monstro-I echo your disdain for row upon row of gaited communities, and cookie-cutter Mcmansions.
So what if it looks the same? It might not be pleasing to the eye (it isn’t to me) but it works, doesn’t it? This “homogenity, comformist” stuff is just crap.
Are you agreeing or disagreeing with monstro and I? 
This is just dumb. If you don’t like the way a neighborhood looks, that means it doesn’t work for you. It may work for other people, for a variety of other reasons beyond aesthetics, but that doesn’t mean you have to withhold judgment of the place because of that.
Frankly, I don’t care for homogenous developments in urban areas either. A lot of new “Enterprise Zone” housing is cookie-cutter, and I don’t like it. Row houses in Richmond typically bore the hell out of me and they are all over the place. But one thing I’ve noticed is that the inhabitants of many of these places aren’t afraid to put up crazy lawn art or pack their porches with overflowing flower pots and children’s toys. You may look in a window and see a poster of Jack Nickelson from “The Shining” or something else that’s as equally unexpected. Urban neighborhoods tend to allow one to fly their little freak flag, and I like that.
Suburban people are free to dislike that lifestyle as much as they want. But I’m also free to call them boring conformists. See how wonderful it is to be free?
Gosh, I live in the suburbs, and agree completely with what you say, although I absolutely love where I live.
I think the problem is that regionally (within the country) we have very different definitions of what “suburbs” are. Of course I’m most familiar with what a suburb is where I live, in southeast Michigan. I’ll posit on what I think a suburb is in other parts of the country.
Southeast Michigan is composed almost entirely of suburbs. For us, a suburb is a city that is geographically close to a big city (in our case, Detroit). The City of Warren is a suburb of Detroit. The city of Centerline is an enclave of Warren, but is still a suburb of Detroit. Hamtramck isn’t a suburb; it’s just an enclave. Some of these are big cities in their own rights. Although Troy is a Detroit suburb, it’s also a large city.
Also in SE Michigan, land, water, and other resources have always been plentiful. There’s no reason to build up. Therefore the suburban cities have always been geared towards houses. While there are trailer parks and apartments, most homes are houses. Also because these suburbs have always been cities in their own right, they’ve always been independent of the big city, and have always had their own houses, planning and zoning, and characters. While there are strip malls, those are just conveniences. Each suburb is its own, unique community.
However, there’s been a rash of subdivisions in the last 15 years. While strictly speaking I live in a subdivision (which is a very specific legal term having to do with Public Land Survey System, or PLSS), the current sense of the word “subdivision” is what I imagine the rest of the country refers to as “suburbia.” And God, it freaks my out. If I were to drive into what was not too long ago rural (i.e., farmland) Macomb Country, or worse, Canton, MI, all of the 40-acre lots (also very related to the PLSS, Google it, it’s a good read), have turned into subdivisions. These are built-to-order neighborhoods where the house occupies 95% of the platted lot, and perhaps there are 10 house designs total. I call these types of subdivisions “Stepford” (Google that, too), because that (to me) isn’t suburban living. That’s subdivision (in the modern sense) living.
I live in the suburbs, specifically a suburb of Detroit with apartments, trailer parks, rural houses, dense neighborhoods, and normal neighborhoods. I love where I live. I have half and acre (wish it were more), am close to things I need, it’s quiet, the houses are all different, the houses aren’t 1/2 acre in size, and it’s not the suburbia that the internet hates.
Not a word of your response addressed my question.
Allow me to be more clear. You said:
[QUOTE=MsRobyn]
The song is also about the superficiality of suburban life. It’s not so much about doing, it’s about being seen doing it. For example, men join clubs like the Masons and Rotary not because they care about the Masons or Rotary, but because they see it as being good for business and because their neighbors do and because they want their neighbors to see them at meetings. Women get active in the PTA because they want the other mothers to see them there because they want to be seen as good mothers. Your neighbors have to see you keep up with the landscaping, because if you don’t, you clearly don’t care about the neighborhood because you don’t care about property values. You may hate these things, but if your neighbors don’t see you doing them, you’re not a good neighbor.
[/QUOTE]
I ask again; what makes you this this attitude is uniquely suburban, and is not present in urban or, for that matter, rural social life?
Suburbs tend to be bland and uniform.
Suburbs are a massive waste of critical resources – water, energy, etc. They require people to use energy-wasting conveyances. They make it very difficult to establish efficient public transit systems. They eat up farmland and other natural areas and replace them with resource-devouring lawns. The increase costs of all kinds to society. They make it difficult for small, locally owned businesses to survice. They become locations for long stretches of ugly warehouses and shopping centers and massive, heat producing and water-polluting parking lots. They increase traffic congestion.
They’re evil.
