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

i think one positive development lately is the move toward decriminalizing medicine like pot and psychedelics.

london is the only city i've ever lived in (v briefly) and i fucking hated it, the rest of my life has been spent in a village. p sure i couldn't stand to ever live in a city again tbh.

i do drive to work tho, when not furloughed, but on the other hand haven't taken a flight in 20+ years.

"Fewer car trips, more lsd trips. Make America high again!"

- map

Fuck. Just realized "Bake America great again" would have been more elegant.

i wish village smallness was as intrinsic to the us as it is the uk, it would make life so much more livable across most of the country. but then we stole all the land and invented it after cars and late capitalism and it's all radiohead album art. there's a weird reflexivity that comes along with trying to shift land use and experience 'back' to something before cars. like humans have always been on this path of least resistance we're essentially as dumb as a population of deer and so it feels weird to design ourselves out of this inexorable capitalist logic. which is why capitalism needs to be fucked with. it needs predator control from the inside. if it sounds like i'm high it's because i am.

one positive thing about single story buildings, is that they are easier to make ADA accessible -- thinking about the aging baby boomer generation, there will probably be a significant increase in the number of people who require ADA accommodations (i.e. have wheelchairs and walkers) in the next decade in this country.

Can someone please distinguish village from suburb, in a non-arbitrary way? Plenty of villages sound a bit like "suburbs, but the good-not-bad kind."

London, for example, has swallowed innumerable villages into its metropolitan area; have these become suburbs now? Or are they still villages?

If we are only defining "suburb" as "you know, the BAD kind," that seems rife with subjectivity, loopholes, and self-serving postures.

Ppl itt still using "suburb" to mean always and only Levittown (or whatever) are not helping clarify the matter.

i think there are a lot of variations and gradations of how land is divided up and sold, also along a historical timeline, so i think it's complicated, hard to categorize, highly specific to the area. that being said i think the forces at play are easier to generalize about and make moral arguments for/against.

also there's a lot of class insecurity on display when people start talking about suburbia

Well, yeah.

one positive thing about single story buildings, is that they are easier to make ADA accessible -- thinking about the aging baby boomer generation, there will probably be a significant increase in the number of people who require ADA accommodations (i.e. have wheelchairs and walkers) in the next decade in this country.

― sarahell, Saturday, May 30, 2020 7:02 PM (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah i've noticed that the trailer park i live in caters to people who are dealing with chronic pain and older people with mobility issues. and smokers lol.

like another thing that the idealistic proposals in this thread seem not to take into account is that it is more environmentally friendly to work with/adapt existing structures than to tear them down and build new buildings. I don't want to get into the issue of expense, because undoubtedly silby or someone like them will argue that the government should front the bill for all of this and money is no object, which is like, sure that would be nice, I would also like free ice cream and great sex every day of my life.

honey money can't buy you great sex

actually it probably can lol

i'm just saying the world isn't perfect and isn't gonna be

like the increase in remote work being allowed could help with the environmental downside to suburbs, and as that is one of the biggest problems suburban development has, maybe suburbs aren't that awful?

yeah but i think there are more cracks in the facade of money actually relating to "honest labor" than ever before, except maybe the silver movement in the 1890s or something, and that more people are starting to realize that 'free money' can actually be engineered somewhat or at least tweaked so it supports a different vision than the hellscape we have now.

xp i really hope remote work becomes a much more regular practice that would be a huge boon to air quality which is such an important issue.

re: air quality -- omg yes. it has been really nice these past couple months such that last night when the wind changed and the smell of the cops' grenades and gas wafted my way, I could actually smell it.

as major american cities increasingly become divided into areas blighted by poverty and areas that serve as consumer playgrounds for the rich, there is a version of suburban living that is far better at meeting people's daily needs at a reasonable expense.

ok yeah i had typed out then deleted something in that vein because i knew it sounded like i was rationalizing future poor choices, and i am, but there are serious material issues wrt urban living in the u.s. so no it's not "doing something bad" to live in the suburbs. the badness was done for us a long time ago. my city is the same as hundreds of others: white flight depleted the residential property tax base & we have a bloated police department and other unnecessary expenses bleeding money from the city. in order to attract businesses that wouldn't otherwise want to have offices here, the city negotiates tax-increment financing schemes so these corporations end up paying no property taxes. and the tax abatements for luxury condos. the result is that in order to live in the city i have to pay thousands more in property taxes than i would for even a more expensive house in the suburbs, and my taxes go toward fradulent cop overtime and settlements for when cops kill people. if i want an actual service performed by the city, it won't happen. someone dumped a pile of tires next to my house and 311 keeps closing my requests for them to be picked up. people from the suburbs come and dump mattresses and old boats here because they know no one will give a shit. i'm feeling extra bad about my life in the city right now, and i'm not that poor. most people don't think it's worth it to spend their short lives being shit on so they, individually, can save the environment.

As the saying goes, you can't buy what isn't on the shelf.

I am sure I would love a society of supremely livable, egalitarian, high-density cities, with wilderness in between. Sleek high-speed trains glide between these gleaming cities, past sustainable farms whose fields are tended by solar-powered robots. Private automobiles are relegated to history museums.

