What's up with the hatred of suburbia?

In My Humble Opinion
21

It’s not so much about the surface appearance, but the overall shape of the buildings and their placement relative to each other. Suburban “townhouse” developments usually fail because the blocks of houses are sort of scattered around the edges of central parking areas. In effect, each section is floating in negative space like detached single-family houses, rather than creating positive outdoor spaces. The site is full of vague areas that don’t seem to belong to any particular house or group of houses, and consequently aren’t really used for anything.

Note that suburban developments can be built to overcome this particular problem, they just usually aren’t. But this particular point is at the level that an individual builder-developer could solve. Some of suburbia’s other problems really can’t be solved except at the regional planning level.

22

You are generalizing about some things that don’t apply to most suburbs. You are talking mostly about housing developments which are a specific type of suburban environment but by no means the most common one.

We have sidewalks here. Big ones that are many miles long. The houses are a mix of history from the 1600’s - the present and there aren’t any Home owners associations. Trees, ponds, lakes, bike trails, parks, and conservation land are everywhere. Street are perfectly well maintained. I work in a suburb just not the one I live in just like many people do. There are plenty of jobs but not necessarily for the people that live in them. People have to do house and yard work at some point but the city is always noisy.

Public transportation? Uhhhh? You may have a point on that. Drive or die.

ETA
I am starting to get confused in this thread. Are we talking about suburbs in general or housing developments planned and built on a central plan? They aren’t the same thing.

23

I have never seen this, and am not sure I even understand what you’re talking about. All the suburbian neighbourhoods I know have houses with driveways on a street… I did once live in a townhouse with an underground garage system, but that was in downtown Toronto so not suburbAn per se…

And on preview, like Shagnasty says, HOAs may not be as prevelant everywhere. I’ve never encountered one, though that townhouse in Toronto had one hell of an anal condo board.

24

I question your premise. I don’t really think it’s all that fashionable to hate the suburbs any more. It was more of an 80’s - 90’s thing. People like different places and higher density, anti-sprawl developments are strongly pushed in may areas, but i don’t see nearly as much current disdain for suburban living as there was 10-20 years ago

25

I refer to exactly the responses you see here. The suburbs are bland, sterile wastelands filled with racist white people who work soul-crushing jobs to buy electronics and uncreative landscaping.

Thank you for the responses to my question of what you don’t like about the suburbs, but I really don’t see many things that are not also prevelant in citoes. Can someone describe for me the housing and lifestyle they see as typical to the lifestyle they do like and how it differs from the suburbs?

26

It depends on your ideology. Some people hate the suburbs because they promote visual homogenization. Some people hate them because they symbolize the destruction of ecological systems. Some people hate them because they increase the amount of commuters, thereby increasing air pollution. Some people hate them because they encourage big lawns. The lawns themselves require an extraordinary amount of water and chemicals to keep visually pleasing. The chemicals leach into the ground, polluting the water table. The last three of those reasons are owed to people with identical ideologies. You know, green activists.

Social activists hate (or simply dislike) them because they insulate communities. Spatially, they create boundaries between people of different incomes. They re-inforce the whole “poor people are criminals” thing. It’s especially nettling when the suburbs are circumscribed by tall wrought-iron gates. At least to some social activists. Those same social activists sometimes hate them because they create a doughnut effect in the interior of the urban environment to which they are attached. Businesses and public services migrate to the suburbs. They leave the inner city. Hollowing it, essentially.

I have a more personal dislike for them. In my part of the country they’ve begun to make it difficult for nature enthusiasts to reach public land. They insert themselves between the community and public wilderness. They make unfair demands W.R.T. water rights and land rights. They raise property values. Property taxes go up. It’s harder and harder to afford property. They’re without exception populated by worthless dickhead busybodies from neighboring states, who have come seeking some kind of imagined, mythological American wilderness. It’s disheartening for me to look up at the mountains at night and see it increasingly pricked by the bright and shining lights of rich suburbanites. I’m a selfish person, I guess.

27

One thought, I wonder how much of the difference of opinion is American? I’ve lived in cities, rural areas, and suburbs in Canada, Portugal, and Australia, but never the States. Could it be that I’m missing some key piece of perspective here?

28

yes. And that is no matter where in the world you look, you’ll find people who are mad at people who don’t agree with what they think is right.

