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

To put a face on the entire "live in city, commute to suburbs" thing that's getting discussed (although my home is probably "suburban" by these standards), here's a rough map of my route to work. I live a little ways too far to comfortably bike in the AM, and it definitely wouldn't be practical in the winter. So, feel free to criticize my lifestyle if you like!

yeah I mean you are in the situation you are in and you have a job and a life and not a ton of room to budge. most people are in that situation.

I'm really only criticizing:

(mainly!) - a. the basic political/economic incentive structure itself - which subsidizes suburban life (in ways that we take for granted) and drains money from urban areas.

b. the alfred-types "my parents worked damn hard for their money and deserve a sprawly house and an SUV" - people who believe that this lifestyle is something they deserveeee instead of something that is a luxury and should be priced as one.

Working damn hard = you deserve some luxuries and the suburbs afaik ARE priced as one.

xxp I don't think you get it. It's not the whole Eastside that's neglected, just the far eastern parts past the 205. ("Eastside" = anything east of the river; "East Portland" = past the 205, 5 miles east of the river.) The parts between the river and the 205 (the majority of Portland, really) are fine.

Anyway, the pedestrian bridge thing was just an idea floated around a couple years back that went nowhere. And I'm not sure what you're talking about with this "hub". All the transit is pretty interconnected to begin with. What they are planning on doing is building a transit-only bridge between the Rock Island and Marquam bridges that would carry the next MAX line to Milwaukee, the Eastside streetcar they are currently laying tracks for, and buses. But that won't be for some years.

something they deserveeee instead of something that is a luxury

these are not mutually exclusive

xx-post

No, they're not. A lot of people move to suburbs because they're cheaper overall, at least in many city areas. Land is cheaper, taxes are generally cheaper since they're not paying for as much infrastructure, and you're more likely to have big box discount stores. You don't get $2 slices of pizza or anything, though.

This doesn't count for "prestige" suburbs but those really are the McMansion/Cadillac Escalade/wine stores in strip malls places that we're using as our straw man here.

Working damn hard = you deserve some luxuries and the suburbs afaik ARE priced as one.

― kkvgz, Wednesday, June 9, 2010 12:48 PM Bookmark

In Seattle, it's waaaay cheaper to live in the non-ritzier suburbs than in the city itself. I couldn't afford to live in Seattle, which is why I moved to a cheaper city.

'the city itself' is expensive because there is a paucity of nice urban neighborhoods in the country and many people actually do want to live in them! that problem is not solved by building new suburbs.

b. the alfred-types "my parents worked damn hard for their money and deserve a sprawly house and an SUV" - people who believe that this lifestyle is something they deserveeee instead of something that is a luxury and should be priced as one.

What you deserve is a fistful of stfu.

Apparently you got through college creating dumb binaries and seeing things that aren't there.

iatee, what exactly are you interested in doing about that other than chiding people?

get politically active on this issue? which is something I do, esp on the local level?

lol, ILX = the local level

I know, I know, never mind me.

wtf are you doing here then -- you've got letters to write, envelopes to lick, and suburban moms to send to pogroms.

I personally think iatee is speaking the truth as proven by science and as taught in schools of urban planning and land-use theory and w/e. But his language deffo isn't pitched for community outreach, and there are a lot of people choosing to be correspondingly butthurt instead of distinguishing between theory and practice.

jeez, a guy shows up saying the suburbs were built at great expense by state power...

Hard numbers time again: my friends live in a house in a suburban development in what I earlier called the "family" suburb, whereas I live in an older part of the city that's eligible for some neighborhood improvement funds (houses generally need work).

Assessed property values:
Family suburb:
$34600 for 0.246 acres
~ $140,650 per acre

Older city:
$23800 for 0.143 aces
~ $166,433 per acre

So, to go back to random discussion: Is light rail the trolley system of the future?

this thread = butthurt city

might i interest you in a nice 3 bed 2 bath out in butthurt forrest? the schools are some of the best in the state.

And cracks aside, I agree with Laurel and iatee generally (I've read my Veblen), but I don't have patience for unproven assumptions. People are reactionary, racist, and vain wherever they grow up; subdivisions don't make them so, no matter what Neil Peart might think.

I don't really understand light rail. We have some of it here in parts of NJ that outlie the NY transpo systems, but being put next to the MTA or the PATH makes the light rail look slow and dinky. I'm not familiar with the residential areas that it serves right now, but they've planning to expand it substantially since before they started building the first sections, so maybe someday it will go somewhere useful.

light rail is about the only solution for cities that never got around to making their public transportation infrastructure work (or dumped their streetcars lol us)

light rail can be okay when done successfully, but it's also a great way to waste lots of $.

tbh, we probably had the genius light rail idea after someone looked at mpls, much like our "skywalks" have a surprising similarity to their "skyways."

xxp I don't think you get it. It's not the whole Eastside that's neglected, just the far eastern parts past the 205. ("Eastside" = anything east of the river; "East Portland" = past the 205, 5 miles east of the river.) The parts between the river and the 205 (the majority of Portland, really) are fine.

Anyway, the pedestrian bridge thing was just an idea floated around a couple years back that went nowhere. And I'm not sure what you're talking about with this "hub". All the transit is pretty interconnected to begin with. What they are planning on doing is building a transit-only bridge between the Rock Island and Marquam bridges that would carry the next MAX line to Milwaukee, the Eastside streetcar they are currently laying tracks for, and buses. But that won't be for some years.