Bull. If someone goes to great lengths to appear as a dangerous thug, I will treat them that way. At the beginning of my post I mentioned that some would twist my opinion into racism. The racism cry is fairly predictable when taking a negative position on the supposed virtues of urban life. I stand by my original position that I will raise my family where it is safe, regardless of how others view it.
(BTW: Thanks Argent Towers ;), I was away from the PC for awhile.)
[Bolding mine] As are mine. The same parks, pools, trails, etc. are easily available to my kids (see below). It always amazes me that city dwellers seem to think their venues are somehow unreachable from the suburbs.
Perhaps I wasn’t clear. They have their own cars. These are the places they typically go; We don’t ferry them. They’re certainly old enough to drink coffee.
Then enlighten me. My personal experience of urban areas (as I define the term) is almost universally negative. I’ve spent more than a little time in “the city” as a water company employee, ambulance driver, and UPS deliveryman. I’ve yet to find much to recommend it. Later forays into the urban core have only served to enforce my desire to avoid it, and to make sure my family is located safely far away.
As I mentioned upthread, the crime map for our town shows the strongest concentration of misbehavior smack dab in the middle of the city. If being close to a museum is worth the added risk of you (or your family) being a crime victim, then have at it. I’m not going to mince words: Crime happens mostly in the city; I choose to locate my family elsewhere.
See post 71. BTW although I don’t want to speak for anyone else, of course I know that suburban dwellers can use my city’s parks, bike trails etc. . And I’m sure you have your own parks. My children could get to ours on their own long before driving age. Yours presumably couldn’t ,which I assume is why you mentioned the big suburban yard where your kids play with your dogs.
Of course crime happens mostly in the city- that’s where the people mostly are. Compare the per capita crime rate- you’re liable to be surprised.
How do you define “urban area”? It’s starting to seem to me that you wouldn’t consider my middle class neighborhood of single family , owner- occupied homes as urban even though it’s in NYC and there’s less than 5 feet between my house and the neighbor on either side.
In NYC, the “suburbs” are typically defined as living outside the 5 boroughs of Manhattan or Hoboken, Weehawken and Jersey City NJ. Basically any place you need a car and live in unattached single family homes instead of appartment buildings.
There are several problems with suburbs. One is that they are isolating. By design, each house is on its own plot of land, separated from it’s neighbors by fenses and hedges. These plots are typically on cul-de-sacs where you would have no business driving down if you didn’t live there. And these streets are further grouped into subdivisions enclosed by 6 lane surface highways lined with strip malls and big box stores with massive parking lots that create a physical barrier to anyone without a car.
This isolation IMHO tends to lead to a very conservative “Middle America” mindset. People become sheltered from anything outside of what they actually experience (which for most people is commuting back and forth between home and some office park) and all their information is fed to them through the TV and internet. It creates an attitude of conformity and xenophobia as anything different is seen as a threat to their utopian existence.
There is no culture in the suburbs. Judging by my high school friend’s Facebook pages, they all pretty much became Stepford wives/husbands (fitting as we grew up in Connecticut) with identical homes and identical cars and the same J Crew clothes. They all probably eat at the Outback Steakhouse nearest there particular town every weekend.
I read your entire post. It was one of the more interesting ones. You are correct that my youngsters were limited to bike (or go-cart) range if we weren’t driving them.
Yours seems like a suburb to me. Maybe with smaller yards (like Doug and Carrie’s house on King of Queens), but no more urban than I am.
Urban to me is cramped multi-story buildings, often sharing a common wall. No yards, no driveways, only sidewalks and parking on the street.
As a kid, I was bused to an inner city school in the 70’s. It was one of the left’s grand social experiments in forcing people to live the way they, the “anointed” thought they should. It was a fairly nasty experience consisting mostly of petty crime, violence and continual intimidation. Education took a distant back seat to survival. My strong dislike of urban areas is based on my life experiences involving this time, my years driving ambulances, and driving a UPS truck. Trust me, I wasn’t treating gunshot wounds in the suburbs, and the kids weren’t stealing shit out of my truck there either.
It may be I’m applying a small set of personal experiences combined with a few episodes of Cops and Hill Street Blues to assemble a false picture of urban life as a hellish existence (it certainly was for me, tho’). But then again, the trendy here seem to base their concept of suburbia on the TV series “Weeds”.
(Sigh. Would that the average suburban hausfrau looked like Mary Louise Parker. Even Agrestic would seem desirable then. :))
Whereas in the city, you get noise 24/7. Bit of a double standard if you ask me.
Here is my take on why I don’t like suburbia. I will try to make it as dispassionate and non-snobbish as possible, but it is nonetheless a judgment of suburbia as less desirable (to me) so it could possibly offend. I hope not, though.
