Ancient Rome had analoges (sp?) to what we call suburbs. They only vanished when the countryside got too dangerous to live in.
So, unless the Visigoths attack Cleveland, the 'burbs are here to stay.
As for demographic shifts…large family homes with extra bedrooms are easier to get in the suburbs. White family size is shrinking, other groups retain large families. It’s just a question of fitting the family to the right-sized ticky-tacky box, that’s all.
I see no long-term future for many car-dependent suburbs. I’m sure some suburban areas can be gradually reconfigured to recreate the patterns of pre-automotive suburbs.
That’s not a suburb at all, then. That’s a town. Small towns, especially small towns with public transit links to other towns and cities, are a very good pattern.
What you have already (from your description) is what suburban areas should aspire to become, if they are to survive.
Why not? If gas is expensive enough to make longer driving distances a hardship for poor people, then there must come a point where it no longer makes sense for poor people to own cars at all–or to live in suburbs (that are not developing to become full-function towns with public transit).
Also, those suburban shopping areas themselves are threatened by increasing fuel and transport costs, and by middle-class exodus. If there are fewer people in the suburbs, with less money, driving less often, and products are growing more expensive with increased transport costs…
Because assuming that one day personal transportation vehicles will become impossibly expensive is a ridiculous assumption to make?
And are you under the impression that no one works in the suburbs. Because I live a few miles away from my job, which is located in the same suburb where I live.
The article in question hardly gave evidence of a middle class exodus, which is a lot different from the movement of people on the borderline to the suburbs, and the movement of some people back. That is a drop in the bucket compared to the suburban population.
I work in a high tech campus, with almost 20 buildings. Right across the street from me is a new shopping center with a bank, a grocery, and lots of restaurants. To get there I have to walk past a whole bunch of either apartments or condos. If I wanted to, I could move in across the street and work closer to my job than my father did even when he moved into New York for a year.
Pre-automotive suburbs were connected to the city by streetcars. Most American streetcar systems were torn up decades ago, and, regardless of what you might remember from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, the process in real life was . . . well, yeah, it was pretty much exactly like that, only without quite so many Toons.
But, I don’t see much push to rebuild them. Americans only want mass transit to be there for the other guy to use, and are reluctant to pay even trivial taxes even to bring that much about. You wouldn’t believe the resistance mass-transit activists in Hillsborough County, Florida (an area that makes LA look walkable) have come up against in the past decade, just trying to get an issue on the ballot to build a light-rail system. All we’ve got now is one streetcar line, that runs tourists between downtown and Ybor City but gets no commuters off the roads at all.
Well, I wouldn’t call that an assumption but a conclusion. I don’t see a realistic way that personal transportation vehicles can remain affordable for virtually all working Americans.
No. But most suburbs don’t contain any where near the number of jobs necessary to sustain their own populations.
I was not speaking only to the OP’s linked article, but to a trend which I believe will become increasingly manifest going forward. More middle-class people will either abandon the suburbs, or demand their transformation.
Your description of your own area makes it sound like your area has already begun the transformation I mentioned, toward being a town rather than a suburb–so, good for you. Would you consider giving up your car in your present circumstances? If not, why not?
Ah, well, a conclusion…that’s different then. What do you base this conclusion on, precisely?
No doubt this has something to do with the conclusion you have drawn. Again, what do you base this on? Frankly, I don’t see any realistic way we could NOT continue with personal transport vehicles in one form or another, whether they be powered by hydrogen/methane fuel cells or some other electric power (say, battery), bio-fuels, good old fashioned out of the ground hydrocarbon based fuels, a hybrid technology of several of the above, or magic pony power. There is simply too much money at stake for someone NOT to figure out a viable alternative given the decades or century or so we’ll have to do it in (assuming global climate change doesn’t bite us on the ass in the mean time). Of course, these are my assumptions, not conclusions.
But since you have conclusions, could you perhaps expand on them some?
Even assuming this were true, so what?
Broadly or in narrow, vertical communities? If the latter then I agree, sort of (I don’t think they will be abandoned, by and large). But broadly speaking? Not a chance. Oh, they will be transformed over time, but this is a continual and continuing process, as people move into and out of communities, and as communities continue to transform themselves with the shifting tides of people in the US.
