But it's so normal to us that it doesn't occur to a hell of a lot of people that it isn't the most wholesome, desirable, responsible thing to do for their families. Whether or not it's good for "families" as a whole isn't a question we're supposed to ask.

I don't think "selfish" is a very useful word in this sense...but it's not inaccurate in overall stats.

The treatment of "the suburbs" as some sort of quantifiable homogeonized thing is what is really confusing me tbh.

Re "selfish" -- I mean it implies a purposeful withholding of resources from others, which is a) impossible and b) making a lot of people defensive I think.

agree w/you, laurel. i don't think pointing the finger at individuals is either valid or productive.

strikes me as a signal that a lot of people on this thread are working out a lot of baggage from their childhood

^^I have composed and deleted three or four posts about rural judgmentalness and urban snobbery because they all pretty much boiled down to that.

if the argument is that all suburb folk should move to the city so as not to live a selfish lifestyle, then uh hope some of you city folk don't mind having all your jobs and dwellings and hangout spots effectively taken over by that massive influx of milquetoast stroller-pushers

We would need a different kind of cities for that, is the thing, but it's not impossible. And it's v desirable for urban space to develop in that direction.

But the thing is, the suburbs weren't meant for PEOPLE, they were meant for COMPANIES and REALTORS and for employers to keep their workforce nearby even if that meant custom-molding a certain look of community, and for auto manufacturers to sell you cars, first one then then two or three per family, and for oh shit you know how this goes already. And now our whole country is built around different degrees of isolation like this, and it's a lot of peoples' dream and it's probably going to kill us or be killed b/c of energy needs.

I've lived rural, suburban, and city...can I be superboring and say I love all three?

For me personally, I think it's more about how connected you are to the rest of the city. It's not good if you move out to the suburbs and become terrified of downtown and act like it's a foreign country (I know plenty of people who are this way)...but downtowners can behave exactly the same way and sort of shrivel up at the thought of venturing out of the inner city for anything...and honestly I don't really care for that behaviour either.

Suburbs give you good living spaces, quite often more square footage for your buck, and you get some cool undiscovered treasures of eating places, weird forgotten asian groceries, specialty stores that time forgot...if we had have been able to sell our little downtown bungalow before the housing market collapsed, I'd be happily kicking it in the suburbs with a comfortable square footage, a good sized backyard and not be living under police/medevac helicopter flight path :) But downtown I have pretty trees and a cute house. It's all good.

sorry for long post.

It's not the fault of anyone here or our parents or our friends, but...now what?

i really do blame realtors & i still hate them, as individuals

Everyone hates them. But unless we can burn them as fuel for our internal combustion engines, we're gonna have to think of something else.

We would need a different kind of cities for that, is the thing, but it's not impossible.

That, plus we could have different kinds of suburbs. Such as the ones described in the last chapter or so of this book: http://www.amazon.com/Geography-Nowhere-Americas-Man-Made-Landscape/dp/0671888250

"suburbs require cars" is not really a baseless generalization

I have lived in the suburbs without a car, I currently live in the suburbs with a car, but could easily do it without again if I needed to. Between my bike, buses and rail it wouldn't be easy, as such, but it would be achievable. I'm close enough to "the city" (Cleveland, in my case) that I can commute by bike.

Also, my particular suburb is about 52% white, 47% black; and of the white population, a huge percentage of that is Orthodox Jewish, itself a minority. So, you know, don't be feeding me this "no minorities" bullshit.

And I don't have a porch.

I think you'll see a lot more carpooling and telecommuting in suburban areas in the next few years.

x-post

if you live close enough to a city that you can bike yeah you're kind of not dealing with the major structural problems that outer suburbs have.

i don't see why it's so hard to separate disliking the suburbs from disliking people who live in the suburbs

Just curious: Granny Dainger, do you still live in the suburbs? I seem to remember a thread a few years ago in which you said you preferred the suburbs to the city because of the proximity to nature (in the form of parks). Could be misremembering.

I think when you're in your 20's, living in a city is pretty much a slam-dunk. It's exciting and fun and the environment is complementary and some sort of social life comes relatively easy.

But by the time you hit 40 and probably before, maybe much earlier, and this is whether you have kids or not, it becomes a question of whether the city is where you want to grow old or whether you're ready for some peace and quiet and some seclusion with the ones you love. And at this point, it's a matter of personal preference. Some stay, some move out. I can't figure if one option is better than the other.

And I don't know the ages of everyone posting here, but living in the city even at 35 is quite a bit different experience than living in it at 25. I mean, I don't know if there's anything better than being young, single and living in the city. Everything in comparison is kind of dud from that perspective. Which isn't to say that getting older doesn't have it's charms, it does. But perspectives definitely change.

So, say, if you don't want to go out drinking every night anymore, and if you're in a committed relationship, and in a general sense your need for fun and a social life has waned, well the city isn't that charming for you anymore really. Especially when your friends are still in a mode of hanging out at loud bars filled with obnoxious kids and maybe you're the oldest people there, I dunno, you start thinking that you might indeed like to have a lawn to tell these obnoxious little bastards who think they'll never get old to stay the hell off of. But in a lot of ways, I think in fleeing the city for the suburbs, you're not just fleeing the city itself and its negatives, but your fleeing a lot of friendships you don't really have that much use for anymore.

Pretty much nothing in your post is accurate in my personal experience.

I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm sure it happens a lot. I think I'm just reacting negatively to your universalization of that particular pattern. I probably should have stuck with writing and then deleting my comments without posting them.

i don't want that all to happen to me!

if i had a family, then i would strongly consider moving back from the city to a suburb. and i would do so strictly for education -- i just wouldn't want my kids stuck in some of the urban schools in my neck of the woods, which have remained pretty bad even as my city has gentrified considerably over the past decade.

and yeah, young 'uns reveling too much at odd hours (and days -- we have a particularly raucous Saint Patrick's Day tradition that brings seemingly every drunken douchebag and their slut girlfriends to town to puke and piss all over the place) is getting too much for my old ass. and to think, that I used to be one of those drunk out-of-down drunk douchebags up to a decade or so ago ...

Have lived in suburbs and cities (only NYC, to be fair.) In my experience: people in suburbs read novels, play in bands, ride bikes, go into the city to see museums. People in cities watch TV, see bands play, work out in a gym, and live close to museums but never enter them.

OK this is a stupid generalization which I'm sure doesn't apply to many of you, but it's what I've seen, and it should be taken as seriously as "suburbs are where tacky white people live in McMansions."

people be doing lots of different kinds of stuff IMO

I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm sure it happens a lot. I think I'm just reacting negatively to your universalization of that particular pattern. I probably should have stuck with writing and then deleting my comments without posting them.