29

A sign of changing times, I suppose. I grew up in a residential area of L.A., not truly suburban but like a suburb in many ways–stores and amenities miles of steep hilly streets away, and no public transit. And, of course, no sidewalks–but kids in the neighborhood just walked to their friends’ houses anyway. At some point in my early youth I was taught to walk on the left side of a road with no sidewalk, so as to face the oncoming traffic.

Whether suburban or semi-urban/mixed-use/commercial, residential streets in L.A. often don’t have sidewalks, but it’s perfectly easy and safe to walk without them. When I need to walk somewhere I tend to favor these quieter streets so I can better hear whatever I’m listening to on my smart phone.

30

I don’t have a general hatred of suburbs, but there are certain types that I would hate to live in. Certain suburbs north of Atlanta and in some areas of Sacramento seem designed to keep people isolated and enforce driving. It is definitely an emotional response - visiting friends in these suburbs I feel a bit lost in the desert navigating the side streets and cul-de-sacs - I’d hate that I’d have to drive anywhere just for a simple errand. I’d also hate to live in an area with lots of subdivisions with strict HOAs.

That said, I would say I live in a suburb here in East Sacramento, and next month when I move to Berkeley in the Bay Area. But both areas are close to urban centers and very walkable (for restaurants, grocery stores and pretty much all services). I like the feel of both: no HOAs, all the houses look different and reflect the individuals who had them built over the many decades, its fairly dense with lots of trees, etc. I like that my favorite deli is just down the block, that I can walk to three grocery stores, all the different lunch spots I could possibly want, etc. I have that now and I’ll have that in Berkeley. I’d be sad without it.

I will say that I don’t have any strong ideological views about this. I just know what I do and don’t like. And I know I’d be miserable in a more stereotypical driving only suburb.

31

– No services available in several blocks
– No sidewalks
– No shade

If there is a place that breaks all the above rules, I typically don’t think of it as a “suburb” even if it is far away from a city center and has large lot sizes and is full of cookie cutter homes. But the number of times I have seen that is very low, especially on the similar homes. Typically a place that is in a walkable neighborhood with sidewalks and trees has been around long enough that the houses have been given time to diversify themselves from each other.

32

[quote=“lavenderviolet, post:3, topic:582742”]

One common complaint is that suburbs are bland, generic places where all the stores are chain stores and all the homes look the same. Urban areas often have more unique character.

**Also, at least in certain parts of the country, there is a perception that suburbs are where the uptight white people who are scared of black people flee to.[/**QUOTE]

I absolutely agree 100% with the bolded above!

33

Honestly, I think it’s mostly jealousy. Most suburbs are expensive and have better stores (high quality), the school systems are better, better neighbors, the cops come when you call and usually fast, and for the most part crime rates are low. I think it’s easy to harbor resentment. No one really wants to say “I’m jealous of suburbianites/I wanna live in the suburbs” because it’s not like it’s the top of the top. It’s not where the top 10% live.

I also think it’s the PC thing to say because suburbia is seen as materialistic and nondiverse.

I have to say personally, I’ve lived in the suburbs most of life and I enjoy it. I lived in the city for a while and it’s not for me. I can’t do apartments. I barely made it through the time I spent in them.

34

That’s just an ad hoc redefinition of suburbs to include things you don’t like however. No one likes things that are self-defined to consist of mostly negative traits which is what some people are doing here.

A suburb is defined as being a residential area dependent but outside of a city center. It may or may not have businesses of its own (upscale suburbs with few professional jobs are called bedroom communities). Suburbs can have any types of houses of any age from old mansions to condo complexes. In short, they are quite varied from downright poor suburbs with crumbling infrastructure of their own to gated communities that you need to show an id to even get into.

35

That’s an odd criticism. Which caused more destruction of the ecological system: the area in shown in this GIS? Or this one? Not to say that there aren’t legitimate criticisms about suburbs, but this one is kind of baffling to me. Is it that the destruction of the ecosystem is worse in the suburbs merely because it’s more recent?

36

You’re going to make big trade offs every where you live. I’ve lived all over personally and there’s no such thing as perfect.

I honestly find it almost “provincial” when I hear someone who has lived in a specific city virtually 100% of their lives talk about what’s outside the city. Some people think anything outside their city is farm land, and that 100% of the United States outside the largest 8-9 cities is literally just endless fields.