-XT
This right here is pretty much why I don’t see it happening: the most ardent insisters that it must don’t really know how it could. They mostly don’t cite magic pony power, exactly, but that’s what it amounts to. They (you) assume that “they” will wave the wand of “technology” and something will be invented which will be able to exactly replace fossil fuels and/or internal combustion.
Forgive me for skepticism, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
I’m all for improving biofuels, for a variety of reasons (though corn is clearly not the way to go)… but I don’t believe the ratios will ever be so generous as to permit one-to-one substitution of biofuel cars for the present ones.
The availability of jobs within a suburb (or any geographic area) is important because it speaks to the necessity of transport in and out of that area. A modest town surrounded by good agricultural land can be pretty much self-supporting, but all of our other models for the distribution of our habitation and production activities require transportation infrastructure. So the question is, which patterns of distribution and which transportation infrastructures are most sensible.
Again, if PRIVATE transportation becomes SO expensive that folks living in the burbs becomes nearly impossible, modern society is going to go down the shitter. The abandoned burbs will be the least of the changes.
Modern society depends on reasonably cheap energy and transportation even if everybody was ridding the hippy bus rather than their SUV to work
Just about everyone posting here seems to be laboring under the assumption that the urbs, the suburbs and the transportation system in general will remain in the same dynamic they’re in right now. How short-sighted.
As noted upthread, the modern suburbs began to develop in the late 19th century as streetcars made it easy to commute several miles. The emergence of the automobile in the 1920s accelerated the dynamic and the development of modern expressways in the 1950s accelerated it again.
But the suburbs grew because a large number of people wanted a newer, cheaper house and more land than they could get in the urban center. And when the inner suburbs got full and transportation improved, a large number of them wanted out of inner-ring suburbs for the same reason. Lather, rinse, repeat.
But after 125 or so years, the growth of the suburbs has fragmented patterns of work, shopping and recreation. The days of all transportation corridors radiating from a single downtown, and everyone coming in for their daily needs, then going back out to sleep, have disappeared and they won’t be back.
There’s no reason at all suburbs can’t have public transit and a population full of people who drive tiny little electric cars (or ride bicycles, for that matter.) Reports of its death are greatly exaggerated.
Well, I can think of plenty of ways it COULD happen…and several that are probably close to how it will play out as well. The thing is, there are literally trillions of dollars at stake. There are myriad potential contenders for the title, and there are companies spending billions to try to be the one that wins out. The only real question, to me, is which one (or ones) will actually emerge in a decade or so as the next pervasive system.
Well, it would be like someone during the age of whale oil speculating on what will be the next thing. It could have been a number of technologies, but in the end the market went for crude oil based fuels. But ‘magic pony power’ is as good as any, at this time, since we have several decades to see what actually emerges and whether it’s one of the current technologies waiting in the wings for the price of oil to reach a level to make them viable, or whether it’s some new technology that hasn’t even been considered today, but that will become obvious later.
But, you see, there are ALREADY alternatives out there…so ‘they’ don’t actually have to do more than refine the existing technologies and market them. Then see which emerge. No magic wand required. Of course, in the mean time, billions are being spent on R&D into all manner of alternatives, and it’s at least theoretically possible that something useful will emerge. In fact, I’d say it’s pretty much inevitable that SOMETHING will emerge, at some point. Because, again, there are literally trillions on the line.
Or, I suppose, you could believe that no one will be able to do anything, and that we’ll simply give up a large percentage of our infrastructure and way of life and move back into densely populated urban centers where we can huddle together using mass transit while the rest of the country slowly goes back to nature and rots away. Personally, if we are making assumptions and all, I’d say that mine is closer to reality than yours is.
But wait! I’m making assumptions here, YOU have conclusions. I missed it…where did you draw these conclusions from again?
Again, even assuming you are correct and that biofuels will never permit a one to one substitution for oil based fuels (and, frankly, I’d like to see what you are basing that on, considering all the research going into bio-engineering these days), so what? Why does it HAVE to be a one for one? What about a bio-fuel hybrid? What about hydrogen? Methane? Hell, what about all the untapped hydrocarbons still out there (tar sands, shale oils, etc)?? What about a mix?
And none of this needs the magic ponies in order to happen. But that assumes there will be no breakthroughs in pony power…at a time when breakthrough technology and science is happening at a rate unprecedented in human history.
