What's up with the hatred of suburbia?

In My Humble Opinion
101

Yes, I know exactly what he meant, he meant to denigrate young black men who were doing nothing more than riding a bus as criminals because he didnt’ approve of their conversation – that he wasn’t a part of – and doesn’t like their clothing style. He was more than glad to write them off and describe them as having no positive future because what? They swore too much for his liking? Their clothes were baggy? Their pants were sagging? Their colors were bright?

If you don’t understand why that’s racist, I suggest you stop and think about it for a little while.

Frankly, yes, I do. And honestly, I don’t care. But I will call him on it when he thinks he can say offensive things like that as if they’re acceptable. They are not. And neither is defending them.

And the characterization of “young felon of tomorrow” is entirely about skin color. Young white men dressed like slobs and swearing and acting like jackasses aren’t called future felons, they’re at worst called frat boys, maybe thugs if their manner is threatening.

More bullshit.

As a matter of fact, it’s both.

In what fashion were they appearing dangerous? Were they sporting weapons? Were they menacing strangers? Screaming at old ladies and little children?

No, the “racism cry” is predictable when you say racist bullshit about young black men who weren’t doing anything even approaching illegal being “future felons.”

And it amazes me that suburbanites act as if the amenities of the suburbs don’t exist in cities. You specifically described the scope of urban recreational venues as dirty basketball courts. It’s false, you know it’s false, but you said it anyway as if it were true. Do they exist? I’m sure that they do. Are they the be all and end all of urban availability? Obviously not. Is it possible to live in an urban environment in a clean, safe community with beautiful, well-appointed parks and other amenities? Yes it is.

Then I suggest you broaden your own horizons.

And where do most of the people live? And what sort of crime is it?

Right now, I’m watching our local noon news reporting on a suburban family that was murdered in their home last night, all members, including the baby, shot in the head. And a suburban 20 year old woman strangled to death last night in front of her infant child. And an elderly woman who will likely die from severe burns after her suburban home was set on fire. And a conviction in the case of a young woman with developmental disabilities in the suburbs who was beaten and tortured by several young suburbanites for several days, killed, dismembered, put in a trash bag and stuffed under a dumpster at a beautifully appointed, resource laden suburban middle school.

My point: crime happens everywhere. There will be more crimes where there are more people. Despite being about as centrally urban as possible and despite my complaints about the “decline” of my neighborhood (which amounts to little more than neighbors not being neighborly) the worst thing that’s happened in my neighborhood in years was an unsupervised child being hit when he darted out into the street in front of an oncoming car, which can happen literally anywhere.

Which further illustrates that you’re talking out of your ear. So maybe you should just stop again.

That depends, definitely. As I mentioned, I’m dead central urban, on a main thoroughfare and across the street from a paramedic station and it’s quiet here at night. I know; I’m very very rarely asleep before 4 a.m. and sometimes the silence after 10 pm or so is utterly deafening.

102

I think my post attempted in a broad way to offer rational reasons for disliking the suburb phenomenon. I grew up in suburbia myself, so I feel completely comfortable in such surroundings. But I can see what a burden it is on our society, financially, environmentally, quality-of-life-ally, and so on.

103

I agree with this. A number of suburban dwellers I know have expressed the same kind of sentiments as pullin regarding their fear of crime and raising their kids in a “safe” place, and it’s hard not to read as racism. I live in Oakland, for Chrissakes, and somehow I’ve managed to get by without ever being molested by the scary criminals lurking in the shadows around every corner. But I’ll just be content to walk out my door and be able to choose from dozens of different types of cuisine within a few blocks and the monthly art walk and concerts and the various other cultural benefits (including basketball courts without crack addicts!) of living in an urban hellhole.

104

Yes, I’m pretty sure people got that.

105

“They’re evil.” Very rational.

The variosu claims concerning the environemtnal and financial aspects, while questionable, I’ll leave aside (do you really think suburbs are causing us to lose necessary farmland? When we’re paying farmers to not grown things?) but “Quality of life”?

The problem with this is that if suburbs reduce quality of life, why do people move there? Clearly, many people like living there. Given a choice, they prefer to live in suburbs; they find it the most utility-maximizing investment of their time and money with regards to home location. So for those people, suburbs clearly do not reduce their quality of life, they increase it.

I very much like Toronto and there’s some things about living there I adored, but I simply do not want to live in it anymore, for a variety of reasons (largely being that I could not afford much of a home.) I can see the appeal of genuinely rural areas but that’s even less my cup of tea. I prefer living in a suburban city. My quality of life is enhanced by living here, and I’d assume it’s true of most of the 170,000 people who live in Burlington, or the 170,000 who live in Oakville, or (insert population and name of Toronto suburb.) What rational argument do you have that it reduces quality of life when all these people choose to live here?