My intention wasn't to universalize the experience. Maybe i didn't succeed in getting that across. I don't know. I don't like rereading my own posts. I certainly know older urbanites and they aren't rich and they're happy. But thats not everyone. I just think a lot of young people associate living in the city with being young and living in the city and thats all that they can understand of city living, and they can't understand why anyone wouldn't want to live there or they think they have this unique constitutional makeup such that they are particularly suited to city living. I'm just saying, everyone feels that way at 24. It may or may not last.

I still live in the city, myself. But I'm thinking of moving out, getting away, starting a family etc, whatever. I guess I don't think it's a decision to be classic or dudded really, and I'm trying to articulate the rationale behind it thats maybe not as sinister as "I'm sick of dealing with minorities," but also not as innocuous and simple as "the schools aren't good enough for my children." Basically, I'm tired and old, I guess.

my family moved out to south jersey suburbs about... 5 years ago, I think. iatee is otm about the transportation problems in a suburb, at least in my suburb. we live about 3 miles from the boulevard where all the big box stores are located. our suburb is served by, I think, one bus route exactly, which goes into philly. if I didn't have access to a car I would probably stay at home all the time.

"suburbs are where tacky white people live in McMansions."

It's not that I think people in suburbs live in giant luxury homes. It's that even a normal suburban house is really energy-inefficient compared to more population-dense city structures. Of course there are tradeoffs in privacy, space available, and all that stuff we've touched on already.

Plus the transpo issue which is partly historically explained by auto companies' actions and a greater faith in the freedom of the individual to take to the open road and that whole mythology, and partly a result of the sheer spread of land in this country in between the spaces that we occupy for various purposes like work, live, recreate, shop...lyfe, basically.

So, you know, don't be feeding me this "no minorities" bullshit.

wtf have you not read a single post I wrote?

this was mentioned upthread but I do think there's an important distinction between a diverse suburb and an integrated suburb

"suburbs are where tacky white people live in McMansions."

It's not that I think people in suburbs live in giant luxury homes. It's that even a normal suburban house is really energy-inefficient compared to more population-dense city structures. Of course there are tradeoffs in privacy, space available, and all that stuff we've touched on already.

Idk, I see the energy bills for my house in the suburbs w/energy efficient windows and a modern boiler, and they're a ton less than the drafty radiator loaded apartments I used to live in. Also I feel like lots of people are assuming that everyone who lives in a suburb commutes to the city for work which is not true. So I don't get this urban energy conservation angle that seems to be taken as gospel truth by some peeps on this thread.

the whole "cities are great for 20 year olds, but what about the SCHOOLS" thing - I mean, this is a self-fulfilling prophecy + there are specific historic and political reasons behind this stuff?

urban areas are not inherently bad places to raise a family. urban areas are not inherently dangerous or more expensive, and the schools are not bad for reasons inherent to high density. all of these things are the way they are for reasons that have very little to do w/ population density.

jj you can see here suburban green can have its advantages as far as the house goes, but *generally* transit patterns will erase those gains
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/48/107880025_1a2b75d75a.jpg

urban areas are not inherently bad places to raise a family. urban areas are not inherently dangerous or more expensive, and the schools are not bad for reasons inherent to high density. all of these things are the way they are for reasons that have very little to do w/ population density.

i agree with this analysis -- at least where i live, it has a LOT to do w/ how the schools are financed (through local property taxes) not to mention entrenched bureaucracies. but that doesn't change the fact that a lot of urban school districts AREN'T as good as their suburban counterparts.

yes it's obviously a self-fulfilling prophecy and we know, doesn't make it selfish to move out

Again part of the problem here is that I think peeps are ignoring the vast differences between inner ring and outer ring suburbs (and maybe that's because they're from regions without that distinction? Idk) Inner ring generally has relatively equivalent public transportation, the opportunity to have control of your energy efficiency/consumption, potentially a shorter commute (k and I intentionally found a house that is between our jobs, so we are both driving less), not to mention stuff like planting a veggie garden in our back yard, buying locally from indie shops/bars/etc.

anything w/ relatively equivalent public transportation = not a suburb

so what are the specific distinctions between inner ring and outer ring suburbs, jjj, besides what you just mentioned? are living arrangements more dense/compacted? distance from city? both of the suburbs I've lived in have been 15-20 minute commutes to the city, but they were also 15-20 minutes from major shopping centers as well.

I mean I have 3 bars, a butcher, tons of local restaurants, a bike shop, antique stores, a grocery store, liquor stores, a bakery, and two coffee shops all within walking distance of my front door. And every single one is locally owned. So the fact that peeps assume that nationally the minute you cross the city limits it's all starbucks and applebees is pretty galling.

That was a bunch of xposts btw

uhm that sounds like a city to me. definitely not the case where I live. xp

city limits have really nothing to do with it! I would consider parts of jersey part of 'urban nyc' and lots of things in the nyc city limits 'suburbs'.

where do you like jjjusten?

live*

anything w/ relatively equivalent public transportation = not a suburb

I assume you realize this is like the most annoying rhetorical move ever right?

jjjj you basically live in Park Slope! Minus the outrageous housing costs. So that sounds about perfect to me.

I'm thinking that we have very different definitions of suburbs in mpls/stpl than the east coast does.

yeah I mean the place you appear to be describing is not a suburb by the definition that I'm using, which is basically 100% transportation-based. dyao's home does fit my definition.

'inner ring' and 'outer ring' are still gonna be as arbitrary as 'urban' and 'suburban' so it's not like we solve any problems by switching to those terms. (esp not when things like los angeles exist.)

so when a suburb improves its transportation enough it stops being a suburb?

yes

restaurants within a 20 minute drive of me: olive garden, chili's, bonefish grill, outback steakhouse, red lobster. pat's pizza. a lot of chinese takeout. (should ask stevie d or los blue jeans they are probably a lot more familiar with the area than me).

grocery stores within a 20 minute drive of me: overpriced convenience stores. shoprite, acme, aldi pathmark...some place called food land?

Enormous parts of Brooklyn aren't served by public transit very well or at all, and are full of free-standing one-family houses -- it ought to be a suburb really, but just by chance it's ruled part of the city proper. Whereas jj's nabe could map onto most of gentrified Bklyn or Queens and even Manhattan neighborhoods.

Yeah but lots of cities (mpls/stpl being a good example) have shit public transportation!

is a city with shitty transportation not a city? this can't be right

this is a new definition like no one has ever used

So are those just huge suburbs then?

Lots of xposts

i say if you have less than 50 murders you are not a city

So are those just huge suburbs then?

this is really news to people? that many american cities are just huge suburbs?

sounds like your suburb doesn't really need public transportation though, jjj.

imo a suburb is a place that isn't easily walkable, that doesn't have a lot of shared community space. you basically need a car to go anywhere or else you'll be walking for an hour each time you want to leave the house, minimum.

and like, I'm using a specific definition to mean something and you can use another definition of suburb to mean something else and we can talk about the suburbs using your definition.

So are those just huge suburbs then?

this is really news to people? that many american cities are just huge suburbs?

