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

London alternative: move to Brighton instead. The glut of demi-trendy breeder-tendency kidult bourgie bohos MUST BE SEEN TO BE BELIEVED.

Eh? This is hard to get. But I *think* you're saying: people shouldn't move to the inner city, then leave again. Why the hell not? Who are you to tell them what do to with their lives, for goodness' sake?

Good points:
safe and suitable for walking, biking, and going on vacation without locking the doors
trees and grass
proximity to stores and other people

Bad points:
Not enough wilderness to be really gorgeous
lack of cultural events (school concerts are about it)

And worst of all, NO PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION. There is a lovely fun job I was offered today and I can't take it. Why not? Because the rest of my family has places to go and we do not have multiple cars or a goddamn BUS to get me there. I am really, really upset about this. The only place I can work anytime soon is the grocery store.

I grew up in a suburb (bordering city) which was multicultural and filled to the brim with Jewish intellectuals and faculty brats. You only went private if from out of town and/or you suffered from behavioural problems. 20/20 hindsight tells me it was great, but this was the exception.

Still, I moved to NYC and then to London at first available chance.

I HAVE WONDERED WHAT A CITY BABY WOULD BE LIKE?!?!?! City babies I met in college seemed well - adjusted though a bit boozy and promiscuous.

What all this says is that a lot of people in South Essex and North Kent - Richard Littlejohn country, the cliches are rooted in truth I'm afraid - are consciously reacting to the multiculturalism of the city from which they garner their wealth, and react by creating a kind of aggressive white English state, a recreation of an imagined monocultural outer London. And of course it's infinitely nastier and pettier than those London suburbs ever were. London actually felt no closer from there than it feels from South Dorset, which is a curious state of affairs.

However I know other suburbs are nicer and more civilised places: the parts of south-west London straddling the Thames (from blue to yellow in one glorious thrust in '97) seem lovely to me. Colindale is OK. Does Brighton count as a suburb of the "extended city of London" (cf Hywel Williams in the Guardian late last year). If so, it's GRATE.

I think that, broadly speaking, Robin's right - at least in terms of voting habits etc of suburbs east of London and those of the suburbs south-west of London.

I think (hope) that most of the NF activity was just a couple of nuts rather than typical of the people where I live. The stickering was quite frenzied (about 50 suddenly appeared over night covering Worcester Park station. I actually know for a fact that there is/was at least one active NF member who lived near me (I remember seeing a picture of him at an NF rally in Searchlight and thinking "Blimey - he went to the same school as me"). The NF opened an office in Epsom but despite me living quite near Epsom, I have NO IDEA what it's like (why would anyone get a train in THAT direction?).

Other scary far-right things that happened in my lovely south-west London suburb:

Crazed nut phoned police after Brick Lane nailbomb claiming responsibility (Edward Davey MP said the phone box should be "disinfected").

Asian guy attacked by ten drunken yobs a few weeks ago in violent racial assault.

On a more positive note, New Malden has something like the highest concentration of Koreans outside Korea in the world. I'm not sure why they love New Malden so much - it's not that good.

since moving to a semi-urban area (St Louis), i enjoy it a lot less. i'm hoping to move to NYC in about 2 or 3 years, and hopefully i'll enjoy that more. i think the main problem w/ St Louis is the lack of ANY type of worthwhile "scene", but that seems to be a whole new thread topic. i simply moved to the part of the city i liked best, and i'm a lot happier now.

while suburbans can be snobs, driving around in giant Sport Utility Vehicles and partaking in Lawn Wars, fighting over who has the bigger status symbol, most teenagers who complain about suburban life tend to be boring individuals inthe first place, no matter what setting you place them in. it's all about making the best of what you're given.

The areas I had in mind are, I guess, further from central London than the area where you live.

I have however always been struck by how much nastier and more aggressive Toryism is when it's actually facing multiculturalism in the face than when it's at a relative distance. So only very recently have West Country Tory MPs become quite as nasty as the south-east mob (Oliver Letwin and Adrian Flook are obviously far more right-wing and far easier to hate instantly than Sir James Spicer and Edward Du Cann were).

However all the points you make are true, and I only had a minority (albeit a particularly aggressive and vicious one) in mind. I just found it curious that the biggest Tory revival in terms of Westminster seats was in East London / Essex (rather than in the outer shires as had been generally expected) and was throwing a few thoughts, perhaps overt generalisations, around.

Of course, when I'm thinking of "suburbs" I'm thinking of places where all the houses look exactly the same -- Levittown-style stuff, where people give the streets fancy names to hide the fact that they live in an utter and total corporate contrivance. But not all towns near to cities are like that, of course, and it is not for those that my withering stare is intended...

