Exurbs & the Destruction of Rural America

The BBQ Pit
1

This is going to be weak, not good at all the creative expletives, but this still does tear my heart:

It seems that people today are content to live in a colorless suburban/urban landscape, filled with Walmarts, Targets, 50 grocery stores, dollar stores, gas stations, the list goes on, in a creepily identical tract house surrounded by 300 of the exact same design and color. From what I have read on here, this actually seems to be a Criteria! in their home selection, not an abomination to be avoided. In one of the recent threads here “Good Things about Your Town”, people actually cited having a Walmart AND a Target as Good things!!! :eek: (Please shoot me when this happens).

Do people not care about local characer? is convenience the end all/be all? Do people just geniunely not give a shit about the destruction of beautiful farms, and rural life? Do you move to the country and complain about your neighbors cowshit, and lobby to have more grocery stores/malls & superstores of mass produced garbage?

Just hoping there is someone else in the world who feels nauseous when they see a beautiful old farm turned into a “house” farm, and other development turning a beautfiul place into a creepy postmodern haven of consumerism and sameness.

2

It upsets me to see farmland turn into shopping centers and neighborhoods. The rural community we moved to 18 years ago has more than doubled in size. It is being overrun with people who only care about their stuff and their lawns and whether or not the neighbor’s stuff and lawn are up to their standards. Houses even for the smallest families are huge. What used to be a home for a small family is now what people get before they have children.

On the other hand, when we moved here there was no Wal Mart or Target within driving distance. There was sad old fashioned Kmart. Now we have a lot of stores the next city over and I like being able to buy the things I need without driving forever. I like convenience because it means more time for me to do the things I want to do. Life’s too short to have to go to 4 or 5 stores instead of one or to have to drive an hour to get something beyond the bare necessities.

There is hope. I have seen more of the new neighborhoods being designed around huge public areas with trails and woods and streams. They are moving away from the identical, flesh toned houses. Cities are starting to realize unrestrained growth is not always good and they’re trying to plan before approving a new development.

This isn’t really a new problem. Our first house was built in 1940, identical to every other house for miles around and it was built on farmland. If the population keeps growing there needs to be more housing spaces and I think American’s have gone so far as a whole to materialism that I can’t think of anything good that could stop it.

3

The reason I cited the arrival of the big-box retail stores as a good thing in my town is that we can actually shop where we live, and because they provide jobs where there were really none before.

Yes, I think there should be more locally-owned stores. But there aren’t, and I have to make do with what I have. :slight_smile:

Robin

4

I agree with much of the OP and am concerned about loss of farmland to bloated suburbs (while center cities are allowed to decay) but have trouble with this statement:

The typical mid to larger-sized farm in America today does not seem chock full of “local character”, but a dreary largely treeless expanse. And if those exurban refugees (and their rural neighbors) happen to end up downwind of a large factory farm operation like the infamous Buckeye Egg and its legendary stenches (and stream pollution) they have every right to complain.

It’s hard to reconcile the image of idyllic country life with "a fly outbreak of Biblical proportions". :dubious:

5

I grew up in a very rural place and hope one day to return to such living. I hate having neighbors I can see and I long for the day when my family and I can live on 40 or so acres with no one around.

That being said, I do not bemoan the “destruction” of farms and rural areas. Farms, generally, don’t make a lot of money. Not many people want to be farmers. What are old farmers, or their heirs, supposed to do with a farm that is losing money or does not have anyone to work it? Just hold onto it because some people like looking at it? Or what about rural areas? Why should the owners be prevented from selling it or developing it because some people like to look at it?

If you like farms and rural land so much, then buy it and preserve it yourself. Don’t expect other people to bear the cost of fulfilling your desire to look at a farm when you are driving down the road.

6

I’m torn. I agree with your point aesthetically, but I can’t fault people for wanting convenience. The area where my parents live (Sainte-Dorothée, Laval) was almost all farmland just thirty years ago. Ten years ago, when they bought a house there, the only things across the highway from them were farmer’s fields and one lonely Canadian Tire store. As my dad put it, “nothing but cabbage fields”. Since then, though, a whole colony of big-box stores has sprouted like mushrooms. They’ve got everything from Wal-Mart to Super C (groceries) to Starbucks. It’s ugly and anti-communal, for lack of a better word. The design of the place is hostile to pedestrians, and its corporate vastness makes it seem worlds away from the neighborhoods surrounding it. But my parents love it! My mom can do her grocery shopping while my dad can find anything he needs for his home renovation projects. And most of the items they’re looking for are reasonably-priced, too. So I don’t feel I’m in any position to judge, even if in my heart, I think these places are an affront to communities in Quebec and elsewhere.