Trying not to get offended here, but given what I just said you just defined my home city as a huge suburb.

Which seems, idk, kinda elitist maybe? Also a little insulting considering you've been mostly talking about how suburbs are basically hot garbage all over this thread.

this means everyone not in la, nyc, chicago, or sf is in a huge suburb

Also I think by your definition Calcutta is a suburb.

i am not offended because i don't feel anything special for suburbs and i am confident i live in a real city despite its public transportation system being shit i just feel this is dishonest in light of everything i know

how would you like to define city? the amount of people who live in an arbitrary line drawn on a map? density?

kolkata has a metro system and presumably has a car ownership per capita than any american city, so idk where you're going with this.

*lower car ownership

Uh are you saying that the per capital car ownership is beacause of super dope public transportation because I think there might be some other factors there

Goddamn iPhone autocorrect

right - it's too poor to be suburb...

iatee, i think im w/ u on this, but maybe this is not a city/suburb and maybe an urban/suburban geog distiction?

like in my city (san antonio) v little of it you'd be able to describe as "urban" outside of a p small city center and then it's waves of housing developments and big box retail/small retail strips (a fairly definable inner and outer ring). and fwiw our public transportation is mostly a joke.

I've felt the sting of the idea that my city is a large suburb before. Basically, with the exception of probably 20 square blocks in our downtown and some old-style apartment-heavy areas, all of Des Moines has the population density of a suburb. There are basically commercial strips every 10-20 blocks and single-family houses sitting on somewhere averaging around a quarter acre in most of the city. By "commercial strips" I mean areas with local businesses/chain groceries, really. There are big box stores in probably a half dozen spots in the city proper, where they moved near shopping malls when the mid-sized neighborhood stores became less popular.

The thing about the older suburb parts, and the local towns that grew into suburbs, is that the housing density isn't a whole lot different in the older parts. The city itself just seems a lot more organic in growth, even though a lot of the areas are no older than the 1950s. I think the main difference between strip malls and some city blocks are just age and the density of the area around them. Strip malls tend to have a few rows of parking and sit on larger streets, where I'm now in an area with more "shopping center" type of things with either a single row of parking, street parking, or a larger shared lot instead of those half-assed divided lots that newer business areas seem to have.

That said, there's a newer ring of suburban development that seems to fit with other trends. We have kind of a ring of economic variance where the south side of town is oddly development-deprived, the east side has the cheaper suburbs, the north has the family-oriented one for people who went to college but didn't move to the city, and the west has the pricier suburb that's next to the mega-mall development and more expensive chain restaurants/stores and giant business campuses. There are a few in-between ones that are older and are varying in the transition from old growth to new-style growth, depending on whether they're boxed in.

So this all means I get to live in a very reasonably-priced 1915 home in the 'city' proper where I can bike to the middle of downtown for the farmers' market in about 20 minutes max, I can walk to bars within 15 minutes, and I have two grocery stores (one small, one recently rebuilt and large) within walking distance. I have what I think is probably the best schools within the city within blocks, and the coolest old homes in the city (including the governors' mansion and historical landmarks) are about ten blocks away.

So for me, I have absolutely no clue why people would live in these newer, outer suburbs in Des Moines. The buses are even spottier out there, you can't walk to shit, and the houses are poorly-built in comparison and are all variations of the same design within a development. The schools are nice but really monocultured. Half the places don't have usable sidewalks, and people I know out there under 30 don't seem to know their own neighbors.

The traditional, capital-S suburb really only exists in the largest rank of cities. The main reference point I think of for the straw man of suburbs is Chicago/Naperville, but I really don't know much about that dynamic.

sorry, that was pretty tl;dr

yeah that wording woulda been better xp to mb

quality post mh

for real

restaurants within a 20 minute drive of me: olive garden, chili's, bonefish grill, outback steakhouse, red lobster. pat's pizza. a lot of chinese takeout. (should ask stevie d or los blue jeans they are probably a lot more familiar with the area than me).

grocery stores within a 20 minute drive of me: overpriced convenience stores. shoprite, acme, aldi pathmark...some place called food land?

― ⚖ on my truck (dyao), Tuesday, June 8, 2010 8:09 PM Bookmark

The vast majority of the restaurants near my parents' house are family-owned. That might be due to their location between the rather extensive pre-WWII urban core of my hometown and (actually much closer to) the small-town downtown of the next town over, and relative distance of any commercial strip. Even on the nearest commercial strip though, except for the fast food places, most of the restaurants are family-owned.

Grocery store situation in pretty much the same, though, with a couple exceptions. There's a food co-op on the outskirts of the downtown area that I never knew existed until right before I moved away, and they built a Trader Joe's waaaaay on the other side of town, down by the mall.

Actually, most of yr Olive Gardens and Applebees and such in my town are down by the mall, rather than along the main commercial strip.

I had no idea yesterday that I had posted itt before yesterday, touching on some of the exact same points.

I think what people are largely glossing over here is that, at least in a lot of places, the suburbs aren't economically homogenous. There are upscale suburbs and downscale suburbs.

― The Reverend, Monday, July 14, 2008 1:36 PM Bookmark

And jj's point that people who live in suburbs don't neccesarily work in the main city is on point. My parents' house is a 5-minute drive from my dad's work and an 8-minute drive from my mom's. My dad's pickup, which he bought new 12 years ago has about 70,000 miles on it (tbh this has a lot to do with the fact that most anytime they go somewhere together, they take my mom's more fuel-efficient vehicle).

And iatee, your thing about public transportation being a defining factor is way off. Seattle, whose bus system isn't that great (which owes to weird geography more than anything), opened their first (modern) mass transit system in...I think it was August? Was it not a city before then? That's certainly news to me if it wasn't.

mh's post is really good. I'd really say there are huge distinctions between pre-WWII towns that became conurbanized into the metropolitan area (like my hometown, which had a third of its current population as of WWII), immediate post-WWII suburbs, which seem to be built much in the same way proper cities are, just with lower densities, and the windy, bendy crap that has dominated the past 30-40 years. However, I think the inner/outer suburb dichotomy is a bit of a red herring, because while the second and third categories I listed do strongly correlate to inner and outer suburbs, respectively, the first category can be anywhere. My own hometown is on the outside of the metropolitan area, but much more urban in character than anywhere between itself and the major city.

Actually, most of yr Olive Gardens and Applebees and such in my town are down by the mall, rather than along the main commercial strip.

― fuck being hard, suburbs are complicated (The Reverend), Wednesday, June 9, 2010 6:41 PM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah this is true of my area too - all of those chain restaurants are by the deptford mall. I'm not really sure how many family-owned restaurants are along the main commercial strip near my house - I think you can find a locally owned hoagie shop, but I've only ever stopped at fast food joints on that strip tbh.