But the intermediate steps between our world and that one are, to put it mildly, unrealistic.

So in orbit's harm-reduction measures seem like a decent start. And way more feasible than BAN CARS NOW or whatever.

wow harbl otm

I mean banning/limiting cars is the goal, I'm just saying...baby steps.

my city is the same as hundreds of others: white flight depleted the residential property tax base & we have a bloated police department and other unnecessary expenses bleeding money from the city.

Yeah definitely all of this. I didn't make time to get into it but I've been thinking about it all day: the creation of suburbs is all about racism and white flight and growing new white-only spaces and then patrolling them jealously and violently.

This is about the US again, right?

Euler asked a question about North Americans specifically; the ensuing responses are US-focused, but I think everyone here would welcome other perspectives.

Oh right, nm.

England is something else that I can't get my head around. I'm obsessed with "Escape to the Country" and how the most rural places that the movers and presenters can imagine are still completely settled and farmed and full of villages. Even national parks have villages INSIDE THEM. And all these little villages have their own post office and a pub and a store and they're only like 10 miles apart from each other. Is the whole country basically a model train set?!

England is so cute.

The British isles have been settled by people building houses (and villages) for 4000 years and more. There is almost no countryside that is truly wild (as in untouched by human alteration) anywhere in the islands.

I mean I intellectually know that but it still blows my mind.

North America had villages & cities thousands of years ago too but when we got here we killed their descendants and erased the evidence so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In France, 'la banlieue' (the suburbs) is usually code for 'the projects'.

It is but eg Vincennes and Clichy are suburbs and aren’t projects. Vincennes is more dense than Paris!

In DC, building height restrictions mean that many neighboring jurisdictions are considerably denser, indeed more "urban," than the city.

I’m from Arlington and have been heartened to see some smart development there on my trips home.

fwiw "acres of buffer" is completely out of the question in any of the suburbs I've looked at unless you have a few mil to spend. I was basically willing to consider any lot 6000sf or above and considered houses as small as 1200sf, and we chose a walkable "village" rather than "more for our money". Place we are renting has an 8000sf lot and is walkable to everything including metro north and bus. IDG why anyone would want anything above like half an acre unless they are planning to grow a substantial amount of their own food. NYC just feels like constant stress though, maybe that makes me "part of the problem" but I am kind of saying fuck it at this point.

as a pedantic side note: the american habit of talking about 'western' consumer habits is v sloppy. there are lots of weird anomalies w/ carbon footprints for smaller countries especially, but the US/Canada/Australia are more than double the EU average per capita carbon emissions, either in total or just consumption-related (& still lower than a lot of big oil-producing states). kuwait, s korea, singapore, mongolia, saudi arabia, kazakhstan, trinidad & tobago, iran, oman, japan, and malaysia all have higher consumption-based emissions per capita than france or spain (w/ china in between the two).

talking about 'western' consumer habits is v sloppy. there are lots of weird anomalies w/ carbon footprints for smaller countries

why would you think that the only measure of consumption worth noticing is carbon footprint? people consume land. they consume ocean resources. they mine, cut forests, dump toxic chemicals, and destroy wetlands. and they often outsource their mining, logging, and less energy efficient manufacturing processes to poorer countries, along with their carbon emissions and pollution.

and ship their trash/recycling elsewhere, don't forget

In France, 'la banlieue' (the suburbs) is usually code for 'the projects'.

― pomenitul, Saturday, May 30, 2020 3:36 PM (yesterday)

yes, we are all quite aware of this, and have been making banlieue jagger jokes for at least a decade

banl0u1s

aimless you might be surprised to learn that I'm actually well aware of the existence of not just forestry and mining, but all the things you mention in your post, and had in fact taken them into account before asserting that US consumption cannot reasonably be conflated with some wider 'west'. carbon footprints are just convenient & readily available stats to give some indication of the stark differences between the US and European averages, but if you prefer you could look at meat consumption, fish consumption, energy consumption, the exporting of plastic waste, the production of solid waste or the importing of timber, all of which have interesting breakdowns, & none of which show the US in line with the other 'western' countries, ahead of everyone else

In France, 'la banlieue' (the suburbs) is usually code for 'the projects'.

― pomenitul, Saturday, May 30, 2020 3:36 PM (yesterday)

yes, we are all quite aware of this, and have been making banlieue jagger jokes for at least a decade

― sarahell, Sunday, 31 May 2020 21:43 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

excellent

US consumption cannot reasonably be conflated with some wider 'west'

yeah sorry for this i meant western as in "western movies"

and the pet shop boys song "go west"

my galaxy brain armchair bored-and-high-posting cannot be faulted for a lack of attention to detail

what about the west end girls in a dead end world?

having a peruse one thing that european countries and the US are leading the table together in is e-waste exported per capita. "the west" as a trope feels like a hangover from the cold war or mb some nonsensical clash of civs biz, but unless western literally just means high consumption its noticeable that lots of Definitely Not Western countries have p high consumption in some respects, and that the US is way ahead of most large european countries on most of these metrics

how do we feel about "the global north" ?