I have no rational argument that living in Toronto proper reduces quality of life. While it isn’t where I want to live, it evidently is where 2,500,000 people want to live. I have to assume (granted some of them are children and don’t have a choice, but never mind) that, since this is a free country and you can live where you please, those people have examined the evidence and have chosen to live there because it provides the specific tradeoffs that they personally feel maximizes their quality of life. Who am I to say they’re wrong?

106

They’re wrong because they’re making everything worse for everyone. And for themselves as well: They are more comfortable in their surroundings for now, but the choices they are making will continue to make their choices more difficult to achieve and more and more expensive.

This is a case in which individual quality-of-life decisions reduces the quality of life of everyone as a whole. It’s like the tragedy of the commons in a way. Sprawl and the increased costs of transportation, increased road congestion, and everything else, make life more expensive and more difficult for everyone. And furthermore, suburban sprawl sends things into a spiral in which things keep getting more consumptive, more costly, and more burdensome.

This is the kind of thing in which if there were rational planning of allocation of resources, everyone would be better off. I’m not saying that everyone has to be told exactly what conditions they should be living in, but at the very least, individuals who make decisions that are costly to society should be made to pay their fair share of negative externalities.

The farm subsidy system is a mess and really says nothing about what our farmland needs are. The fact is that our urban areas need more close-in surrounding farmland because of (1) the environmental and other costs of transporting food from farther and farther away and (2) the environmental, nutritional, and other costs of increasingly intense food production on shrinking farmlands. Just one example, our feedlot operations are so dense with livestock that they are producing quantities of fecal pollution and runoff at a level that cannot be absorbed by the surrounding environment. Food production needs to be more spread out.

Er, thanks for latching on to a flippant remark at the end of my post. Obviously that negates everything else I said … or something?

107

Even that isn’t necessarily true. The suburb I live in has pretty good public transportation. My house is five minutes from a rail rapid transit station; from there I can take the train into downtown of the center of the metropolitain area in about a half hour.

108

The suburb I live in is about 60% Asian. Very far from exclusively white.

109

We do have a (very small) opera company in the suburb where I live.

Also, it’s quite diverse – about 60% Asian (both East Asian and South Asian), 30% white, the rest black and hispanic.

This is the San Francisco area, which is perhaps not like the rest of the country.

110

I live in Surburbia - hell, I live in Orange County, CA. This place is often considered the model of modern suburbia. The ONLY thing I see missing from an urban environment is mass transit / walking access to more.

I think that the hatred (in both directions) is due to gross stereotyping, minimal exposure, and general sour grapes / defensiveness / hipsterism.

From my stucco home in suburbia, I am less than 30 minutes of driving from:

  • Performing arts of varying types
  • An entire University
  • Almost all “ethnic” foods (except Ethiopian - that requires LA or going back to Washington DC).
  • I scare quote ethnic above because my area has a pretty wide degree of different ethnicities, so ethnic almost seems to be a misnomer at this point. My white males sons are the minority in schools of Chinese, Persian, Korean, Hispanic, Japanese, Indian and African kids.

I get all of this with big parks, wide streets, sidewalks, and one of the lowest per capita crime rates in the nation for a city of my size (greater than 100k in total population).

111

People’s vision of the suburbs really boggles my mind. I’ve lived in the suburbs all my life most of the things you’re talking about that happen “in the suburbs” sounds completely foreign to me.

I live in a place that is about 20 miles outside of Cleveland and 20 miles outside of Akron. We are not technically a suburb of either city, as we don’t abutt either city.

In the past month I’ve mowed my lawn, planted a plant, sat on my deck, cleaned my car in my garage, spoken with my Indian neighbor, gone to a museum, saw the band Cake in an auditorium, went to two professional sporting events, ate in a vegan-friendly restaurant, walked down a street and “window shopped” for records, vintage clothes and vintage toys, saw three local bands in two venues, and signed up for the local farmer’s market food pickup.

There’s nothing keeping me from enjoying the city as much as citydwellers do. It just takes a little more gas for me to be able to do it. And I’m able to enjoy the “country” as well.

I won’t even comment on the assumption that we all live in “McMansions” or have HOAs or cookie-cutter anything. Cuz that just isn’t true and you know it.

112

So you claim, in absence of, well, a convincing argument.

More than half the population of greater Toronto lives in what could be described as surburbs. So your argument is that by living where they prefer to live, more than half the population is somehow making it worse for themselves, as opposed to living somewhere they do not want to live.