You bad, bad person, you.

sorry, I have no interest in getting sushi at Crazy Wok Chinese Restaurant ;)

I dunno, my whole family finds eating out to be a deeply repellent option so we mostly just cook and eat at home, and order out for the occasional pizza.

sorry, I have no interest in getting sushi at Crazy Wok Chinese Restaurant ;)

Ha. I never had problems finding fairly good restaurants back home (which isn't to say there aren't others I would have been loathe to step foot in). I still haven't found a bahn mi here anywhere close to the (apparently much-praised) Vietnamese sandwich shop by my school.

Oh, grocery-wise I forgot: quite a few small Mexican grocers, too.

It's always kinda funny to read about people talking about suburbs as places of middle-class/bourgeoise seclusion. In Helsinki (and other big Finnish cities) the situation is almost the opposite: rich and upper middle-class people mostly live in either the city centre (where the apartments are the most expensive) or they have their own houses in the smaller towns that neighbour Helsinki. There are a few upper-class suburbs, but mostly the suburbs here are the sort of places with big concrete apartment buildings, where the working-class people, lower middle-class people, immigrants and ethnic minorities, and poor people live. I grew up in a suburb in North Helsinki where most of the people (including my family) are working-class, and the ethnic diversity there is much bigger than in Helsinki centre. There has been a gentrification/white flight process going on in here for the last couple of decades, but mostly that means that white, middle-class people are moving out of certain suburbs, and only poor people (including immigrants) are left there, because they can only afford to live in the cheap city-owned apartments which are mostly located in the suburbs.

Sociologically, it's pretty interesting how the process of "suburbanization" goes almost into opposite directions in different countries. I think Paris and many German cities have the same sort of situation as Helsinki, where the suburbs are the place where ethnic minorities and other poor people live.

when americans talk about 'the suburbs' we definitely aren't talking about people living in 10 story government-owned apartment buildings.

and paris (can't speak for germany) does have that same situation, but it also has some very american-style suburbs.

Depends on the city

Though I would have thought most have out-lying areas that are middle class, out-lying areas that are poorer and out-lying areas that are mixed

While the popular image of modern suburbia is one of endless subdivision, are there more attempts now at walkable suburbs, of attempting to build suburbs that ape functionality of small towns. I'm not really so clear on changes in recent suburbia in regard to this

Re: Tuomas - think thats a reasonably apparent distinction between city/suburb relationship in Europe vs US. Think this is mainly due to when the citys core was built, and road construction and public transport, how much was in place before mass car ownership

xxp: Exactly. (Also some outlying areas that are $$$$$.)

how much was in place before mass car ownership

― cherry blossom, Wednesday, June 9, 2010 5:07 AM Bookmark

Huge factor.

i think when people say inner-ring suburbs that's what it means, "streetcar suburbs" built before most people had cars. those are mostly within the city limits now in a lot of cities, though.

Also whether a city is surrounded by towns (or terrain) that act as a constraint on unfocused sprawl, eg...pittsburgh?

Kind of interested here about post-car-boom cities without public transport as opposed to ones that grew either before or with public transport, and questions about introducing public transport into those cities now, when the geography of the city isn't necessarily suited (isn't Charlotte's held up as a success story? need to read up on this)

There was a streetcar between my hometown and Seattle until 1939. The right of way now contains a bicycle/pedestrian trail. http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&file_id=5341

(sorry bit of a tangent here - just kinda related to this idea of a particular city being equated to a giant suburb - when, effectively, newer cities might well be this! without differences in density btwn core and suburb being much less)

I'm thinking here also of tech cities I guess...campus cities could they be called?

Read something interesting here about Stanford rise to prominence and tech companies building sites that ape campuses

The thing is that introducing good public transportation to outlying cities tends to reshape them in ways that do allow them to take advantage of such a thing. A lot of the areas near MAX stops in Beaverton/Hillsboro, OR have developed into dense nodes and Beaverton now actually has greater population density than Portland itself (although some geographical quarks play into this, to be sure).

Read some postive stuff about MAX...my (possibly totally inaccurate!) impression of Portland is of a city that began to look at this stuff in the 70s as a way of revitalizing certain parts of the metro area, and were quite forward thinking about this

(i rode the MAX once to the airport but was half asleep and don't remember it bah)

Read some postive stuff about MAX...my (possibly totally inaccurate!) impression of Portland is of a city that began to look at this stuff in the 70s as a way of revitalizing certain parts of the metro area, and were quite forward thinking about this

― cherry blossom, Wednesday, June 9, 2010 5:41 AM Bookmark

Yes, and they established urban growth boundaries at that time, except some stuck on stupid ruling says that they now have to expand them every so often, which partially negates the purpose of having them.

And oh yeah, the MAX is great. I live a few blocks from one of the stations and ride it pretty much every day.

how much was in place before mass car ownership

― cherry blossom, Wednesday, June 9, 2010 5:07 AM Bookmark

Huge factor.

I'm not quite sure how this is a deciding factor, care to elaborate?

In Helsinki the situation is a bit different, most of the poorer surburbs were built in the late 60s or later, and we have a pretty good and extensive public transport system that reaches all the suburbs, so mass car ownership is a not a big factor. I'd say the biggest reason for the fact that suburbs are where poor/working class people and immigrants live is that most govenrment/city-owned apartments are in the suburbs, and since those apartments are significantly cheaper than privately owned ones, they're often the only thing poor people can afford. Plus the explicitly stated function of publically owned housing companies is to provide cheap apartments for people with low income.

Also, up until the late 1950s Finland was a rather rural country, the biggest wave of urbanization took place only in the 1960s and early 1970s. A lot of the Helsinki suburbs were built specifically for the people who moved in here to work during that era, which might also explain why the city provided them with good public transport.

here almost all public housing is built in cities in part because suburban governments refused to allow it (there was definitely demand for it outside of cities, so it wasn't just that), similarly a lot of places have/had restrictions on where multi-family housing can be built. now more poor people are moving to suburbs and using vouchers to pay their rent so maybe it is becoming more like finland, more low-income people in suburbs.

Try to get hold of Edge City by Joel Garreau - written in the late '80s about suburban expansion and its tropes.

Certain transportation arteries in the Twin Cities are very well served by public transport, but it still suffers from the delusion that the only people using it are commuting to work on a 9-5 schedule. Light rail has opened up some really nice residential parts of Minneapolis to new people, or has paved the way for people discovering them.

i shouldn't say "almost all" because it's hard to define what is city and what is suburb but the exclusion of low income housing in the beginning is part of how suburbs became what they are

yeah, I think a huge part of the difference b/w Europe & the USA on this comes down to zoning laws re. multi-family housing & residential density.

I'm not quite sure how this is a deciding factor, care to elaborate?

Compare the parts of my hometown north of 41st street to those south of it. http://maps.google.com/maps?client=opera&rls=en&q=everett&oe=utf-8&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hq=&hnear=Everett,+WA&gl=us&ei=II8PTMrNFcPinAfY6LSVDQ&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&ct=image&resnum=1&ved=0CB0Q8gEwAA

american suburb = some kinda fucked-up hybrid monstrosity born of postwar economic boom + lotsa undeveloped land + bizarre idealized image of the british country estate

european suburb = ???

