The city and the commerce it generates is the sole reason that the suburbs exist. They should never been allowed to form separate jurisdictions.
They were often separate jurisdictions before the modern concept of suburbia came to be. Dallas, Texas was incorporated in 1856 and nearby “suburbs” Plano and Richardson were both incorporated in 1873 and Garland in 1891. Plano had it’s own school system by the 1880s.
The truth is that suburbia today isn’t the same as it was in the 1950s and 60s. In many parts of the country you can live and work in suburbia without ever having to go into the city. And suburbia doesn’t really owe the cities anything.
Not exactly, some of them are not accessable by public transportation and have parking lots that you need a resident ID sticker to enter , the libraries want proof of residence in the town that funds them before they issue a card and there are some beaches that issue town residents wristbands to allow them access. Other places require a pass for admission, and the passes either aren’t sold to non-residents or are sold to them at a higher price. And yes, there is someone checking.
That’s pretty standard operating procedure for public libraries. Dallas, for example, won’t give you a library card for free unless you’re a resident. Non-residents can purchase a card but they can take advantage of TexShare cards if their home library participates in the system. The Central Arkansas Library System (HQ in Little Rock) requires you to be a resident of Pulaski or Perry County. There’s a Gateway system you can use to check out books if your home library participates in it. If not, non-residents must pay $60 per year to keep a library card.
Let’s table the issue of “fault” (which does not mean I’m conceding that point, just not addressing it at this time) and substitute the word “responsibility” in its place. Is that your position as well? Are you prepared to go into that zone I described where the city is left to be like “Escape From New York” and the suburbanites have to live in walled enclaves and make their low-wage workers go through heavily guarded checkpoints every day on their way to and from work?
That’s quite a categorical statement to make. Yes, there are some fairly big buildings in Bellevue, although not many in Redmond. But there is much much more office space in Seattle proper, and my ex-father-in-law commuted every day from Sammamish (where I got to watch an almost ridiculously literal version of The Lorax in action over the years* as they bulldozed forest after forest to build subdivisions and strip malls) to Safeco in downtown Seattle.
- In that area at least, the rapaciousness of suburban development seems to actually have gotten worse as we approached and passed the millennium. The older subdivisions tended to have a good number of Pacific Northwest trees left in people’s yards even if the forest was too thinned out and broken up to support the ecosystem that had been there before. But every development I saw go up in the late '90s and '00s, and there were lots of them, proceeded by completely bulldozing every tree and making a barren wasteland–over which was laid sod and little planted trees like you would put anywhere, including a subdivision built over top of former Midwestern farmland or wherever. I mean, seriously: WTF? Is it important to the latest generation of Seattle metro suburbanites that their environs look like they could be in Anywhere, USA? What happened to having some regional pride or a taste for a Northwest feel, even if the environment means nothing to them? Wasn’t the idea of moving to Sammamish supposed to be “living out in the country”? Are Doug Firs passé, and everyone wants to look like they live in Plano Texas or something? Jesus fucking Christ. And they wonder why someone with taste (which, let’s face it, is a lot more plentiful among liberals then among conservatives, though there are exceptions in both directions) might gag at suburbia. Neal Stephenson nailed it.
The “sole” reason?
Big Cities expanded to the edge of neighboring towns and villages. Some area’s were annexed. Some weren’t. Land was cheaper and more plentiful the farther you moved from Big City. A large factory is cheaper to build 10 miles from Big City limits. 20 miles might be even cheaper. People moved to where the jobs were. Former Big City residents began buying larger homes with yards in villages and suburbs that sprang up where the jobs were.
What do you mean when you say “allowed”? You’re no longer “allowed” to live where you want to or can afford? You were born in Big City and you must always live within Big City? Or are the boundarys of Big City expandable at the whim of Big City government?
What are the limits, if any, to Big City borders? Chicago suburbs extend to the city of Elgin. Should Chicago declare eminent domain and grab all of the land and it’s accompanying tax dollars so Chicago can continue to pssst away even more tax dollars rewarding Chicago politicians friends and family?
There are plenty of low wage workers living in the suburbs. I doubt that the folks working at McDonald’s in Plano, Texas are commuting from Dallas.
OK. Nobody is at fault. There is just a problem and someone has to deal with that problem. So what is the actual problem?
I say that many Big Cites are losing residents because there is less incentive for people to live in Big City. Now it’s a well know fact that if money wasn’t important, Tahiti would be very crowded. Why live where it snows or tornados occasionally destroy your neighbor’s homes?
Why did people move to Detroit or Chicago or Atlanta? Because it was better than were they were. Maybe there was a job waiting. Or maybe there was no job where they came from. Nobody moved to Detroit for their health. They moved there to find a job. Big City has to find a way to coax people to live there.
IIRC, NYC was a prison in “Escape From New York”. So, no, I don’t want to go to prison. Or real-life NYC either.
I think they still have municipal governments below the departmental level, however.
I guess I wonder, therefore, why you propose to put these people (who far outnumber the city dwellers) in charge of urban Seattle?