Frankly, I’ve never understood this form of ‘skepticism’, since it seems more driven by ideology and a desire to make the world fit into a certain world view than it does by reality. It’s like the folks who have this kind of ‘skepticism’ want to ignore the technologies that already exist and are simply not being mass produced today because they aren’t currently economically viable due to how cheap oil still is or because the current capital costs outweigh any reasonable ROI TODAY. As if how things are today are how things will always be. in addition, they also seemingly want to ignore the fact that we are in a period of almost exponential scientific and technological discovery, and instead want to focus on their desire to have people go back to some model of how humans should live that they keep tucked away in their own heads.
-XT
As far as the state of New York is concerned, a town and a suburb are practically synonomous. I’m sure other states have official designations as well. But what do you believe is the fundamental difference between a town and a suburb?
City living is more stressful. The scientific, anecdotal, and logical arguments agree on this. I don’t know if they’ve done studies on the suburbs’ soulessness, but at least where there is a gradient between city, suburbs, town, and country, those with the means can choose where they want to live. Not so when everything is one big suburb.
I think I hear a lot of suburban homeowners whistling past the graveyard in this thread.
In Atlanta, I see the described trend in action every day. Young middle class and wealthy people are streaming into the city (often from their parents’ homes in the suburbs) while the poor are being driven into the suburbs by economics and policy decisions.
What puzzles me about this trend is how the working poor are going to be able to afford a daily commute into the city when gas prices inevitably rise. (?)
But why? Do you honestly believe the suburbs will just disappear? Or will they (more likely) change into something that more resembles a mixed-use locale?
Beyond that, the linked article is nothing more than NIMBYism about more brown people moving into the burbs. The horror!
Second of all, the end of the article even recognizes that minority population jumped in the US in the last decade and that it’s only going to continue to grow. They’ve got to live somewhere don’t they? The article also said that poor people are still more likely to live in the city. So I really don’t understand all this head scratching about what will the poor suburban folks do because they’re so poor.
I dislike suburbs, but they aren’t going anywhere. The existing suburbs would have to become about 10x denser to make any appreciable difference. For example, compare the relative densities of very sparse suburbs such as Atlanta versus relatively dense suburbs like LA. There is no big difference in lifestyle, as far as I can tell, but the difference in density is huge.
If you limit the future to “more” I agree with you. That hardly is going to turn the suburbs into something significantly different.
I mentioned the trend to making suburban centers denser a few posts ago. I don’t live near work, since I have too many books to fit into one of those condos. I’ve moved around enough, while staying in the same company, to make a car necessary. However, after my wife had eye surgery and couldn’t drive, she found that she could get whatever she needed on foot.
Heh. I live in Silicon Valley, and this is old news to me. I can walk to some really fine Afghan restaurants and grocery stores. I can walk a bit further to a fantastic Asian supermarket - as big as the standard ones. The diversity we have here is really pretty cool. Now if I could only walk to a decent deli …
A town is essentially self-contained. It contains all the things that people need in their day-to-day lives: residences (of different sizes and qualities), workplaces (of many different kinds), basic public institutions like schools, libraries and clinics, shops with all the necessities, restaurants, entertainment venues. And these things are not haphazardly scattered, but arranged and connected so that they are readily accessible to the people who live in the town, and they generate activity–public life–between them, and thus support each other economically. Of course people who live in the town may work or shop elsewhere for various reasons, but they don’t absolutely have to. The town makes sense on its own terms.
A suburb is essentially dependent. It contains residences. (Often the residences are all of similar description, which means that people of the wrong age or income bracket or family size may not find something suitable.) It may contain some of the other elements of a town, but it rarely has all of them; they are not arranged with the intention or expectation of supporting one another or generating life between them; largely built as islands in a stream of motor traffic, they are very hard to use for people who don’t have personal motor vehicles–the young, the old, the poor. Most people who reside in suburbs work elsewhere by necessity. The suburb makes no sense except as an adjunct to a larger town.
Well, you’re right that it will mean big changes. I would like to try to preserve the parts of “modern society” that we all agree are nice to have, rather than throwing up my hands and saying it’s all going down the shitter. Or pretending that nothing needs to change.