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

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.