In Helsinki the situation is a bit different, most of the poorer surburbs were built in the late 60s or later, and we have a pretty good and extensive public transport system that reaches all the suburbs, so mass car ownership is a not a big factor.

This is kind of what I meant...in Europe an inner core that was strongly in place pre-mass car ownership, later housing (partic public housing) tending more towards the outskirts. Some US cities seem more donut-shaped, hollowed out inner cores, with suburbs that wanted to extricate themselves from the city core (resulting depopulation in many cases), but those with an established core pre-mass car ownership have been more successfully in keeping the core functioning well (and leaving structures in place ripe for gentrification 80s onwards)

also, what harbl said - issues here about the power held at local/city level...abilities to annexe etc (read somewhere this is less the case in the south?)

the delusion that the only people using it are commuting to work on a 9-5 schedule

This is one of the things that always made me AAIFJSOHP;KML;DSFJLX.

european suburb = ???

Exactly

I mean, Europe's kind of a diverse palce

here almost all public housing is built in cities in part because suburban governments refused to allow it (there was definitely demand for it outside of cities, so it wasn't just that),

So I guess the nature of suburbanization is partially due to how much power the central city government has? In here they've always had a very strong say in housing policies, there's even a policy which says that when new houses and new suburbs are built, there should always be publically and privately owned apartments in the same area, to avoid gentrification. Obviously gentrification has still happened, but I think it's less pronounced in here than in the US or even in many other European countries.

Some US cities seem more donut-shaped, hollowed out inner cores, with suburbs that wanted to extricate themselves from the city core (resulting depopulation in many cases), but those with an established core pre-mass car ownership have been more successfully in keeping the core functioning well (and leaving structures in place ripe for gentrification 80s onwards)

Yeah, the downtown area of my hometown was pretty empty until about 10 years ago, but they've done a fairly good job of revitalizing it (somewhat stymied by current economic foibles) and now the ugly condos are on the rise.

(x-post with Cherry Blossom)

i moved 2 a p. nice suburb a few wks ago. things ive noticed from going out jogging:

most everyone's lawn is really nice
lots of pickup trucks

i think when people say inner-ring suburbs that's what it means, "streetcar suburbs" built before most people had cars.

This is the very definition of my town! It was settled as early as the 1820s, but didn't really grow too much until John D. Rockefeller started buying and developing land here in the 1870s (and had a summer home here), and then a streetcar line opened up in 1899.

Heh, my hometown was launched by Rockefeller, too.

Or at least the launch was financed by him, to be more accurate.

Also the type of housing built in various city cores can be really different! And sometimes not really suited to modern usages. Philadelphia or Baltimores rowhouses vs the rickety scooby doo houses they seem to have in Cleveland or Pittsburgh (Detroits were more like suburban single family houses - city and suburb built pretty similarly?)

Those scooby doo houses pretty expensive to heat and too big but not necessarily easy to convert to multi-occupancy

Looking at the over-the-rhine area in Cincinnati is pretty interesting...would seem structurally perfect for gentrification but not sure whats actually happened there

Its impossible to talk about American sunbelt suburbs without reference to race. They were initially created by white flight following integrated schooling, the Civil Rights Act, etc. In my own hometown, what started as a 5 mile belt as become a 40 mile belt as social problems of poverty migrated outward. The city now has a dartboard like structure with a well-gentrified core, inner ethnically diverse suburbs, and outer caucasian + professional class asian suburbs...

I've always had an interest in the history of my city, suburban expansion, the cycle of public transportation, and growth trends but this thread has been revived at just the right time. I'm looking at doing a project that will involve researching a lot of these points, so I might drop back in to contribute.

The entire "streetcar suburb" thing is pretty huge. Des Moines went through several developments that kind of de-industrialized the downtown in the early 1900s, removed streetcars after car use became widespread, and actually narrowed some streets. It's sad, the building density in the original part of downtown is actually much lower now, and many of the buildings in this picture were torn down and replaced with smaller ones, or even left vacant. I think it's a pretty common small/mid-sized midwest city issue that downtowns became barren after cities became established and automobile traffic took off.

This thread is way too long to read, but chiming in abt dyao and I's suburbia: mine is a half-mileish strip of antique shops and "quaint" houses with a McDonalds, ShopRite, and a few other things at the end of it. That's just the main road; any and all side roads are farmland and housing developments. I'm lucky enough to live a block off the main road, where I can bike most anywhere I need to go, including a decent public library, and there is also ONE single bus to Philadelphia that stops approx every 1.5 hours and is never less than 10 minutes late (sometimes 30 or 40!). Our neck of the woods has some decent family restaurants. Off the top of my head there's a Chinese restaurant, a family owned pizza joint, a diner, an ex-diner that's now some weird fancy thing, and a nice-ish Italian restaurant. Being Jersey, there should be a diner within 5 miles of anywhere you are, and they're usually nice enough, but it's mostly stuffy white people and they drive everywhere.

wait the part abt the white people driving everywhere wasn't supposed to have anything to do with the diners.

Also this is totally not indicative of everywhere, or even New Jersey. But our specific part of SJ tends to be like this.

I've learned a lot from the revive of this thread. I've never lived in the suburbs (I started rural, then small towns (<2,000), bigger college towns, small cities (<1mil) and now Chicago) and a lot of the perceptions I have of the suburbs are based on my experiences living in small cities with dead centers and the kind of sidewalkless, strip mall sprawl that gets attributed to suburbs. Like, I lived in a gated apartment community in NC for about a year that represented the very worst (IMO) of this kind of mindless, isolating expansion and I always referred to it as "the suburbs" but it was well within the city limits. Plus also driving the length of Delaware and seeing all of the really sad looking sidewalkless, cookie cutter, miles from commerce housing developments there. But none of those things are actually suburbs, either, because LOL it's Delaware and Wilmington isn't big enough for suburbs. And then I lived in Atlanta for a bit and that city is so hostile to pedestrians that I assumed 1) suburbs are less urban than the cities they surround, therefore 2) the Atlanta 'burbs were wastelands in which people drove the length of their driveways and back to pick up their mail and never met their neighbors.

All of this and I've been to Evanston*, even, which I just assumed as some suburb anomaly.

*And of course, all those John Hughes movies I watched as a kid I assumed were set in small towns like those where I lived because those were the only residential areas with single family homes and sidewalks that I had seen and I could never figure out how come their high schools were so huge or how they could have a party attended by like half the population of the entire county where I lived when my entire high school served three towns and lots of country in between and had fewer than 300 students.

I do sometimes think of Evanston and Oak Park -- old suburbs served by the CTA -- as honorary Chicago neighborhoods.