Others think it’s just endless suburbs, miles and miles of equally sized plots with nearly identical homes.

The truth is actually only like 30% of America lives in what people from New York City or Chicago would consider “urban.” You see we’re highly urbanized according to the census, but the census definition for urban is essentially “any census defined place with a population greater than 2,500.” You see when they started using the terms urban/rural, rural literally meant farm land, and you literally had to walk miles to the next neighbor, or you had small share cropper huts close together but miles and miles between little communities and sometimes a day trip or longer to get somewhere with real stores and etc.

Outside of the large cities you have:

Small and Medium Sized Cities (pop. 35,000-250,000), many of them hundreds of years old. They may not have as wide a variety of cultural groups, as a New York or Chicago but a lot of them will surprised you with how unique they are and how even in the smaller cities there are very well defined, historic neighborhoods.

As you get smaller than cities like that you get into smaller and smaller communities, but even on down to the 5,000-10,000 population range I can still name some little towns I’ve been in which are their own little communities and very much “small city” and not “suburb” in style.

Then you do have the actual suburbs, highly residential areas with only heavily consumer oriented businesses (the stereotype being most of the businesses there are to serve the residents, whereas in a city proper you might have more large scale service, manufacturing, or other sorts of business that the people who live in the suburbs work at.)

After that you get into people who genuinely live in rural areas. This isn’t the same as people who “live on a farm.” A lot of people live outside of any incorporated city and in sparsely populated areas but they just have a big yard and a long drive between neighbors, they aren’t necessarily farmers (in fact most of them aren’t.)

And then there of course are still like almost a million farmers in the U.S., and they do typically live on real farms.

For me I personally like medium sized cities a lot for their convenience combined with their relatively high quality of life (in the measures that are important to me.) Something that I found really aggravating when I actually lived in D.C. itself years ago is you’re basically committed to shopping at little boutique stores to buy staples. You end up paying 50% more than someone can pay for the same quality stuff at Wal-Mart, and the dude who owns that store lives out in Reston and is a borderline millionaire. It’s a hassle to buy lots of stuff at once (be it staples, electronics, anything) because you either have to drive and fight insane traffic or you have to carry stuff through the public transit system, and you don’t really want to do that if you have a ton of stuff you’re carrying. For large items it’s almost guaranteed you have to pay for delivery.

The noise and smaller living space don’t bother me as much, but that’s also a major negative for large cities.

True rural areas also have a lot of negatives. I own a cabin on the WV/VA border that I use for hunting trips and things, and it’s a nice place to visit but I’d never want to live there. You can easily get stranded in bad snow storms, and even serious 4x4 vehicles will have trouble getting out. It has a generator but if power goes out for a long period of time you probably will not have enough fuel to keep it going (if natural gas lines were near it then you could buy one of those generators that can run off your natural gas line and keep going indefinitely, but there isn’t a natural gas line available.) Obviously unless you want to use satellite internet there is no connection to the rest of the world. Cell phone reception is laughable. Even radio stations unlikely to get tuned in very well.

Since you have to drive to buy anything it’s not a big deal to buy a lot at once since you can pile it all in your car, but if you forgot to buy toilet paper and it’s 10 AM you may be looking at a 45 minute drive to Wal-Mart. There are small stores nearby off states highways and such but as is typical in places like that, they close at like 4:30 PM or something crazy.

37

I recently read a great book called The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, and was interested to see that hatred of the suburbs has old roots. But back then (late Victorian/Edwardian period) when suburbs were getting started, it was the wealthy intellectual elite that was doing the hating on the ‘grey faceless masses’ of working-class people–clerks and lower-middle-class workers and so on–who lived in suburbs and took trains into cities for their jobs.

Because really, all those lower-class folks belonged in the country, where they ought to be peasants keeping the rural idyll going, or else they ought to be safely tucked away in manufacturing cities where no one would have to look at them. All this class mobility and the beginnings of wealth, not to mention them trying to get educations, for people who were clearly uneducable anyway was getting kind of intolerable.

So when T. S. Eliot and E. M. Forster and so on really get going on all those depressing suburbs and faceless masses, there’s just a teeny bit of snobbery going on. We wouldn’t want those poor people getting a bit comfortable and owning houses, now would we?

I was quite fascinated to see where some of that came from. It’s a really interesting book, if you’re willing to read a giant tome of social history.