Damn, do you work for the city or something? You know a hell of a lot more of about this than I do apparently. Anyway, I just got the info second hand for an annual report I designed for the tram people, but come to think of it that was about 2 years ago now. Last I heard they were going to expand the OHSU campus around the south waterfront and make it more accessible to the rest of the city, but maybe that's no longer true.

Also, there are no buses that connect directly to the tram and that is a problem for a lot of people who commute up the hill.

billion x-posts

(I sound like I hate light rail - I don't, but it's only worth it if the money can't be more efficiently spent on buses)

All I know is that light rail is EVIL EVIL EVIL bcuz the guy who owns Midway Books says so.

Oh, the skytram! I thought you meant the streetcar (which British people call a "tram". Now I have to completely go back and reread your posts cause I completely misread you.

The skyPRAM. You know, for babies.

http://rgr-static1.tangentlabs.co.uk/images/bau/97819333/9781933368559/0/0/plain/bomb-the-suburbs-graffiti-race-freight-hopping-and-the-search-for-hip-hops-moral-center.jpg

i think the big thing about this thread is that the truth is that people choose to live where they do for inherently selfish reasons, this should not be a shock for anyone. some peeps flee to the suburbs for racist or city fear or whatever motiviations, some do it for safety or school reasons (still selfish), i did it because it gave me what i wanted and was actually and ecologically better choice (and btw eco-concerns are also selfish). when i lived in the city, i did it for totally selfish reasons too (proximity to shit going on, etc.)

the thing thats getting to people about iatee's argument i think is that it seems to be built on the idea that city-dwellers are making an altruistic/moral/selfless choice, which is disingenuous.

xxpost hahaha Jon otm!

I live in NE, and never go to SW, so I just tend to forget the Skytram exists.

There's so much stigma against buses in a lot of places. Is light rail an attempt to rehabilitate people's perceptions of PT as clean and modern without fixing the real problem(s)?

And I guess you don't want to just add buses if your streets are already overloaded, poorly planned, and not working in whatever sense...although in that case shouldn't you be spending the money on fixing your roads instead?

we have one light rail line and i like it way better than bus. i just wish we had like 6 more of them.

People are reactionary, racist, and vain wherever they grow up; subdivisions don't make them so, no matter what Neil Peart might think.

I dunno if you reread what I've actually posted here, I've said basically nothing about race or culture w/r/t the suburbs. not that those things don't play a(n important!) role in the history of the suburbs, but I really have only been talking about the economic/political incentive structures + the environmental impacts - those are the things that matter to me on a personal level. I am a product of a suburb, so I don't think that suburbs make you evil.

The light rail here is a godsend, fyi.

what city are you in harbl?

baltimore

there's a lot of small bore stuff u can do to make bus experience better, like gps locators on buses keyed to subway-style "arrival in" displays at stops. make it more train-like and predictable and ridership increases (maybe)

I never ride the bus here, except for maybe like once a month. Strictly bike and MAX for me.

bus problems (breakdowns, lateness) take on a whole new meaning when you live in the frozen death hole that i call home xxposts

Ok Darin, now that I'm actually reading you correctly, they extended the streetcar down to the South Waterfront, including the Skytram station. No idea what the bus situation there is cause I never go that way.

light rail 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buses

the thing thats getting to people about iatee's argument i think is that it seems to be built on the idea that city-dwellers are making an altruistic/moral/selfless choice, which is disingenuous.

okay I should have avoided bringing this down to a personal level - I believe that the idea of the suburbs is selfish on a macroscopic human-sized level. I don't think many people think about these things when they decide where to live - 'selfish' was a poor (/troll-y) word choice. suburbs are 'inefficient to the point that they are not something that can exist on a global level, thus not something that we can act like we are 'owed' as a human on this planet'

buses suck because they are underfunded, they don't inherently suck. they can be fast and cheap and efficient.

iatee, what about rural dwellers? I'm pretty sure they use more energy than urban-dwellers, too. Should they all move to the city, too?

Is light rail an attempt to rehabilitate people's perceptions of PT as clean and modern without fixing the real problem(s)?

Laurel is pretty much otm, I think that the main reason people were so interested in light rail is that buses are mediocre, seldom available, and have a bad rap around here. They're wisely relocating our transit mall (a block downtown where all of the bus lines converge) to a new station near the revitalized nightlife area, so I'm hoping that means that we'll have a lot more bus traffic in a decade. And, you know, a bus or two that runs after 7PM in a place I want to go.

Light rail is awesome but it doesn't exactly go anywhere useful unless you build long tracks throughout the already congested city.

The light rail here goes all the way from one end of the metropolitan area to the other. It pretty much takes me 90% of anywhere I need to go.

there's a lot of small bore stuff u can do to make bus experience better, like gps locators on buses keyed to subway-style "arrival in" displays at stops. make it more train-like and predictable and ridership increases (maybe)

― goole, Wednesday, June 9, 2010 1:20 PM

these are great

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mildlydiverting/2449462/

iatee, what about rural dwellers? I'm pretty sure they use more energy than urban-dwellers, too. Should they all move to the city, too?

that, or we could continue spending billions of dollars building them their own bridges, roads and spending most of our homeland security money there.

which is, well, what we're gonna do, so,

dude that is completely insane