On preview: Renob, you’re absolutely correct. We city-dwellers have no right to complain about disappearing farms when we’re not the ones who have to manage them. I just wish more people (from government officials to grocery stores to individual consumers) would appreciate the importance of local farms and help them become profitable once more. Though I suppose those are voeux pieux (wishful thinking), as we call them here.

7

Amen, Renob. I come from a long line of farmers, own a farm myself (I rent out the fields and putter around in the woods), and enjoy the isolation. But I’ve got a day job that lets me do that.

Noone around here is getting rich, or even particularly middle-class running a family farm. My cousins work 80+ hour weeks, rare vacations, no health insurance, no retirement policy, with their profit margin riding on milk or crop or pelt prices. A number of them refer to themselves as “slaves to the land” and hope that a large conglomerate will buy them out. They’re tired of getting stepped on by cows, bitten by mink, and having to stop what they’re doing all the time to repair the damn tractor.

And they too like the convenience of the ‘big box’ stores moving in, giving them a greater variety and lower prices nearby.

And now the local residents, mostly in the nearby villages, voted to restrict (ban, really) the development of farmland into subdivisions, or even single family home lots. The village folks like to see the neat green farms and red barns that they remember all their livese, but don’t have to work on anymore. We that own the land can’t even chop a couple of acres off to give to our kids for them to build a house on, unless said kids are engaged in full-time operation of the farm!

8

Small town or rural life is so overrated by people who have never lived it. I have. I do. Its destruction would be fine by me.

9

But urban sprawl itself carries with it tons of problems. It’s based around car use in a very persistent and concrete way, both in terms of siting, infrastructure, and density, that is very difficult to retrofit into a mass transit structure.

Even leaving out the extremely obvious problems with increased carbon emissions, those unfortunate folks who’ve moved out there because they were looking for a cheap house to raise their kids (this is a problem in many cities, either because the downtown has not renewed, or because it has and has gotten expensive) are going to take it up the ying-yang the more expensive gas gets; they’ll be paying out the nose for car travel, and will have trouble selling their house for the same reason.

There’d be less problem if we were talking good, creative transit-oriented development, but too often we’re not.

Further, how long will it be before we start to run into food supply and climate regulation problems? Haven’t we already started to come up against such things?

10

Don’t count me against those who want the suburban lifestyle. What doesn’t make any sense, is turning some of the best farmland on the planet into a parking lot. (I live in Iowa) Stupid.

11

I think far more destruction in the form of deforestization occurred in the creation of all that farmland and logging from the 1600s to the 1900s than is occurring in its conversion from farmland to exurbs.

12

I think the sprawl of subdevelopments is much more unsightly than the relatively small footprint of a big-box store, no matter what their other impacts on the local economy are. (I guess I’d prefer small-town shopping despite its larger prices, if it were possible to have everything you need on the main drag and had reasonable parking, a situation I’ve never encountered!)

But if they really want to keep the land undeveloped they should either supplement the already-meagre federal subsidies or purchase the land outright and return it to nature. This comes from someone who hates the sight of pop-up McMansions that blot the landscape of an otherwise perfectly reasonable rural road. And why do they have to clearcut acres and acres of land for these monstrosities? It’s just more lawn they’ll have to mow.

I wouldn’t mind an ordinance that mandated the keeping of some trees when you develop. Come to think of it I wouldn’t mind for an ordinary development either. And keep the sidewalks while you’re at it. Is it too hard to have communities with shade trees and sidewalks?

13

I just see so few benefits of surburban sprawl.

It means more driving, less personal interaction, less small business, more energy consumption, less nice land.

For what, a little more space? I’m just prplexed by the whole thing. I know people who have moved from homes with $90,000 mortgages into homes with $250,000 mortgages because they don’t want to pay to send their kids to private school in the city. :confused:

I know people who have moved from homes on streets where they knew their neighbors, watched their neighbor’s kids, chatted on the sidewalk, chatted when they get home from work to places where it’s car-in-the-garage, go in the house, maybe sit on the back deck. I go to friends’ houses in the burbs, and it “who lives there?” “I’m not sure. I see him leaving in the morning, but I don’t really know.”

