The suburbs, it seems, can’t get no respect. In several recent threads, people have bashed them for a variety of reasons. An article in Sunday’s Washington Post about urban planning knocked them for being “unsustainable”, among other things, and seemed to simply assume that the reader would agree with this negative view. This recent article from the Atlantic cheers their upcoming demise. Yet for all the nay-saying, it’s hard to find any reason for this anti-suburban sentiment.
Here’s the basic fact. The percentage of Americans living in the 'burbs is either slightly less than or slightly more than half, depending on who’s counting. Now, since nobody’s been forced there at gunpoint, that means that about half of Americans choose to live in the suburbs. How bad can the 'burbs be if so many are freely choosing to live there?
It seems obvious to me that so many people choose the suburbs because they’re a good place to live, offering many good things. A typical suburb has low crime, low cost of land, low cost of living, low local taxes, lots of parks and other public spaces, good schools, a pleasant appearance, good maintenance of roads, and other necessities. Since it’s surely reasonable to desire all of those things, there’s nothing unreasonable about people wanting to live in the suburbs.
There are, of course, a number of complaints about suburbs. Living in them means a long commute, no high culture, little ethnic diversity, and monotonous repetition of design in the houses and everything else. All of this is true to some extent, though perhaps not as much as the anti-burbers think it is. But the whole point of a free society is that people establish their own priorities and choose what’s best for themselves. So if half of America chooses the suburbs, what’s wrong with that?
The criticism of them being unsustainable is unrelated to whether people like them. It may be that living 30 minutes from where you work in a standalone house that is three times bigger than the average apartment is a unsustainable model of human society for environmental reasons. It is certainly true that the carbon footprint of the average city dweller is far smaller than that of the average suburbanite.
Another main criticism of the 'burbs is that they become (or start as being) homogeneous. Part of a thriving culture and democracy, according to this criticism, is interacting with people who are not like you.
A third criticism is that the phenomenon of suburbs damages our cities and the vulnerable populations that live in them. When the middle class tax base flees the city, you get Detroit.
I don’t think any of those criticisms are ultimately persuasive, but they cannot be dismissed merely on the basis that the evidence suggests people like living in suburbs.
I live in a suburb now. I don’t think they are long term sustainable.
According to the info I’ve looked at:
[ul]
[li]Suburbs are misallocation of resources made possible by cheap oil. When oil supplies drop, the low density of suburbs will be a huge handicap.[/li][li]Their layouts encourage isolation and racial segregation instead of a sense of community[/li][li]Wasteful of resources such as lawn watering, etc[/li][/ul]
Certainly, a lot of criticism of suburbs, like a lot of criticism of anything except maybe puppy-kicking and Nazis, is exaggerated and unfair. However, I think it’s also exaggerated to argue that there isn’t any reason for “anti-suburban sentiment”.
You just debated yourself. In one breath you say there’s no reason to be anti-suburb, and in the next you acknowledge several valid reasons to be anti-suburb. A number of other standard criticisms of suburb impacts are listed in this Wikipedia article:
Just because many people feel that suburbs are the best choice among the choices available to them doesn’t mean that they think suburbs are ideal. Sure, there are trade-offs and dissatisfactions in any mode of living. But it’s a bit naive to argue that suburbs must be great just because a lot of people freely choose to live there.
Hell, to take an extreme comparison, a lot of people also freely choose to live in urban slums in India, instead of staying in their own rural villages. The urban slums have significant advantages in many ways over the rural areas, and many Indian working-class people (and many middle-class ones too) have deliberately chosen residence in them as “what’s best for themselves”. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t valid reasons to object to Indian slums.
I think that when people say suburbs, they might really be thinking of exurbs. Sprawl has gone past the traditional suburbs. Also, I’d think again when attaching the “lack of diversity” tag.
Current economic and energy realities MAY be making the suburbs unsustainable in the long run.
But let’s face it, intellectuals were trashing suburbia LONG before anybody knew what “Peak Oil” was. Let’s not pretend that “sustainability” is what the arguments are really about.
I don’t particularly hate suburbs. I do object to the fact that current government policy heavily incentivizes people to live in suburbs by directly providing subsidies, hiding the true cost of such living arrangements, and creating artificial barriers (such as zoning) to potentially denser living arrangements.
I live in the middle of San Francisco proper, a friend of mine is from Daly City, a suburb just south of SF. He always says there’s parking in the suburbs. He’s right, because there’s no there there.
(Oddly enough, Oakland (and Berkeley) are only slightly less urban than San Francisco itself these days, but the sentiment holds for much of the Bay Area suburbs.)
I hated living in the suburbs when I was a teenager. I didn’t have a driver’s license until I was 23, and it was hard to go anywhere in our neighborhood without a car. I still don’t like driving now, so I’m glad my urban neighborhood has shops and restaurants I can walk to from my house and the option of commuting to work via mass transit. There’s an upside to the smaller yards, too- less yard work, and cheaper to hire someone to do it for you.
If you like that sort of thing. Most suburbs I’ve seen tend to have most of the houses of very similar ages and styles. I prefer my neighborhood where there’s a Victorian built in the 1890s, then two Tudors built in the 1920s, then a ranch (I don’t know when it was built). I also prefer lawns full of flowers (maybe even native plants) to a plain grass lawn (boring, and I’m allergic to lawn grass). Plain grass lawns tend to be encouraged instead of other options at least in some suburbs.
What makes you think that both types of criticisms of suburbs (i.e., both the mid-century complaints on aesthetic/cultural/social grounds, and today’s critiques of unsustainability) can’t be sincere? Or (to some extent) valid?
Actually, this city slicker can at least understand the appeal of the country. Suburbs, IMHO, seem to be the worst of both worlds. I can’t get anywhere and there’s nothing to do here?
These may be valid complaints in some cases, but not always.
I live in a suburb of San Francisco.
My wife’s commute is all of five minutes.
There is high culture all around us. Notably reachable by a half hour BART ride into San Francisco. But also in Palo Alto, San Jose, etc.
This is just about the most ethnically diverse area in the country. I’m only a few minutes away from the biggest Afghan community in the U.S., for example.
Sure, we can agree that there are valid objections to both the country and the city.
But this is a debate about the suburbs. Usually, a GD thread is started to give interested participants (a category that doesn’t seem to apply to you as far as this thread is concerned) a chance to argue and learn about specific claims concerning a particular topic.
What’s the point of coming into a debate merely to say “hey, other things suck too, so let’s just be done with it”?
The article linked in the OP portrays a future in which people will abandon the suburbs. As such, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to defend them on the basis that people choose to live in them.