They bulldozed everything because it’s cheaper to flatten everything and put in pre-planned everything than to cut down only a few trees and fit the new house into the existing lot. Yeah it’s crap. But that’s not because the people buying those houses didn’t want big trees or local character, it’s because the developer didn’t want to spend extra thousands or tens of thousands of dollars developing around trees when they wouldn’t be able to charge thousands or tens of thousands extra for a few big trees on the lot that might not survive anyway.
Ideally I would just be in charge.
Then how come they used to do it? I usually don’t hesitate to blame slimy capitalists, but it has to be said: if the first time a developer tried that move, no one wanted to buy in that subdivision, that would be the end of that. The people who bought there are as guilty as the developers. Guilty of clearcutting a PNW forest; and guilty of having shitty ass taste and deserving my utter contempt.
If many people (not just a few retail and service workers) can live and work in suburbia and never go into the city, and places like Plano ( the 70th most populous city in the country ) are “suburbs” then I really wonder if your definition of "suburbia is “anywhere that’s not NYC or a select few other cities and where there are no farms*” or “any place that’s not included in the name of the metropolitan area” Those definitions leaves no way to distinguish small cities,villages or towns which may have a downtown shopping area ,corner stores and professional offices in residential areas, and may be laid out on somewhat of a grid from the suburbs where everyone lives on a cul-de-sac, you might have to drive or walk a mile or two to get to the front door of your backyard neighbor because of the street layout and residential areas are strictly residential and commercial areas strictly commercial so there are no corner stores or doctor’s offices in a converted house. If Plano is a suburb, then Yonkers ( with a smaller population) must be one too, and you can’t always tell so easily when you’ve crossed between Yonkers and the Bronx.
- actually Manhattan, because I’ve heard more than once that Queens is a suburb even though it’s not
That is obvious for you and BrainGlutton both along many many different stripes of Progressives and some types of Liberals. It is a deep character flaw and not something you should admit out loud even if you feel that way. You are going to be greatly outnumbered anyway so it will thankfully stay a lifetime exercise in frustration for you. In my ideal world, people can make their own choices without busybodies like yourself constantly putting everyone else under the threat of coercion to follow their One True (ill-informed) Way.
A lot of people define suburb in different ways. Under some definitions you can be considered to live in a suburb even if you’re within the boundaries of the city. Most people seem to go with a definition of suburb that is any area outside of core city which may include other municipalities or unincorporated areas but is within the same metropolitan area.
You can’t always easily tell when you cross the border from Plano into Richardson, Garland or Dallas. Drive from Dallas and it’s not always easy to tell when you make the transition to Addison and then to Carrollton. In the 1980s it was easy to tell when you drove from Allen into Plano but the former has built up so much since then that it’s hard to tell.
You must not have looked at the election returns. The white male suburbanite is the one getting increasingly getting outnumbered. Obama says sprawl is over, and his voters, the majority, smile and nod. The consolidated metro government in the Twin Cities is a reality, not just some pie in the sky proposal. We are winning, outside the South and the Plains, and we’ll consolidate our federal strength and deal with those regions too, in good time.
That is great for the Twin Cities if it really is true but it has no bearing on anyone else. There is no need to force the same model on the entire nation because it is a terrible fit for many areas. It doesn’t matter Obama thinks about about sprawl. That is a state or local and not a federal issue and he can’t even make laws at the federal level. Obama also only won with a tiny majority of the vote and there is no indication that he would have won at all if he emphasized this issue as part of the core platform. I am completely certain that he wouldn’t have if he had.
The ‘We’ on this particular issue is much smaller than you can imagine. I would put it generously in the low single digits of voter percentages but feel free to provide cites otherwise. I don’t like to keep using Boston references but that is what I know at the moment. It is really two different cities, Boston and Cambridge, that are only separated by an overgrown stream and you couldn’t even get them to merge if had to even though they are both incredibly progressive by American standards. Multiply that by 10,000 across the country and then you can start to appreciate the concerns.
The United States is not run by referendum. All that matters is whether the politicians in power support this, and that the people who oppose it are not able to defeat them.
Since the US entered WWII, only two presidential candidates have won more than 51% of the popular vote every time they faced the nation’s voters. One was the affable general widely credited with winning that war; the other was…Barack Obama. I would think that kind of says it all right there. (And Hillary is going to run up the score in 2016.)
We will chisel away, slowly but surely, against all this local intransigence, don’t you worry–just like we did under FDR and LBJ. Only a matter of time as the Tea Partiers shuffle off this mortal coil and are steadily replaced by a younger, browner, more progressive electorate. And we just need one more SCOTUS appointment. Eat your oat bran, Scalia! 
BTW, and I mean this in all seriousness, it isn’t just white males that live in suburbs and it is both telling and shocking for someone to assume that is what the issue is about. You can hate older white males all you want but that has much less to do with this issue than you might ever choose to believe. I live close to a suburb that started out as a mill town and now has a huge Brazilian and Portuguese immigrant population for example. Main street is now filled with shops and restaurants that cater to them.
Your world-view is more than a little bigoted and antiquated. You may know what you see in lily-white Minnesota but don’t ever assume that applies to the whole country. There are completely mixed suburbs, Mexican suburbs, black suburbs, poor people’s suburbs, and everything else you can imagine. The important thing is that they chose to live there based on all the options they had available and that is their home. They don’t need someone else like yourself coming in from the outside to save them via decrees from the tower.