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

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.

as it pertains to externalities, if you've got newly developed residential communities that explodes to such an extent that the freeway that feeds it can no longer manage the flow of traffic, the denizens of that suburb do not internalize the full cost of constructing expansion of that freeway.

xpost to add to goole's pts

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?

that totally fucking false! minneapolis has lots of bike lanes and its a big reason why there's great numbers of bikers here.

i've been biking to work about 3 times a week and bike lanes make that possible.

This whole discussion reminds me of a running (friendly) argument we've been having with friends. A couple years ago my wife and I turned into (apparently, according to this thread) worthless, boring fucks when we had the chance to buy a house in the suburbs. Now, this is where our argument comes in. Our house is literally four blocks from the Chicago city line and we live in a suburb that is pretty much at times an extension of the city - shared public transportation, all of that. So friends of ours started calling us "fucking suburbanites" all the time, but we found that kind of hilarious since they live in the city - but only a total of twelve blocks south of us, in a neighborhood that really isn't much different from ours (same tightly packed houses, garages on alleys, etc.). Its just kind of funny to see how hard and fast people draw these lines.

Do you...use govt money, tax concessions, whatever, to promote developing these businesses?

Start w/zoning. Suburbs were very often founded w/restrictions on commercial lots and minimum size to insure single family middle-class homes.

Hey, back off, all of you alligators. You only have to read through yesterday's discussion itt to see plenty of evidence of people not wanting the outside world to intrude on their residential idyll and the American dream of perfect privacy, perfect quiet, perfect kingship of your own domain. And also plenty of people commenting that the dislikeable things about cities are their noise and congestion -- and at the same time, there's general agreement that one way to fix up and possibly save suburbia is to increase population density AND the number of places for people to gather for activities and/or services...which is going to lead to exactly what made people with a certain mindset MOVE to the suburbs in the first place.

I might not have pretty graphs or studies to quote to back it up, but I hardly manufactured it out of whole straw.

your friends sound kinda dickish tbh

xpost

much of political nyc and la are absolutely 'suburban' - so yeah, city borders lines are generally meaningless from this POV

xp

sorry for using the correct definition of "suburb" and not your personal, negative-connatation-already-included definition

yeah the govt home owner subsidies are some bullshit

that totally fucking false! minneapolis has lots of bike lanes and its a big reason why there's great numbers of bikers here.

Oh yeah, I forgot you fuckers got voted #1 biking city ahead of use when we have way more bicyclists than you. Grrrr! Anger!

ahead of us*

sorry for using the correct definition of "suburb" and not your personal, negative-connatation-already-included definition

there is no 'correct definition of suburb' ffs

your friends sound kinda dickish tbh

Nah, I know them well enough to know they don't mean harm by it, but they are totally the types that will never move out of the city and don't understand how anybody could do so. They aren't being dicks, but there is a lot of truth when the say it.

yeah the govt home owner subsidies are some bullshit

― hope this helps (Granny Dainger), Wednesday, June 9, 2010 9:54 AM Bookmark

No disagreement.

Laurel, I'd like to think there's a happy medium between super hi density urban living and bloated inefficient unsustainable suburban sprawl. ie you can shift current suburbs TOWARDS the hi density urban model and obtain much of its benefits while still retaining much of the attractions of suburban living.

well "suburb" as a legally distinct entity separated from "the city" is a different thing from low-density single-owner freeway-dependent developments. but when you way "suburb" everybody is talking about the latter.

i mean, one radical solution i'd propose is erasing all urban-suburban legal boundaries and have each metro area as one constituency under one administration. bingo, problem solved.

jvc but i don't understand--if you live blocks apart and the neighborhoods are similar the fact that they're within chicago city limits is that valuable to them?

Granny otm.

my sister lives in the suburbs and i live in an urban neighborhood in minneapolis..her's is very new development big homes, cul de sacs, etc

but honestly....they seem to be way more engaged in their neighborhood than we are...it's just very safe and everyone has elementary aged kids and everyone's kids hangs out at everyone else's house and they have little pool gatherings in the summertime....

i lived in the same house for 9 years and BARELY knew my neighbors

that totally fucking false! minneapolis has lots of bike lanes and its a big reason why there's great numbers of bikers here.

Oh yeah, I forgot you fuckers got voted #1 biking city ahead of use when we have way more bicyclists than you. Grrrr! Anger!

― fuck being hard, suburbs are complicated (The Reverend), Wednesday, June 9, 2010 4:55 PM (14 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

We started this gangsta shit? And this the motherfuckin' thanks we get?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a3/Tallbike.jpg/450px-Tallbike.jpg

http://images.tribe.net/tribe/upload/photo/a27/d7f/a27d7ff7-6227-44b7-ab09-1923fafa3f82

there is no 'correct definition of suburb' ffs

totally don't know what you mean by "is"????????? cause for me "is" means "bathwater".

i mean i guess technically i moved to a suburb of boston last week but it's the damn city afaic

i mean, one radical solution i'd propose is erasing all urban-suburban legal boundaries and have each metro area as one constituency under one administration. bingo, problem solved.

or elect iatee to a zoning commission in North Korea.

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

What if they work in a POLLUTION FACTORY, smarty-pants?

BTW I live in a city where it's below freezing mostly from December to April and I would KILL for more bike lanes and sidewalks.

Granny OTM, I mean, here's a view of my neighborhood in the suburbs.

i mean, one radical solution i'd propose is erasing all urban-suburban legal boundaries and have each metro area as one constituency under one administration. bingo, problem solved.

― goole, Wednesday, June 9, 2010 12:59 PM (1 minute ago)

i am for this, also abolish states thx

I mean, by implication, if it's below freezing for half the year, that still makes bike lanes and sidewalks usable for the other half of the year. And even then, they're still useful for walking to bus routes, etc. Plus, I saw plenty of hardcore cyclists biking to work all winter long in Cleveland. I haven't worked up to that, but I hope to.

Many American cities are single-family dwelling sprawls. I've lived in lots of 'suburbs' but ones like Mill Valley or Sausalito are distinctly different from even the western part of the city of San Francisco.

erasing all urban-suburban legal boundaries and have each metro area as one constituency under one administration.

Megalopolis, here we come!

they seem to be way more engaged in their neighborhood than we are...it's just very safe and everyone has elementary aged kids and everyone's kids hangs out at everyone else's house and they have little pool gatherings in the summertime....

Do you think it would be accurate to say that some of the ease of their suburban community comes from the fact that many/most of the residents are very similar to the others with their priorities and where they are in life? This strikes me as the comforts of similarity, that we feel better w people most like us. It might make it easier to know and/or feel good about knowing your neighbors, but it's not a very...robust community.

It's like a mono-culture.

uh oh

All the "best" suburbs of Chicago owe their existence to being on train lines. Most of the worst owe it to being near interstate exits. That being said, an attitude of "cars are evil and so are car owners" is so reductive and unproductive I don't even know where to start.

jesus

Having been born in the San Fernando Valley and having had grandparents and then my mom live in Sacto, I can tell you that, for me, suburbia is hell.

I see what you are getting at Laurel, but some of these communities can be surprisingly diverse! I mean, our block alone is home to two gay couples and a really wide range of backgrounds. But, also, a notably liberal and lolcollege town.

That being said, an attitude of "cars are evil and so are car owners" is so reductive and unproductive I don't even know where to start.

find somewhere to start!

eh that "community involvement" thing is just about having kids in school imo

I'm just saying, suburbs can be diverse and don't always have to be 100% white, middle-class.