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

i've spotted a few in LA but thankfully not THAT many -- probably more in OC.

The whole house is vaguely reminiscent of my grandparents' friends' house on LI.

/pedant.

Sprawling on the fringes of the city
In geometric order
An insulated border
In between the bright lights
And the far unlit unknown

Growing up it all seems so one-sided
Opinions all provided
The future pre-decided
Detached and subdivided
In the mass production zone

Nowhere is the dreamer
Or the misfit so alone

Subdivisions ---
In the high school halls
In the shopping malls
Conform or be cast out
Subdivisions ---
In the basement bars
In the backs of cars
Be cool or be cast out
Any escape might help to smooth
The unattractive truth
But the suburbs have no charms to soothe
The restless dreams of youth

Drawn like moths we drift into the city
The timeless old attraction
Cruising for the action
Lit up like a firefly
Just to feel the living night

Some will sell their dreams for small desires
Or lose the race to rats
Get caught in ticking traps
And start to dream of somewhere
To relax their restless flight

Somewhere out of a memory
Of lighted streets on quiet nights...

(cue some guy posting about how he hates reading lyrics, how i'm thirteen, how i wrote these lyrics myself, how this is a serious post, etc......)

The Chicago suburbs have a lot of really cool houses from that era that I would hate to see torn down, including my grandparents' former house, which my Grandma just sold. The lot is pretty small so I'd be surprised if it gets torn down.

If you really want to be pedantic, not according to Wikipedia:

Suburbs are inhabited districts located either on the outer rim of a city or outside the official limits of a city (the term varies from country to country), or the outer elements of a conurbation.

The presence of certain elements (whose definition varies amongst urbanists, but usually refers to some basic services and to the territorial continuity) identifies a suburb as a peripheral populated area with a certain autonomy, where the density of habitation is usually lower than in an inner city area, though state or municipal house building will often cause departures from that organic gradation. Suburbs have typically grown in areas with an abundance of flat land near a large urban zone ...

Not the same thing as "the suburbs" I realise =) But here, unless you actually live in "Melbourne, 3000" as your postcode, you live in some suburb or other - some are innercity and old, some are new and sprawled and a long way out...

When I was younger I used to spend my summers with my grandparents on Long Island. I remember them taking me through Levittown once and pointing out the houses that still looked original from the outside. I didn't really appreciate it at the time, but now I realize that they were showing me the genesis of all that I despise about my culture.

the problem i have (if the issues of white flight, sprawl, land use, and inner city/inner ring suburban decay are put aside) is an issue of personal taste. from what i've seen, it really doesn't matter how much money you plow into new construction currently. you end up with basically the same thing (at least from the outside view) as your neighbors. perhaps you have a wine cellar and someone else has a pool or an in-law suite above the garage, but the building styles are pretty indistinguishable.

that, too. the house i largely grew up in was built in the 50s. it had italian marble in the front hall and a sandstone fireplace in the family room, and it was a 3-bedroom split-level in a working/middle class community. you could spend hundreds and hundreds of thousands in a gated development today and not get that.

OK, now TOMBOT can show up and call me prejudiced for thinking the rich guy is a dolt and doesn't deserve what he has.

8Versailles pronounced correctly. No points deducted there.

Dave, I actually doubt dude is really rich. These ppl all be doing this by putting themselves into tremendous debt. At least from the ones I know buying into suburban monstrosities and middle-of-nowhere "luxury condos" etc.

I guess that's the thing I don't understand, going into tremendous personal debt to have...the same exact identical poorly made house as everyone else?

My wife was at a meeting (after getting lost in numerous cul-de-sacs) at someone's house in the suburbs (for work, not PTA, nor Pampered Chef) and someone in the group said, "I was in this house last week." My wife was the only one who did not understand that the person meant the same model of a house in another subdivision, and not the exact same house.