My mom, as always, is an excellent example. Before she got married, she was a woman so steeped in Italo-American Catholicism that she sincerely thought she'd get struck by lightning if she committed one measly sin. Moving twenty miles away from her parents, her family and neighborhood allowed her some breathing space to silently question the dogma she grew up with. Ten years later, she stopped going to church, took birth control pills and started to think about divorce. I bet something analogous is probably occurring right now to all the new Indian and Asian immigrants (and their families) who now call Long Island home.

I have no problem with non-urban living, but the slavish attentions suburbanites have paid to the dubious convenience of the automobile have made humane suburban living well-nigh impossible. None of the Long Island towns that essentially did not exist before William Levitt are as anywhere near as lovely or even useful as the ones whose layout show little influence of the automobile, such as Babylon, Islip, Port Jefferson, Sayville, Montauk, Garden City or the Hamptons.

I want to believe.

Where I live is in the official city limits. I need only walk a couple of blocks in one direction before I hit a major, well-traveled thoroughfare, and a few blocks in another direction before I hit a highway. Therefore, one could consider my neighborhood an "urban" one. Yet, all of the residences on my street have large front and back yards, are houses, are pet-friendly, and are largely quiet and separate entities from one another. Plus, we've spotted deer and peacocks around the area and have even had a deer come into our back yard. Therefore, one could also classify my neighborhood a "suburban" one. To complicate matters further, the actual suburbs that border San Antonio were largely rural towns in the not-too-distant past and do still sometimes have that countrified feel to them.

Maybe it's because I live in an area with a lot of growing pains and a heck of a lot of space to move around in (the city as of 2000 had an area of 333 square miles and it just keeps on growing outward). Approximately 50 years ago, the neighborhood I live in now was largely rural itself. But then the hospitals came, and the home builders decided to construct neighborhoods, and demand for housing in the area skyrocketed, and things just snowballed from there.

Hm. How fascinating do you guys find me? Maybe not at all, maybe somewhat, maybe very -- I have no clue. I would like to think I'm an interesting person who is worth getting to know, and I am a product of an environment that is a mixture of "urban" and "suburban", not to mention one that is purely driver-friendly (which is the case for the whole of the city, really). I drive a (small) SUV (a Chevy Blazer, a model of vehicle which existed L-O-N-G before the term "SUV" came into being), was educated on how to drive starting at 17, got my driver's license at 19, have never lived in an apartment before in her life, like gardening, love dogs, and sometimes harbor fantasies of living in London (where some of my fondest life memories took place).

Just stuff to think about, 'tis all.

Case in point:
http://www.west-point.org/users/usma1981/38405/graphics/Highlands_Ranch1.jpg
By the way that's not my house.

I haven't been there in just over ten years.

This is outside of saint louis. The 'Laumier Park' mentioned is a sculpture park.

I live on an old city street, but we have old, grand bungalos built in the 20s. And some stupid asshole "custom builder" just put up a travesty in an empty lot a few houses down from us. It's a big fucking garage, with 5 bedrooms and a greatroom. Stupid fucks. It doesn't match the neighborhood at all...

Legacy Village- east side

http://www.legacy-village.com/images/gallery/1.jpg

Lol

i'm standing with donna on this one

Donna is the clear hero of this story and also wkiw

The line about the warranty on the paint was a master stroke

Dick Hopkins is a fragile flower whose delicate constitution cannot contend with the trauma induced by bright colours two doors down.

FWIW i was just talking to the tree service guy, a longtime local, and he was saying the thinking in the area on lawns has "dramatically shifted" in the last two decades, and that many more people are just letting their lawns be semi-wild, planting lawn alternatives, etc. He said many people now just want "something green" and don't care about having "a golf course" in front of their house.

My father-in-law has had his lawn professionally re-done for what I'm pretty sure is the 4th time in the 20 years he's lived there. His lawn looked great to all the rest of us, but he was upset that weeds and moss were showing up in places and the grass was (apparently, to him) not growing in others. His yard is a mostly shaded area in sandy soil, so of course you're gonna have problems growing grass on it! The lawn basically exists to get mowed. Maybe 3-4 times a year, pre-pandemic, the grandkids would run around on it at parties, but kids don't count blades of grass. No one else in the family understands, but the mentality is so ingrained in him so we just congratulate him on the new lawn. Hopefully this time it will achieve his expectations.

Ours is mostly whatever is growing wild around here - dandelions, onion grass, clover, mugwort, etc.

I honestly like seeing all the dandelions and onion grass and stuff in my neighborhood, I think it's much prettier than just straight grass, esp since the landscape is already kind of rustic and rocky and hilly.

After that recent horrible freeze in Texas, the first thing my GF's dad did was start working on his San Antonio yard because the cold had killed everything. 81 years old, still recovering from Covid (which his wife also had)and frozen pipes, and he's out there yanking plants out because what would the neighbors think?