What alternative do you propose? Should they be forced to live in dense cities? Exactly how do you propose to effect such a solution?

You’d almost think they should be forced to pay relatively higher property taxes, or taxes on gasoline.

But… er, actually, at least around here, they do exactly that.

I wholeheartedly agree that negative externalities should be taxed or prices appropriately, but you’re coming up damned short of “suburbs are evil.” You know as well as I that a slight increase in gax or property taxes over their already high levels isn’t going to get rid of suburbs.

Anti-surburbia sentiment is, mostly, elitist bullshit, and has been in vogue among elitists since the 19th century and the invention of railroads, when the Duke of Wellington bitched and complained that the invention of rail transport allowed working class people too much freedom of movement. One in a hundred people will trot out an economic argument against it but that’s already being solved through higher taxes in most places; around here a third of the price of gasoline is tax, and Canada’s actually not that bad as industrialized nations go. If what you’re arguing for is different tax policy by all means do so but don’t think for an instant it’ll make the suburbs go away. People wnt to live in suburbs, they have perfectly good reasons for doing so, and live in them they shall.

Double the size of urban areas and we’ll still have more than enough farmland - built up areas are a smal lfraction of arable land and unused farmland - and the marginal cost of transporting food from 200 miles away versus 50 is essentially nothing; “buy local” is the dumbest idea to come down the pike since garlic-flavoured mouthwash, since the saved transportation costs (which are miniscule as compared to the value of food) are far outweighed by the energy and wastage of going to smaller, inferior economies of scale. There’s also the rather obvious problem that while getting rid of Suburb X would push Farm Y a few miles closer to the city, it would also moive the customers exactly as many miles further away from the farms. I’m sorry, but that’s a complete non-starter. We’re awash in arable land; the problems facing agriculture have nothing to do with surburbs.

There is no logical or evidentiary reason to believe this is caused by the existence of suburbs. We have ample room for farms and livestock; farmers are driven to overproducing simply because it’s cheaper to do so and they can carve a few bucks off the cost of production. You can use regulation to stop densification of livestock and not touch a suburb. Or you could tax farmers to pay for the negative externalities they’re producing, just as we’re proposing to tax suburbanites.

113

I may be mistaken, but I believe the nature of the “buy local” movement is to support small farmers over giant industrial mega-farms. Also, local produce is theoretically fresher than produce shipped halfway across the country because it doesn’t have to travel as far. I have never heard of transportation costs being one of the main issues.

114

I grew up in Queens in a semiattached house in a neighborhood where, though you could walk to a bus, you still mostly needed a car.

115

I feel like I’m back in the '50s, with everyone moaning and groaning about Levittown.
I love the city, but often people don’t live their because their jobs aren’t there. I could live in San Francisco, but then I’d have a 50 mile commute every day. No thanks.

There are three types of suburbs. The town I live in in NJ counts as a suburb, but the town is hundreds of years old, with the church across the street from where I lived the place the Hessians fled after the battle of Trenton. There were plenty of women volunteering there, but not out of status, but because they got to stay home thanks to being married to people working at the local research centers, and thus had time.

Where I live now was a standard development 55 years ago, but now while some of the houses are the same inside, very few are the same outside. Trees? The tree next door was easily 150 feet tall, and was scary, and the park has large redwoods. People all the same? We have the largest Afghan community in the US half a mile away. No sidewalks? Sidewalks everywhere, and tons of people are out walking all the time. I also have probably 40 restaurants in over a dozen cuisines within easy walking distance.
HOA? We have one, and they are sometimes a bit obnoxious in trying to get people to take their trash in, but it is run by old people. Still, from what I hear, your average Co-op board makes them look like a sewing circle.
The just build development does have all the houses looking the same, and only small trees - but give it time, and it will diversify also.

116

Echoing what others have said, the personal disgust I have for some suburban neighborhoods are the very new ones, that began appearing in the 90’s.

Older suburbs are quite nice: leafy, cobblestones, winding roads, no HOA’s, interesting architecture, even some small walking areas/shopping areas like you’ve described in your 'burb, quality restaurants that rival city ones. Pittsburgh has a few of these. Affluent suburbs are really quite nice. They still close up shop earlier than the city and don’t have the same restaurant options but they are still nice places to live. Also what falls under these “older suburbs” category are suburbs in very socially progressive cities, like San Francisco.

Small cities and college towns are also not “the suburbs” - sometimes they’re all lumped in together when the former two are often quite nice, with dedicated main streets and walkability.

