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

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.