It’s the change from the “front porch” to the “back deck” culture, and I just don’t understand people who want to make that change.

I can’t understand people who want to give money to to the Wal*Mart heirs in Texas or to the $100,000,000 golden parachute of Home Depot’s CEO because it saves them $1 on a hammer, instead of spending the money with a person they can see at the grocery store, at the dog park, at a neighbor’s house, who might turn around and spend the money at YOUR small business.

And the answer is “because it’s convenient”? Consider me disgusted with that attitude.

This area has it all in sharp contrast. . .big cities, old school burbs, new-school burbs, ex-urbs, rural land.

I know guys who are single, early 30’s, good jobs. . .choosing to live in these shitty little “town houses” in the burbs, when they could live in Baltimore or DC. . .vibrant cities with places to eat, drink, socialize, walk. I guess those things just don’t make much of a difference when your existence revolves around trying to get a Wii, and the next CSI episode.

14

The ultimate irony to me is whn conservatives talk about preserving traditional American values while they shop in big-box stores, worship in mega-churches next to mall, belong to religions invented last week, and live in faux traditional houses blending tudor, spanish, and colonial design.

My liberal friends on the other hand tend to live in urban neighborhoods, their kids walk to school, and they shop at local stores. Or, they live on small farms growing food to sell at farmer’s markets.

15

At least in the DC area, those shitty little town houses are cheaper than the equivalent in DC. Also, they are newer which means fewer surprises when it comes to getting stuff done and fewer things going wrong. There are rational reasons for wanting to live in the suburbs.

How much do you think that private school costs anyhow. If the cost of private school is $7,000.00 per year and you have two kids, it makes sense to move out to where the schools are good and pay the higher mortgage.

Don’t get me wrong, I am most definitely not a fan of suburban sprawl. I think that what is needed is smarter development and to build up the inner areas. But at least around here, it is almost impossible to buy a condo that is larger than a 2 bedroom. If I could buy a three bedroom or a four bedroom with three baths, I would gladly live in an apartment.

I can most definitely understand why people live in the exurbs and not in the city. Also, sometimes the big box store is good. How many people here complain about the local book store that doesn’t carry anything they want to read or how the local food store doesn’t sell fancy wines or something else. Do you want to pay 15% more for things.

Hell, how often is local character just an excuse for poorly maintained and poorly run?

16

Considering how shitty most Baltimore schools are, I’d say that this is perfectly rational. If you consider that you may pay $10,000 to $15,000 for a good private school, and that your house value will likely be increasing so it’s not as if you are flushing your mortgage payment down the drain, this makes a lot of sense.

Sure, but I don’t understand why people want to live so close to each other like they have to in a big city. I don’t want to see my neighbor. I want privacy. I like a lot of land. You may prefer crowded conditions; I do not. One isn’t better than the other. It’s just a matter of preference.

And I don’t understand people who think that they should put the economic well-being of the small business owner ahead of the economic well-being of their own family.

Convenient and cheaper. The local store does not deserve my business any more than Wal-Mart does. My business goes to the one that better suits my needs. Wal-Mart, if it is cheaper and more convenient, wins. There is nothing evil about that attitude.

I don’t like suburbs, either, but that, again, is an expression of preference. Your elitist attitude about these people is ridiculous. Your preferences to eat at a trendy bistro, pay $8 a shot for Grey Goose vodka, and pay 50% more than you should because you shop at Whole Foods doesn’t make you a better person. It just means you have different taste than someone else. Do what you like, but take your superior airs and stick them up your ass.

17

You know, I’ve always contented that the whole post-WWII white-flight that occurred has been the source of America’s problems nowadays. There are so many ways in which we have gone wrong. Rather than deal with the problems of urban life, the richer folk decided to high-tail it to the suburbs where they didn’t have to deal with the problems that America would eventually have to face. It’s a very selfish notion, if you think about it, covered up with some plastic nonsense about returning to the land. Maybe if we had kept our suburban expansion to a minimum we’d have dealt with our problems sooner? Maybe the 70’s wouldn’t have been a time period of absolute decay in most cities. Even New York, being one of the most robust cities in the nation, faced it’s problems. It’s finally now recovering, but only from homogenized suburban kids returning.