But it’s the 100k starter homes (Ryan homes, basically) churned out by the thousands in horrible, unplanned unincorporated areas that make me nuts. The 3-4 lane traffic is horrible all the time. The people universally do this: go to local college or trade school, graduate by 23, get married by 26, have 2 children before 30, get fat. The women often don’t work. Nobody travels except to see relatives. Everyone eats fake Mexican food or fake Chinese food for dinner out. They go to megachurches on Sunday.

I was volunteering at a Petco (for an unrelated charity) when 30 heads swiveled to the front - where a young black woman and a white guy were holding hands. That would never happen in the city itself.

In short, there is no intellectual curiosity, there is no drive to succeed nor authenticity of food or culture. The only interests are in maintaining the status quo in a “new” house and living paycheck to paycheck in a bland suburb away from the city (and scary brown people).

And all of that is universally reviled by the 'dope.

117

I’m not sure that this level of aggression is the norm outside of, say, GQ or GD. I’m not in this thread to offer a rigorous defense of any particular position. So if you’re dissatisfied with my level of specificity or justification, I’ll just have to disappoint you, because at this point, I’m not really interested enough in this topic to put that much energy into it.

They don’t pay anywhere near the amount of the impact they have on the environment and quality of life in general. Sprawl makes massive demands on infrastructure, water, power, roads, which have disproportionately increasing effects the farther you move from the urban center. Water wastage is massive, and then you add on the absolute dead weight loss of water on fucking Kentucky bluegrass (and other environmentally-net-negative species) lawns, the maintenance of which is tantamount to starving a fair portion of the worlds population of humans, not to mention the massive destruction of habitat for non-human species. Every house in the suburbs has a geometrically large impact on the use of resources and space that a house closer to the urban center has. The very existence of a single road cutting through otherwise green areas is a huge disruption to animal life as well as a huge source of pollution to adjoining green areas.

I’m not talking about a “slight” increase. I’m talking about increases large enough to dissuade large numbers of people from moving farther away from the city center, growing exponentially higher with each mile. Perhaps even entirely cutting off at defined boundaries tax-supported infrastructures like power, water, roads, bridges, etc.

Well, then, I’m glad I haven’t engaged in any anti-elitist bullshit. As I said, I grew up in the suburbs and when I’m in them I like them just fine. The Duke of Wellington’s concerns are not mine.

Not hardly.

I don’t know about Canada, but in the United States, the gasoline tax is not high enough to dissuade people from driving or from moving out to outer-ring suburbs.

Some of them will, and those that do should be required to compensate for the damage that they do to the environment. Currently, we’re nowhere near making them feel any of those costs.

And what about the expenditure of energy to transport, which is one of the main negative externalities. One of the principal advantages of buying local is that less driving is done to get the goods from source to destination.

118

Mr. Neville and I both dislike driving. So any car-dependent suburb was completely out of consideration when we looked for a house to buy.

He has a job where he works long hours, and I’m allergic to lawn grass. Doing our own yardwork is a no-go for us. So a large yard was a minus, not a plus, for us, since landscapers presumably charge more to do a large lawn than a small one.

We live in a house in an old neighborhood of Pittsburgh, where he can catch a bus to the campus where he works from about three doors down from us.

119

You’ve just defined a large part of NYC as suburban. Really- big pieces of Brooklyn , Queens and the Bronx , most of Staten Island ( possibly correctly:)) and possibly even some parts of Manhattan. I absolutely live in an urban area, yards and all, just like Doug and Carrie and the Bunkers. My lot is 20 feet wide, and my house takes up 17 feet of it. I have a train and about six buses within three blocks of my house. Good public transportation is one of the things that defines an urban area. Mixed-use areas are another - the same streets which are predominantly single family houses have the occasional deli , neighborhood bar , video store, pizzeria etc. Schools are right next to houses .There are lots of houses containing various professional offices (doctor, lawyers, accountants) and the stores on the shopping street have apartments over them. There is zoning, but the zoning doesn’t completely separate residential and all commercial uses
And proof that it’s urban - my 20+ year old children don’t know how to drive

120

Which begs the question, where does the “city” end and the “suburbs” begin? I used to live outside of Boston. Towns like Brookeline and Newton are very suburban, but they are still close to the downtown and within the public transportation network (the “T”). When people think of “suburbia” I think they are either thinking of “exerbs” where people commute an hour from wherever the fuck to work downtown and then head back right home after work. Or they think of cities like Phoenix, AZ, Jacksonville, FL or much of Southern California which are just giant blobs of sudivisions and office parks with little to no discernable “downtown”.

My GF and I went to visit some friends in Eastern PA. And while the Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton area may be the third largest metro area in PA, it is very “suburban”, borderline “rural”. Basically everyone we saw was like a fat version of Dwight Shrute eating disgustingly massive portions of everything. at the local Chilli’s.