I find the suburbs bland and repetitive. I don’t like the fact that the same shopping plazas with the same stores seem to repeat every few miles (thinking here mostly of suburban Phoenix, but also to a lesser extent Rts 1 and 9 in suburban Boston). The things I like most about urban life are the things I can’t get in the suburbs - 2 block walk to the subway, 1-3 block walk to a dozen restaurants, short ride on the subway to museums, hundreds more restaurants, the aquarium, ice skating, the library, shopping, farmers markets. Work. You may see a theme here - I can do the things I want to do without a car. I hate getting in a car to go places. It annoys me. I have my heavy groceries delivered, a weekly organic vegetable delivery that includes coffee and cheese, and I get yuppified humanely raised meat delivered once a month from a farm in central MA. I frequent several small urban farmers markets in the summer. For everyday small groceries (picking up milk, bread, salad greens) I stop at a supermarket when I change trains on my way home from work.
Do the suburbs have good restaurants? Sure. It’s not all chains, but the variety of non-chain restaurants is often limited. And I will admit to the occasional urge to go to Applebees (which we don’t have in my urban area, you have to go to the 'burbs for it).
Do the suburbs have fun things to do? Sure, but I would have to drive to get to them, and I hate driving places. I prefer how concentrated everything is in the urban environment. And I prefer the diversity of things to do and (especially) things to eat.
Depends on the neighborhood. I find city life pretty quiet at night if you don’t live near a hospital or over a bar.
That’s because a lot of major cities were hellish shitholes in the 70s. The “white flight” trend of previous decades has largely reversed in places like NYC and Boston where newly gentrified urban areas are now the more desirable places to live and the poor and working class tend to find themselves pushed further out by rising housing costs.
It always cracks me up when people say places like Manhattan’s East Village or Hells Kitchen “just aren’t the same anymore”. Whatever. I’m sure it was awesome living there when the streets were filled with crack-whores and junkies.
I think the reason a lot of people don’t like the suburbs is simple. Since suburbs are typically inhabited by young, upwardly mobile, affluent people, it’s a VERY status conscious place. Many people don’t like that feel- it makes many people very uncomfortable to live somewhere that you feel out of place and/or like you’re being judged.
The level of pretense in the suburbs and the trendy parts of cities is about the same; it’s just that the focus is different. One’s about showing off your wealth through your possessions and children, and the other is through things like weekly organic vegetable delivery that includes coffee and cheese and yuppified humanely raised meat delivered once a month from a farm in central MA. Same attitude, different manifestation.
I say this having grown up in the West Houston suburb of Alief in the 1970s and 1980’s, lived in West Plano, TX for about 3 years, and Frisco, TX for about 5 years. It doesn’t get much more suburban than that.
However, there’s a lot of gray area between grimy Bronx-style urban life and obnoxious Southlake, TX style suburban excess. For example, my home is in an area of Dallas that was the far Northern suburbs about 40 years ago. Nowadays, we’re barely within the City of Dallas, but probably 10-15 miles in any direction from the edge of the suburbs, and more like 25 miles south of the Northern edge.
Do I live in the suburbs? I have a house and a yard, I don’t live within walking distance of much, but I also live in a fairly racially diverse area (not particularly well integrated though; the minorities tend to live in low income apartments nearby), and I’m relatively close to the central part of Dallas. Our demographics tend to be either elderly (original homeowners) or people in their 30’s and 40’s, and there doesn’t seem to be much “keeping up with the Joneses” other than trying to keep your yard mowed so you don’t have the jungle yard.
Hey! I resemble that remark!!
I also completely agree.
I think it’s obvious that what we have here are a lot of people saying “I hate people who I think are different from me,” but who don’t have the balls to actually come out and say it.
Nitpick: this is by definition a culture. What you mean is that the culture is very homogenous and/or not very individualistic. Or perhaps that there’s no indigenous suburban high culture (opera, theater, what have you). You can’t really say there’s no culture, just that there’s one culture and you don’t like it.
I live in an urban environment, a residential neighborhood adjacent to the city’s downtown area. I do, generally speaking, have a distaste for suburbia. Their concentration of chain restaurants, shopping malls, traffic concentrations, and bland mass-assembled housing communities are incredibly unappealing to me.
My larger issue, and it is specific to my city but probably exists elsewhere is the suburban sprawl. I can see in my city the downtown and adjacent areas are doing well. What used to be the suburbs, the areas outside downtown and inside our outer belt are now either dying, in a death spiral, or already dead. The areas outside our outer belt are now the “new” suburbs that just continues to expand outwards at the cost of downtown and the inside the outer belt suburban areas.
As a result, I cannot help but view those mini-van, HOA, soccer mom, almost exclusively white “enclaves” of suburban living as a negative.