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

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" ?

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'

All of which information was rather vital to understanding what you were asserting and was missing until you supplied it. If I am surprised, it is because you were vague.

But all you have now brought to the discussion is that there are some anomalies that do not fit a simplistic model, not that on average the 20 wealthiest countries, which tend to be clustered in Europe and North America, and are often considered to represent a lifestyle described as 'western', consume far more of the world's resources per capita than the average of the remaining 140 or so countries.

Nor do you address what I perceive as the strong desire among the populations of those 140 less wealthy countries to raise their standards of consumption to match those of the 20 wealthiest predominantly 'western' nations and why you think such desire is not important to the future behavior of those nations.

Or we could just agree that the expectation of an ever-increasing global population acquiring ever greater amounts of consumer goods per capita is not something that can be sustained, when we are already in the midst of the Sixth Great Extinction Event at current levels of human pressure on the environment, and leave it at that.

coincidentally this quite credible Pet Shop Boys pastiche is also relevant to the thread

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wqfcwgT0Ds

I made it

What happens out there?

Is it still bad

A family stopped by to bring us muffins.

And Trump lawn signs? (I kid, I kid...)

were the muffins dudes? or classic? or icky?

I've seen one trump sign so far, but I chose an extremely granola suburb.

TBF, that's one more than the number of Biden signs I've seen.

sometimes I feel an eerie sense of time moving at a different speed, or perhaps being outside of time

I'm sure the pandemic heightens this. Also being new and not having a full sense of being grounded within the town, not having a mental map. At some point in my old neighborhood I could really visualize the entire thing from above, almost as though there was a network of wires connecting my family/apartment, the playground, the school, certain other people's homes, certain restaurants and stores, etc. -- maybe not even wires but just a sense that these places were all linked and all part of the same map. I don't have that yet with my town -- things feel a little more independent of each other in my mind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XDuHPLzsxM&feature=emb_logo

or maybe

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8XDuHPLzsxM

never mind. Just going for a Man (Alive) Out of Time reference

Update: I've bought a massive trampoline

Off Road Vehicles are next!

It’s not NOT one of my dreams to live on 5+ acres and use a dirt bike to get around. They’re offensively loud so I probably wouldn’t, but I’ve thought about it.

Get some goats. You can hitch two or three of them up to a cart and get around that way. Also you won't need to mow, because they will eat the grass (among other things).

Problem solved.

(While creating other, unrelated problems. But hey.)