Point being, I'm not going to move to the suburbs any time soon because Jeff and I were geographically abused by our rural/small town upbringings (his waaaaaaaaay more isolated and rural and boring than mine) so we're still (and maybe always will be) reveling in living in an honest to god urban environment (I still sometimes wander around like Mary Tyler Moore all awed and agape at tall buildings and we've lived here almost six years) but I can stop being quietly smug and judgmental about people who chose to live in the suburbs, which is good because that's both obnoxious and exhausting.

My high school had 2000+

I have to be the only person outside of Wyoming who hears "Evanston" and first thinks Evanstan, Wyo.

Much bigger than any of the HSs in Seattle itself, actually.

Here is a question: is Greenwich, CT considered a suburb of NYC?

I'm confused by your question just because I can't imagine what the controversy is -- Greenwich IS a suburb of NYC, and I can't think what definition of suburb might exclude it.

yes xp

There's no controversy. I'm asking for my own information.

I suspect we'll be debating the merits of Ugly Condos soon.

I grew up in Greenwich and it is very definitely a suburb of NYC. Though as this thread shows, being a suburb can mean a lot of diff't things...

How common is the idea of "Ugly Condos"? I once used the phrase to some of the old suburban ladies at work, and they looked at me like they had no idea what I was talking about.

have no idea what "Ugly Condos" means, enlighten

and I'm from the suburbs

I've never heard the term before, and if it means something v specific like "McMansion" does, then Google is not helping me figure it out.

Ugly Condos = new, bland, cookie cutter condos going up in old urban neighborhoods. Kind of the McMansions of cities.

a phrase used by several posters to define the sparkling new high-rises studding the bay and coastlines of major cities.

Also, these "ugly condos" are often marketed as "luxury condos"

I grew up in Greenwich

I forgot that! One of my besties from college is from there. You don't know a guy named St3ph3n P@ul0, do you?

As for the original question, it's predictably unimaginative and reductive.

My hometown is being slowly overtaken by these:

http://www.vegasluxurycondosales.com/images/Urban01.jpg

No, I don't think so. I was a reclusive lad though, and Greenwich is actually a pretty big place.

I actually tend to hide the fact that I'm from Greenwich, because, you know.

xp to jenny

Those look like they are made of corrugated tin.

xp

Ugly Condos: Epidemic across Brooklyn in the past 5 years or something...many mid-construction and now languishing unfinished or unoccupied b/c of the housing market.

The thing is that infill housing is a really smart thing to bring to an already residential space, within reason. Aesthetically, however, blergh.

xxp I do not hate those slope-roofed houses.

AJ - I visited my friend once and I remember thinking Greenwich was a regular town (because I had no previous experience w/ suburbs), but then she busted out her yearbook and I realized she went to a giant high school. I guess I'm formulating my own definition of suburbs as a town that is both easy driving distance to a city or served by some sort of commuter rail and also home to a giant high school.

Yeah, high school had about 2000 kids.

A lot of Greenwich looks just like a normal town but that normal looking house will cost you $900,000.

the fact that people believe that a car and a large house are their god given rights as an american citizen. suburbs should be EXPENSIVE - they should be a luxury because in an environmental and social sense, they are.

What "facts" are you citing here? As a kid of the suburbs, whose family became comfortably middle-class after years of hard work, I'm pretty sure my parents felt they earned the right to spend their money as they pleased.

As a point of comparison, I just returned from a trip to NYC, where the Dominican teens in Inwood (the "ethnics" and "diversity" one is supposed to enjoy in a big city as opposed to the suburbs, right?) all sported the same iPods and boat shoes that I saw on their Greenpoint and Bushwick confreres last night. Talk about conformity.

It is corrugated tin (galvanized steel, actually), and that is the face of "ugly condos" in rejuvenated downtowns through the south and southwest. Its pretty much the cheapest building material available (much as unpainted concrete was in the 60s), and I suspect will face similar issues with resale value once the "hipness" factor wanes.

I also have issues with a double-wide garage door being a home's face to the world. Well designed highrises with integral greenspace would be a big step up from these.

xp By "regular town" I meant "town like those in which I had lived" as opposed to "not astoundingly wealthy." I knew Greenwich was richie rich b/c my friend was blue collar (her dad was a cop) and she told me all about it.

when did I bring up ipods or inwood teens being cool?

I do believe that people have the 'right to spend their money as they please' - I just believe that actual cost of the suburbs does not reflect the real cost of the suburbs.

Sanpaku, what is that....thing?

Somehow my post upthread was the first in the history of ILX to use the exact phrase "ugly condos".

i am trying to find pictures of a couple of my go to ugly condos in mpls, that are built to look like fake cartoony old blocks, complete with foreshortened fake terrace balconies. fuckers

I do believe that people have the 'right to spend their money as they please' - I just believe that actual cost of the suburbs does not reflect the real cost of the suburbs.

So what?

oh yes there we go:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v729/JT-MI/uptown6.jpg

I paid $3 for coffee at La Guarida this morning. It did not taste like three dollars.

xpost

The thing is that infill housing is a really smart thing to bring to an already residential space, within reason. Aesthetically, however, blergh.

is otm

Those mpls condos kind of actually look nice.

I do believe that people have the 'right to spend their money as they please' - I just believe that actual cost of the suburbs does not reflect the real cost of the suburbs.

So what?

wtf so what? I believe we need to structure our world so that people pay for their externalities. that would make living in the suburbs more much expensive and cities relatively cheaper. right now we live in a world where we subsidize and thus prioritize suburban life. this isn't a system that can last forever or one that can spread to 7 billion people.

Corrugated tin not a problem for me but then I'm p. interested in making houses out of old shipping containers so I don't find the idea of metal walls aesthetically horrifying. Same goes for garage- or freight-sized doors opening to the outside (although do these designers not believe in BUGS??), tho admittedly only if one can adapt for keeping heat in the house, toddlers in the house, bugs out of the house, and so on.

xp yeah, the mpls condos look like a decent version of still-modern-but-blended-into-surroundings...? There are some REALLY GREAT little builds in parts of BK where people made new things look exactly like their 1850 neighbors but that's not everyone's mission in life and that's okay.

xp

well that goes back in a way to the subsidies that encouraged post ww2 suburbia in the first place

i sort of prefer the corrugated metal condos to the blended-in fakeness but i like "ugly" buildings in general

iatee, i asked you this upthread yesterday, but please define what you mean by externalities

xpostss yeah see the prob with the mpls condos is theyre in an area that looks NOTHING like that. also trust me they are also way way uglier in person.

ok, so lots of these infill condos here in madison but i have to say they're pretty handsome. but underfull and the people who live there are kind of screwed, as i understand it.

wtf so what? I believe we need to structure our world so that people pay for their externalities. that would make living in the suburbs more much expensive and cities relatively cheaper. right now we live in a world where we subsidize and thus prioritize suburban life

Apparently you live in a world that "prioritizes" urban life. Cities are loud, dirty, and frantic (especially if you've ever visited a city that isn't in the US or Europe).