I would assume the neighbors' yards had also died but that's the mentality in the 'burbs.

lol yeah i mow something out there every two weeks in the summer but i'm sure a lot of it isn't really grass.

Yeah, it's a good vibe! Lot of pretty flowers out there right now.

xps

I remember my parents telling me that neighbors complained to them about our lawn maintenance, and that once a neighbor actually cut our grass without asking

One of the nice things also about not spraying a lot of chemical fertilizer and pesticide and weed killer is that you get tons of birdlife in the yard. I realized when I moved where I live that the reason a lot of suburbs I've been to feel sort of fake and sterile is that lawn maintenance and landscaping practices basically destroy the possibility of any kind of habitat.

A traditional lawn is fucking dumb, and it's insane that a more natural yard could get you fined in some communities.
Most front lawns by me here in AZ are gravel + landscaped plants/trees. But a few ppl have green grass lawns and they stick out like a sore thumb. Just that much more apparent how fake and unnatural they are when you see them in a desert environment.
My backyard seamlessly merges with the undeveloped "state trust" land behind me and I think it looks great. My gf who still spends good deal of time living in Illinois thinks I need to "get rid of all the weeds". Just indicative of a fucked up relationship with nature that most people have internalized.

We bought our last house directly from some acquaintances and they gave us a tour of the place which included thirty minutes of the dude explaining his lawn care routine and watering schedule (in a very arid climate) and my wife and I didn’t have the heart to tell him his life’s work would be brown and full of weeds and dog piss within three months.

A guy down the street has a magnificent golf course lawn that he spends hours maintaining and my neighbor and I just kind of laugh at him as we do the legal minimum required to not get ticketed by the city. A lot of the lawns nearby have permanent dead rings that surround the students outdoor drinking game tables anyway so nobody gives a shit.

yeah fuck a lawn, grow a damn habitat

Grass is stupid. I've been gradually replacing it with clover, ground ivy, and purple deadnettle.

I grew up in the woods. We had an acre of pine trees and pine needles between us and the road. Going through all that trouble so it can look like Soldier Field is ridiculous.

THAT SAID, God, I hate privet with a passion.

FWIW my favorite development since our move is that H has gotten massively into gardening, and even more recently into native plants. Going forward we are planting only native and especially plants that are good for pollenators, butterflies and birds. And we have begun plotting out our gradual lawn replacement plan and have already added clover and wildflowers in some areas.

Just started composting as well.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=nature%27s+best+hope&gclid=CjwKCAjwi9-HBhACEiwAPzUhHELZtaWTJlj0_-7Nitv5EV9KiXUlr8mwnOVQgJPD8oSQKDDDISkLABoCj9IQAvD_BwE&hvadid=409958545374&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=9004253&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=17557947266658875369&hvtargid=kwd-780715891398&hydadcr=13631_11415873&tag=googhydr-20&ref=pd_sl_4o3wjs332b_e
Have not read yet, wife is reading. Author also runs this:
https://homegrownnationalpark.org/

Did you just post the book itself?

I really want to replace our lawn with native plants as well, kind of intimidated to start on my own since a) I know next to nothing about how to make sure it looks nice too and, b) I have literally the opposite of a green thumb. I've always wanted to get more into gardening, but I can't keep any plants alive.

part of the idea of planting native plants is they are more likely to just stay alive without constant intervention

Haha, I know, but this is how little faith I have in my skills. I understand they generally need a little help at the start though.

In Seattle there's a program that will pay for you to install a rain garden on your property and will help you with the installation; might be worth seeing if there's anything like that near you.

My wife is just kind of diving in and trying a lot of different plantings. I'm doing my best to help. There's a company called American Meadows she sometimes uses that will send you plants that go together, and in some cases they have seed packs of stuff that grows really easily and is hard to fuck up (like wildflower mixtures).

The book I tried to post above is called Nature's Best Hope, not sure what happened with the link.

We're only just getting started with replacing some of the front lawn, moreso have been planting in rocky areas in our backyard. H is way more the one doing it than me, I just kind of supply labor when I can, but I would say one way to avoid the intimidation factor is just to pick a small patch to start with, maybe something out of the way so it doesn't fuck with the "curb appeal" if you fail.

There may be a Native Plant Society facebook group in your area. They are usually good about offering advice to beginners.

Actually doesn't have to be local, statewide is fine. I'm in the California group and they give advice for every locale in the state.

Native plants are just taking off and it's amazing. We have a whole strip of steeply sloped land in between the patio and the terrace above our retaining wall that H just went nuts planting native wildflowers and other native stuff from seed, and it went from being this kind of scrubby, rocky, vaguely green blah to exploding with flowers and stems and colors, it's awesome.