Good gawd you’ve summed up my feelings about suburban Chicago perfectly. Endless sprawl on all directions. It’s a spectacle. Whenever we visited the in-laws I’d get a colossal tension headache that would gradually fade once we left and got near to the Michiana border.
Change “shitty weather” to “miserably hot weather” and you’ve neatly summed up the Dallas suburbs (Plano, Frisco, Garland) as well.
Except we don’t have Marie C. stores. Those boxes are available at any grocery store, though. (I didn’t really even know they had standalone stores.)
But yeah, “endless corporatization of the human existence” is one of the best phrases I’ve evee encountered to describe Plano.
To go back to the O.P. I was gonna say the cleaner air is a feature of rural areas, but I guess that’s highly dependent on location. Decades of NIMBY-ism have shoved a lot of pollution spewers out into the sticks, where locals have less money and political power to fight back.
“Once you get used to the smell of melted hog fat, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.” Our medium city has a giant compost facility on one side which is widely blamed for the terrible odour if the wind blows the wrong way. No reason I can see these buildings have to be anywhere close to densely populated areas.
Rural towns have their charm, and I enjoy some aspects of smaller town life. The rub is that the best small towns may be 60-90 minutes from a bigger city, but these are the most likely to:
- be more expensive
- be overrun, if charming
- lose their charm when developers come
- become congested once overbuilt
So maybe the best small towns are on a beautiful spot further away. But these are less likely to have services beyond basic, and that may include the Internet which is similar to suburbs in that it has been degraded (and improved) by endless corporitization, if more subtle.
I spent my middle school years in a far northern bedroom community for NYC. The only really good thing about that town was being on the train line.
It’s worth remarking that this type of development also characterizes exurbs (basically suburbs that have either spread or popped up in areas that are considered rural). People who live in exurbs often consider themselves “rural” and adopt the superficial trappings of rural life without actually having a connection to the traditions or the land. Avalanche pickups - check. High-powered hunting and fishing gear - check. Actual farming or hunting - eh, not so much.
It’s nothing like the quaint Main Street USA ideal that folks tend to pine for. Places that have protected that kind of community are indeed very nice places to be. But they’re an endangered species because so many people are willing to cash it all in for any kind of development at all.
I know because I grew up in a place that underwent exactly that kind of transformation. They cheered when the last dirt road was paved, they cheered when the first Chili’s went up, they grumbled about the stubborn farmers who wouldn’t sell out to subdivision developers. But sell out they did, 30 years ago. Now it’s all suburbs, all Chili’s and bowling alleys, and the “pioneers” sold out to go ruin whatever nice rural space is waiting at the next exit down on the interstate.
We came upon a suburb of Sacramento that appears to have constructed a sort of macro-shopping mall that is meant to evoke a small-town Main Street. It had a bit of an icky feel to it.
I’ve seen some of those. Though I do appreciate the gesture toward a more homey feel, I agree it falls quite short.
Lordy but do I hate Schaumburg. My idea of hell is an outing to Ikea.
However, there are hidden gems in that area. Asian Bistro & Mitsuwa, for example, are worth a look and there are tons of independent Indian & Mexican places to explore in between the seemingly endless PF Chang’s, Paneras & Olive Gardens.
There’s a Mitsuwa in the Chicago area? They’re definitely cool. The one closest to me has the best ramen vendors.
Marie Callender’s was originally a sit-down restaurant chain (and that’s likely what @squeegee was referring to), which eventually licensed the name for use in frozen foods.
The restaurants are gone from the Midwest, though apparently there are still a few dozen left (mostly in California).
Well, MC was a proxy for souless corporate franchising run amok in 'burbia in my post. Chili’s and others would fit as well.
I’ve only seen the fast food, which is unremarkable, and did not realize it was a place until discussing meatloaf.
Is there any connection between Claim Jumper frozen dinners and the chain?