Although I don't believe people get better, I really thought we'd progressed to the point where indefensible dichotomies like cities = grate suburbs = boring, pre-fab no longer existed.

I will say, looking at the tin houses again, I HATE when the garage itself is the front face or front identity of any house, and now that I look at those, I see that they all have parking front and center on the ground floors -- sorry, Sanpaku. Didn't see that at first.

I don't hate the idea of a garage-style door being the main entrance of a building as long as it doesn't ACTUALLY lead to the garage. I don't want my car's storage area to define my living space because I don't want to live on a scale that's customized for cars alone (and not for people).

xp Cities are loud, dirty, and frantic (especially if you've ever visited a city that isn't in the US or Europe).

Either someone didn't read the thread, or we may as well call Granny Dainger back to thread to cite this occasion of anti-urban snobbery. Also, I called this one yesterday.

I don't espouse this view! I'm throwing back his dichotomies.

re:fakery,

not in a suburb but I laughed a little at the railings on these infill recreated townhouses in Bristol, England, protecting passers by from falling into non-existent basement yards

http://tinyurl.com/34cakvk

What do you think should be done, iatee? " structure our world so that people pay for their externalities" is some vague, abstract shit. I don't disagree with you, but imo you're looking at this from the wrong perspective.

While the popular image of modern suburbia is one of endless subdivision, are there more attempts now at walkable suburbs, of attempting to build suburbs that ape functionality of small towns. I'm not really so clear on changes in recent suburbia in regard to this

At least 2 examples of these are described in that book I reference above, Geography of Nowhere. (Been about 10 yrs since I read it). One of them is in *gasp* FLORIDA. This gets back to iatee, cause it seems like you're arguing that people should be coerced into leaving the suburbs for the city, mainly via being priced out. Which uh would make suburbs even more gentrified and upper-middle class than they already are. It's not feasible or even desirable for huge swaths of land to be abandoned. They should be restructured to be more efficient and more human-scaled. Neither of which necessarily means they should morph into a heavily urbanized landscape.

I really thought we'd progressed to the point where indefensible dichotomies like cities = grate suburbs = boring, pre-fab no longer existed.

well I for one am cheered by the hopeful perspective you'd had until this thread brought an unwelcome dose of reality to your table!

I kinda like it's this way: Both my parents were raised in my hometown. My mom was born there, my dad brought there as an infant. Both went to school there, have lived and worked there their entire lives, and made a life for themselves there. If you think they should be forced to live somewhere else because of their "externalities", you can eff right off.

xp cherry blossom: best thing about that google map by a mile is the existence of a bar called "Ye Shakespeare"

jj:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

That's funny, jj, because those pretend condos look like they were transplanted from huge parts of the outer boroughs here. They probably just developed them for another area and didn't bother to tailor the aesthetic?

One of them is in *gasp* FLORIDA.

thats Seaside isn't it?

http://www.theseasideinstitute.org/

is that a suburb though or a separate small town?

Maybe iatee's vision of what the Democratic party should do includes subsidies for the study of urban/suburban "externalities."

GD: They should be restructured to be more efficient and more human-scaled.

How, seriously, would that be done? It seems like in order to bring necessary goods and services to a human-traversible distance from people in spread-out suburban communities (and a lot of small towns, too), you'd have to duplicate the outlets offering those services x 8945678903 to achieve the same coverage per capita. Is that sensible? Obv it's "sort of sensible" up to a point of spread, after which the idea doesn't scale up anymore. What are some major directions for "humanizing" suburban/bedroom town-type residential areas?

have you guys never run into the term externality before?

I have but only sort of recently in reading a book about reducing waste.

This thread needs more JBR.

Apparently you live in a world that "prioritizes" urban life. Cities are loud, dirty, and frantic (especially if you've ever visited a city that isn't in the US or Europe).

Although I don't believe people get better, I really thought we'd progressed to the point where indefensible dichotomies like cities = grate suburbs = boring, pre-fab no longer existed.

right, except I don't dislike suburbs for being boring or pre-fab or for not having enough bars or brown people or whatever. read what I wrote, this is basically 100% about transportation.

iatee, i asked you this upthread yesterday, but please define what you mean by externalities

when someone drives to work, they create large amounts of pollution, depend on a highly subsidized street and road system and they take up a large % of the urban environment w/ a single of metal. these are all (among the) externalities they create. there are environmental, urban and social 'costs' of this lifestyle, and this person isn't actually expected to pay them. in fact, driving might be cheaper than taking public transportation, when the environmental/urban/social 'costs' of public transportation are significantly lower. there is no logical reason for this to case.

no no, i get what externalities are, i just feel like the vagaries about what the "costs" of these imaginary suburbs iatee keeps talking about are make it impossible to do anything other than shrug in response xxpost

what is the best kind of community

living in a van moving around the country solving mysteries. #2 probably minimum security prisons

What are some major directions for "humanizing" suburban/bedroom town-type residential areas?

Not really sure about the more sprawly type of existing suburbs - other than improving bus services possibly

As for newer suburbs what does everyone think about retrofitting of existing satellite towns (I'm kinda thinking about Pittsburgh here - as a city I guess its still losing population but as an urbanized area?)

pollution, congestion, space, government $. what's vague about these costs?

xp

but dude, like rev and i have both said repeatedly, your idea that suburbs are 100% city commuters is not borne out by reality xxxpost

in fact the majority of my city dwelling friends commute out TO the fucking suburbs which is where all the office parks etc are.

please give example of where I said something contrary to that? a large % of suburbans commute to other suburbs.

What are some major directions for "humanizing" suburban/bedroom town-type residential areas?

Adding sidewalks to areas that have none, bike lanes, creating mass transit, increasing density in areas with access to nearby amenities, I'm sure other stuff I'm not thinking of.

or the same suburb even! it doesn't matter. what matters is that they take a car and for a large % of people their only viable option is a car.

i might be wrong here but i am kind of thinking that you live in one of the gargantua cities in the us and are taking that experience and extrapolating it to the rest of the country, which is just not accurate. xpost

DUDE, I just said that URBAN residents I know predominately commute TO the suburbs. are you even reading anything I write?

yes and I wasn't disagreeing with that either?

A lot of people in cities drive cars, too.

yes and I am even more so opposed to those people!

In other words according to your model in my circle of peeps, people in the city should be penalized for the externalities of commuting to the suburbs because they could choose to live there thus cutting their transportation costs.

yes

why not

i mean if you want to fix this obv dealing with ways to increase the cost of car ownership is the answer, not some bizarre suburb sin tax.

In other words according to your model in my circle of peeps, people in the city should be penalized for the externalities of commuting to the suburbs because they could choose to live there thus cutting their transportation costs.