I just feel like it was a very selfish idea to turn the backs on the cities to live in isolation. It was a very anti-social, and racist movement, in my opinion. The destruction of rural America is another side-effect of this. Basically you have people that wanted the benefits of living in the cities (higher salaries) while staying away from its problems. Of course we never knew the problems it would cause (a HUGE dependence on foreign oil and sprawl) but it was a very ego-centric point of view that worked best during the 50’s when America was the most prominent it has ever been economically compared to the rest of the world. But that was because most of Europe was in ruins at the time. This is also where the baby boomers got this notion that people live in poverty only because they didn’t try hard enough. Basically it’s the reverse of the American dream. If you don’t work hard, you don’t succeed. It was too easy when they grew up. They grew up in the idyllic 50’s went to college in the late 60’s and early 70’s and cashed out in the 80’s. Hindsight is obviously 20/20, but the annoying thing is that most people don’t have hindsight about all of the countless problems that are caused by the anti-social nature of sprawl. It separates us and that eventually leads to selfishness. If we all spent a little more time getting to know each other, maybe we’d start to agree that things that benefit the poor really end up to the benefit of us all. Maybe not financially, but in other, less-measurable ways. The American dream has really turned us all into selfish bastards.
And yes, I find it highly ironic, coming from the deep South, that those who preach conservative values, are really talking about something that is a bastardized form of rural life. You know, I think the people of the 1910’s would see our society as repugnant in our waste and consumption and selfishness. Why do you need an SUV? “Well I’ve got three kids and it’s really essential nowadays.” Bullshit! I’m only 25, and I remember my mom got around fine with a station wagon. They had more than enough space for what we needed. We also tell ourselves we need larger houses, etc. Have you ever looked at the crap that is sold in an appliances section of your typical Wal-Mart? It’s absolutely insane all of the stupid crap that is sold.

But yes, I see this as a problem that has many causes, but I don’t think the flight to the suburbs was the main factor. The problem is that so few people see any problem with their lives. Why not? If it’s all you’ve ever known, then you aren’t interested. And when people get bored and depressed with their boring existences they take many destructive outlets like micromanaging their kids lives or funding addictive consumption through excessive work, or religion that tells us the problem is the gays or the atheists. “If only we lived in a society were everyone believed just like we do! Then things would be perfect, so we must fight for that.” Of course that will occupy your time, because it’s a solution that is unworkable outside of a fascist state. We have to learn to live together, dammit! The sooner we realize that the better off we’ll be.

18

When it comes to housing in this area, “newer” most definitely does not mean “better” or “fewer surprises”. The surprise is going to come when people try to sell in their over-built subdivision and nobody wants to pay what they paid during the bubble for their sheetrock shell, nailed together by a cadre of illegals in a day and a half.

It’s not $7K a year per kid everywhere, and there are other options too. . .magnet schools, and things of that nature.

But, it takes some thought to figure it out, some examination, some talking with your neighbors, some sacrifice. . .like I said, I never underestimate how much the “path of least resistance” thinking dominates people’s largest decisions. The things you say are a case in point.

Yeah, the easy decision is to move to the burbs. The consequences of that decision, especially on a large-scale, are not so easy to observe.

19

Where I live, the local downtown stores are much better than the big-box stores. We have Powell’s bookstore which is the best in the country, a ton of fantastic wine stores, the grocery stores are great and also have extensive wine selections. My wife has a yarn/knitting store in downtown that puts any of the suburban ones to shame.

I do run out to the burbs for Costco, but even that is within the “urban growth boundary” for Portland. There was an excellent article inthe NY Times a few years ago about someone moving from Manhattan to a small town. They discovered that the ability to shop at small, local, owner-run stores was much better in their old neighborhood than in the small town they moved to.

20

Depends on your priorities.

I know the people I trade with. They live in houses like mine, near me. I enjoy living near them, in their company, and not sending my money off to some guy who doesn’t need it.

I have personal relationships with them, and business relationships with them. No one here called Wal*Mart evil. The extra money I might have to spend is well worth what it’s going to support.

This is just you being a fucking asshole, and getting really fucking righteous based on a set of assumptions about things you know nothing about.