It looks like the Claim Jumper name was licensed out by the restaurant company to a frozen food company to make the frozen dinners; at least in 2010, ConAgra was making both Claim Jumper and Marie Callender’s frozen pies, under license.
It also looks like the frozen Claim Jumper stuff may have been discontinued.
They’re putting up shops where anyone can open a business with parking in front. Like a main street of the past. Whatever the inspiration or implementation, if it’s a bunch of storefronts in a walkable space that people might actually walk, I can’t criticize it. Please do more.
Yep. I haven’t been in some time (it’s a bit of an inconvenient location for me) but every visit is interesting. There’s a huge Super HMart (Niles, IL) that has a lot of overlap with Mitsuwa and easier for me to get to.
I can’t find a video of the program from about 10 years ago on PBS…they compared a quirky Dallas neighborhood to life in a suburb—I don’t think they ever said “Plano” but you could see the water tower in the background of some shots. Plano’s population has changed over the past few decades…from a little under 18K in 1970 to 222K in 2000.
The Dallas neighborhood probably grew slowly, with homes and stores and schools coming in as population grew, without any master plan.
A lot of 'burbs might start with a fairly blank sheet of paper…the program said the people (in Plano) basically move in giant triangles. Presumably zoning concentrates housing in certain areas, businesses/shopping in other areas, and schools in other areas. People don’t walk much any more, which this (link) echoes, but it also names the highway system as a cause.
It’s really funny how Plano keeps popping up in this thread. I visited there just once, in 1998, and my first thought was, well, I can see why they call it Plano. It’s about the plainest place I’ve ever been.
Interesting factoid about how modern car-centric suburbs are designed. West of Pennsylvania, most of the United States was divided into parcels under the Public Land Survey System going back to the times of Thomas Jefferson. The basic unit being a “section” measuring 1 mile on each side and “townships” of 6x6 sections… These sections are subdivided into half and quarter sections. It’s the reason the landscape looks like a patchwork when you look out the window of an airplane.
Because of this, suburbs west of PA tend to be laid out along a “supergrid” of arterial roads, 1 mile on each side. The stores and offices tend to be along the main roads along the perimeters (usually set back behind massive parking lots) while the residential homes are organized into subdivisions along side streets and cul-de-sacs inside the block.
See this example outside of Dallas, TX
This has the effect of rendering most suburbs unwalkable and giving the appearance of a repetitive, almost mechanical pattern. Pedestrians are effectively trapped in their neighborhoods - first by a maze windy side streets and identical, unremarkable homes, then by a barrier of 4-6 lane highways.
In contrast, suburbs in New England and the Northeast tend to be a bit more organic. Many of these communities go back to colonial times so they often have walkable downtown areas with rail access to the nearest city.
But like all suburbs, they still suffer from the same problem of lots of people living in single-family homes with big yards means traveling some distance to get somewhere else.
IIRC my history teacher attributed some of this to the Northwest Ordinance. I grew up in the Midwest and a lot of towns could use a sheet of graph paper as a road map.
“The suburbs—where we tear out all the trees, then name streets after them.”
It first landed on my radar about 25 years ago. Money doesn’t solve all problems; it actually creates some
My hometown is not a suburb—just a small town in the middle of farms farms farms. 10 years ago, the state made some money available to build new schools and they jumped at it. But they built it outside town. Back in the day, about 75% of the students could walk or bike to school. Now, almost nobody can—it’s on a highway. WTF?
Later, they also built a new hospital. That’s right—out in the country.
It’s devolving into a bedroom community. The Wal Mart ten miles away put a lot of locals out of business because everyone would rather drive than support local businesses—that’s old news in a lot of places. Everybody and his brother has probably seen this documentary:
Walmart and McDonald’s are among the top employers of beneficiaries of federal aid programs like Medicaid and food stamps, according to a study by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office released Wednesday.
What’s next, amazon driving Wal Mart out? I never say, “It can’t get worse” because it always can.