Those metroplexes confuse me, especially around Arlington. The developers completely turn away from an existing city and build a planned shopping/living center with underground parking that exists in its own little orbit.

http://la.curbed.com/archives/2006/06/local_man_makes.php
http://la.curbed.com/archives/2006/06/northeast_la_go.php
http://la.curbed.com/archives/2006/06/beverly_grove_g.php

og i miss the greenery

the parks where like no one goes for some weird reason when you decide to go to the park

just empty

i miss the trails in the woods, the delis where the highschoolers would pull up in their cars and like get a soda

get a blog dude

Are you in NYC? I lived there for just 4 months once and I remember flying home to Texas and it was just so totally alien, looking out the window on approach seeing sky and green and open space between buildings and all those cars, none of them yellow!

This thread has some bad US/UK disconnect. Suburbs are for the rich!

i'm in NYC. everytime i visit Nashville i'm awed by all the oxygen.

Gardening while visiting my mom's house...birdsong everywhere, huge trees rustling in the breeze, big cornflower blue sky with big ol' white fluff clouds hanging around, green and sun, green and sun, green and sun. Serene backyards with late-afternoon shadows, rabbits, cardinals, honeybees, beetles, sun and green

Surmounter otm

I try to remind myself that most of the things I find great about suburbs -- the sun and lawns and sometimes idyllic coziness of them -- is totally based on them triggering the experience of suburbs as a child. And while those things remain good as an adult, they leave out all the stuff that would be tiresome about maintaining an upscale suburban lifestyle as an adult, even apart from making the money to do it: mostly the weird neighbor relationships of competitiveness and enforced lawn-care and the way your life is observed and scrutinized and needs to fit within certain parameters to have any kind of social clout.

But there are pockets lots of places of a less upscale but no less nice suburban-feeling lifestyle that doesn't have those weird regimented drawbacks, I think; I remember plenty of people I knew finding places in the nearest Chicago suburbs (or places like Skokie) where they could step into little-lawn pleasantness and avoid the strangeness of strict subdivision stuff. (Actually I think the single thing that makes this difference is still being on some kind of gridded street arrangement, rather than the cozy cul-de-sac subdivision thing where it's suddenly like you live in a 20-family village and are all responsible to one another for stuff like what color you paint your door.)

(I should note that I didn't live in a "suburb," as a child, but in a planned subdivision in a town of about 100,000 -- i.e., basically the same as a suburb except you don't hear about cool new stuff from people in a nearby city.)

This thread has some bad US/UK disconnect. Suburbs are for the rich!

Haha wow, not here (Aus) they aren't. The outer burbs are where all the lower middle class families go, because theres no way in hell they could afford even an apartment closer to the city. Inner suburbs here have students in rental, and extremely wealthy ppl in all the older homes/mansions/fancy condos. No one chooses to go live in the sticks, its just all most can afford if they actually want a house and a yard.

mostly the weird neighbor relationships of competitiveness and enforced lawn-care and the way your life is observed and scrutinized and needs to fit within certain parameters to have any kind of social clout.

Remind me to link this thread next time an American poster points and laughs at British class issues.

Back in the day, I would have agreed with the UK/US divide, and explained that British cities don't really map onto a straightforward urban/suburban plan, but since the outer boroughs of London elected Boris I don't feel remotely inclined to do so.

nabisco, as ever, otm

the suburb i grew up in was decent enough. it wasn't at all planned; our house was built in like 1940. there were no brown people (or non-catholics, really, except for me) but i think i largely emerged unscathed by the endemic racism.

cities are grebt and really the only place i wanna live. but there's certainly something to be said for having one's own green space as a child. even if you just turn it into a hockey rink/ballfield/football pitch in your mind.

thank god you emerged unscathed from that anti-catholic endemic racism, must have been terrible for you!

oh look, I found a dickwad on the internet.

dude in basketball huddles when everyone's like 'forgive us our tresspasses' and you're all 'forgive us our debts' it can get pretty hairy

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