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

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)