38

Yes, obviously, any “modern” settlement will necessarily result in ecological destruction. That goes without saying.

It’s worse because the suburbs cause ecological destruction on a much larger scale. Take a look at this GIS and compare it to this one. Can you appreciate the difference? Which has the greater population density? If you disseminated the whole population of urban New York into a suburban development, how far would it stretch? Certainly you can see that it would result in far greater ecological destruction, right? It’s the difference between an apartment building that projects thirty stories into the sky and a suburban residential area that accommodates people along a horizontal plane.

39

I think we’re talking about 2 different things: suburbs and suburban pods or developments. I live in a suburb, though I don’t think of it that way. It is in a hilly, wooded area right on the edge of the city limits. There is no landscaping, unless you want to put some in, but most residents do minimal. I have no lawn. Like most people here I practice “freescaping,” letting the native plants grow as they will, keeping the brush cleared from right around the house, and planting a few perennials. Residents actually own only a small circular lot upon which their houses sit; the rest is held in commons. Deer, turkey, critters and varmints of all sort are common, even the occasional bear or cougar. The drawback is that one has to drive to any kind of shopping, and there is minimal foot traffic and therefore minimal neighborly interactions. The neighborhood board is pretty laid back. I should know; I’m vice-president of the board. We do have an architectural committee that reviews additions and landscaping proposals, but it’s not rigid or rule-bound. Most of our neighbors, after all, like the look of the neighborhood, and moved here specifically because of the way it looks, and have no desire to change the overall feel of the place.
I had a very different experience when on an extended stay with my parents in Nampa, Idaho last summer. Theres was a typical suburban pod; characterless houses that had obviously all been built at the same time by the same contractor; uniform landscaping (a newer neighborhood so there were no large trees, and the neighborhood association was run by the most uptight Nazis you could imagine, levying fines if they saw a dandelion in your yard). But what struck me as utterly bizarre was the lack of people on the streets and sidewalks right in the middle of a residential neighborhood. The weather was gorgeous; I would hop on my brother’s bike and ride all through the neighborhood - miles and miles on a beautiful summer’s evening - and never see another soul, though almost every house was populated by a whole family. Explain that to me. There was shopping within walking or biking distance, a paved trail along a creek, wide clean sidewalks and streets, and not a human to be seen. The only people I saw were in vehicles, coming and going to their domiciles. The garage door would open as they approached, shut behind them, and they disappeared. I was going on at great length to a co-worker about it when I got back, and she said “You realize that 80% of Americans live in those places…” I didn’t ask her for a cite, but I did realize that she lives in a neighborhood exactly like that.

40

I thought about this issue quite a bit when I lived in Nashville, which could be the textbook case of suburban growth and urban decay over the past 50 years or so. One would have to be blind or deeply in denial to not notice that the city interior is overwhelming black (except for a few wealthy enclaves) while the ring of suburbs surrounding it is equally overwhelmingly white. Some people may see that and jump to the conclusion that the white people moved to the suburbs because they disliked or feared black people. I don’t think that’s warranted, however. The way I see it, in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s, city centers were becoming unlivable: crime was skyrocketing, home prices were soaring, public school systems were falling apart, and so forth. Meanwhile, in the suburbs crime was low, housing prices reasonable, and schools still acceptable. So almost everyone who could afford to do so headed from the cities to the suburbs. Unfortunately most who could afford to do so were white, while those who couldn’t were mostly black.

I think we have to realize that the blandness and homogeneity of suburbs is a feature rather than a bug. There’s a reason why most people in the suburbs want to be far away from malls and businesses. It’s because they don’t want crowds and traffic near their house, and they don’t want to have to put up with lights and noise at night. In a suburbs you rarely get woken up at 3 in the morning by some idiot blasting his boom-box on the street.

The lack of diversity in businesses is also a featurethat the residents desire. Many people probably sought out suburban living partially to get away from strip clubs, porn shops, bars, tattoo parlors, all-night motorcycle repair shops, and that sort of thing. Zoning regulations in suburbs are designed to prevents those types of businesses from moving in.

Lastly to understand suburbs you have to think about children. Suburbs are entirely designed around the needs of families with children, from the size of houses to the funding for schools to the parks to the malls. City living is designed mainly for the childless, even after the urban renewal that’s taken hold in recent years.