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― Adolf Hipster (jjjusten), Wednesday, June 9, 2010 9:33 AM Bookmark

...but people who do live in suburbs should be penalized for their externalities whether they work near where they live or not.

anyone i've known who lived in the suburbs but worked in the city took the train to work. you'd be insane to drive. (haha as a kid I basically never saw my dad during the week, cause he chose to drive his 25ish mile commute to the city, but couldn't handle rush hours so worked the 3pm-11pm shift. crazy!)

DUDE, I just said that URBAN residents I know predominately commute TO the suburbs.

well, this still falls under the "problem with suburbs" tbh. living in one, working in the other, driving one way or the other doesn't really matter

people who live near where they work create fewer externalities...what is complicated about this idea?

increasing density in areas with access to nearby amenities

This is interesting because...it seems like another way of saying, "Make areas with access to Stuff be more like cities." Which is fine, it's great! but you're basically admitting that the high-pop-den urban model is more desirable on a human scale.

Also, a lot a lot-lot-lot of residential areas have ZERO access to amenities. You'd have to CREATE the amenities where they didn't exist before. Do you...use govt money, tax concessions, whatever, to promote developing these businesses?

^

people who live near where they work create fewer externalities...what is complicated about this idea?

― iatee, Wednesday, June 9, 2010 9:36 AM Bookmark

Nothing at all. You only seem to grasp it though when it applies to city dwellers.

Adding sidewalks to areas that have none, bike lanes, creating mass transit, increasing density in areas with access to nearby amenities, I'm sure other stuff I'm not thinking of.

^yes. Plus, mixed-use areas rather than ginormous tract of houses, then ginormous office park, then ginormous shopping complex.

And jj, although your house and your nabe and your life sound perfectly charming and I pretty much want them all, you are taking the perfection of YOUR suburban-by-some-definition life and using it to defend things just as generalized as any of the champions of cities may be doing on this thread.

Nothing at all. You only seem to grasp it though when it applies to city dwellers.

no, it's just much more likely to be the case with them because they live in an environment suited for it, or near public transit.

ok so at this point i think iatee is arguing that people who commute to their suburban job out of the city are in fact living in a one person suburb that orbits around them.

waht

as much as i apreesh the "hey ppl in suburbs aren't JUST commuting to cities" sentiment the fact that fucktons of people do just this remains.

have there been any studies/proposals/etc. for creating environmentally sustainable models of living in outer-ring suburbs as they are understood in the u.s.? because i would like to read those.

This is interesting because...it seems like another way of saying, "Make areas with access to Stuff be more like cities." Which is fine, it's great! but you're basically admitting that the high-pop-den urban model is more desirable on a human scale.

Did I ever say otherwise?

Also, a lot a lot-lot-lot of residential areas have ZERO access to amenities. You'd have to CREATE the amenities where they didn't exist before. Do you...use govt money, tax concessions, whatever, to promote developing these businesses?

― the soul of the avocado escapes as soon as you open it (Laurel), Wednesday, June 9, 2010 Suggest Ban Permalink
9:37 AM Bookmark

It wouldn't be perfect, but a lot of this could be handled with simple zoning changes. One of the problems with suburban planning is the hard seperation of land use into seperate commercial and residential areas. Allowing some commercial or (preferably) mixed-use development into areas where only residential use exists could incrementally make those spaces more livable.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/48/107880025_1a2b75d75a.jpg

reposting this because i think its an impt piece of data, it's generalizble to say that suburban space is more energy-inefficient and i think that's all iatee has been getting at

Or what Granny said.

xp yeah exactly--is there any model that refutes or mitigates this?

bison, I think you are saying the opposite of what you mean?

and nah laurel, im not generalizing at all about what other suburbs are like, and i wouldnt be caught dead living in some that are around here. i just think that it bears mentioning that the preconceptions about "suburbs" getting tossed around on this thread are a little bizarre. some suburbs suck. so do some cities. some rural areas are awesome. some are not.

Re redding-up the suburbs: Sidewalks and bike lanes are USELESS in parts of the country where the temperature is below freezing for half of the year, there could be several feet of snow on the ground, and everything you might want to buy or do is 5-50 miles from home. I gotta figure this is most of the northern US, from east to west?

Rev: Good, this is what I was thinking/getting at. However, the next hurdle seems like the fact that people who live in the burbs are unlikely to vote for or allow those zoning changes because none of them want to live near business or places/services that will gather groups of (possibly undesirable, possibly noisy, etc) people together. Should the municipality make the changes over their heads? Go on a campaign to show people the benefits and hope they're open to changing their minds?

xxpost for clarity i shouldve have said less energy efficient than more inefficient?

oh never mind, I misread your post

think of something like the mortgage income tax deduction or 1st time home buyer credit -- there's a lot of research indicating that it doesn't really encourage more home ownership; it encourages people who already would have bought a house to buy a bigger one, and therefore encourages builders to build bigger houses.

it's a government expenditure that super-sizes houses, along with (maybe even instead of) its intended effect: easing home-ownership and allowing more people to enter the middle class.

it doesn't seem like much, but you multiply it over a whole nation and it adds up: larger houses, more heating and cooling, more upkeep roads between them, more driving between them. it's a classic case of the government paying for the "wrong" thing

i don't get a break from the gov't on my rent, so what gives? (i might from the state i live in, but my income is too high)

It's a very old debate.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51lVkm%2B0uPL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

Alas, the problem was tackled much earlier:

http://www.allingtonbooks.com/allington/images/items/000028.jpg

the fact that people who live in the burbs are unlikely to vote for or allow those zoning changes because none of them want to live near business or places/services that will gather groups of (possibly undesirable, possibly noisy, etc) people together.

why exactly is this an assumption? this seems like strawmanning of the highest degree

and nah laurel, im not generalizing at all about what other suburbs are like, and i wouldnt be caught dead living in some that are around here. i just think that it bears mentioning that the preconceptions about "suburbs" getting tossed around on this thread are a little bizarre. some suburbs suck. so do some cities. some rural areas are awesome. some are not.

I mean I think you guys are just failing to see how I'm using the word suburb, (in the suburban vs. urban sense, and not in any sense related to the size, political border or location of a city) - your examples of 'suburbs that are actually nice!' are actually just suburbs that are not very suburban by this definition, and well...are almost by definition the opposite of the things I dislike about 'suburbs'.

Re redding-up the suburbs: Sidewalks and bike lanes are USELESS in parts of the country where the temperature is below freezing for half of the year, there could be several feet of snow on the ground, and everything you might want to buy or do is 5-50 miles from home. I gotta figure this is most of the northern US, from east to west?

Uh, not exactly. It snows about 2 days a year in the PNW. I hadn't taken the less temparate climates of other parts of the country into account tho.

"The fact that" usually signals the unfurling of an opinion.

brian setzer has a condo by where i work in mpls. i bet that shit cost a fortune

I admit I only read like one-third of A Pattern Language before I gave it to my little brother for Christmas while he was in arch school. So I don't know shit about shit, obviously.