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

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