I am a liberal who lives in a bedroom community (hypocrite!) and your post accurately summarizes my views on the matter. I like cities that organically grew out of existing settlements/towns, not ones that have been bare ground for hundreds of years until a developer decides to plant a bunch of McMansions there.
Bedroom communities, including the one in which I live (which is about 20,000 people and lies approximately 25 miles from San Francisco), tend to be less car-centric; I can easily walk to supermarkets, bars and restaurants from my front door. But growing up in Orange County CA, such a thing would be inconceivable; the nearest supermarket was several miles from our house. Then there’s the aesthetic reasons you also mentioned in your post. Basically, true suburbs feel far too planned and fake for me.
Obama isn’t a liberal, fox news isn’t a real cite, curbing sprawl isn’t a war on suburbs, the Sierra Club isn’t political, reducing the need for cars is just good sense… man. That might be one of the wrongest posts ever made! Congrats!
No, not really, unless you believe the threat of nuclear war ended with the cold war.
At a minimum, North Korea may ultimately be able to lob a missile at us, or a terrorist smuggle in a nuke. It will not destroy the city, no matter what they attempt to claim for propaganda purposes.
Next thing you know somebody in the public eye will bring up the astounding fact that homeowners aren’t the only people who matter.
I don’t think there’s a war on suburbia, but given population growth it can’t go on much farther. How far are most people willing to commute? At what point does it become a dealbreaker?
Somebody mentioned Robert Heinlein. I recall another typical sci-fi meme, which was that there would be new cities with their own suburbs to accommodate the population. In the Star Trek universe, Captain Christopher Pyke was supposed to be from “Mojave”, a city of some millions in what we call the Inland Empire. As catastrophic as that sounds environmentally, perhaps it wouldn’t have been so bad if it meant the retention of open space between L.A. and “Mojave”, along with small towns that retained their history and character.
But we didn’t get Mojave. What we got is most of the jobs still in L.A., and people commuting from ever more distant points. I once worked in El Segundo and my officemate came in every day from Corona.
Not sure what was difficult to understand. Liberals who romanticize city life and move there are most definitely upper middle class. Working class liberals, though they are very few, want to move out of the city because they cannot afford to live in the gentrified districts carved out by upper middle class liberals and send there children to private schools. They know the realities of city life including ruthless crooked police, bad schools, corrupt governments, and food deserts.
I can’t say if any particular group likes one or wages war on the other, but I will ask: if liberals supposedly want to live in a diverse area, then so be it…what’s wrong with that? By the same token, if conservatives wish to be among their “own kind” then again: so be it…what’s wrong with that? People can live wherever they can afford to; if you want diversity then move to such an area; if you want your “own kind” then that is fine too. Why be critical of either one?
As with many topics, we should probably define our terms and stipulate that we really mean not “liberals” generally, but “well educated white liberals” or–to leave race out of it–what Paul Fussell calls “category X”.
Right, again with the need to define terminology. This is what “suburbia” means to me. Your version might technically be a suburb, but it is not “suburbia”, KWIM?
MadMonk’s snerk about the Olive Garden is on point. Let’s face it: part of the enjoyment of being a liberal is to sneer at people who dine in such places, shop at strip malls, etc.
It is likely “the city”, regardless of what it once was. Many metros have inner ring “suburbs” that are just extensions of the city with a grid layout, and no discernible difference from the city itself. That is not suburbia in any meaningful sense.
But you don’t live in the suburbs. Not even technically. You live within the city limits!
I am a liberal, erstwhile (and still wannabe) urbanite, and I will admit this leaves a mark. However, the issue at hand is liberals’ reasons for disliking suburbia, which I think are valid. I want to live in an ideopolis, which means not in suburbia (and also not on a farm or in a ghetto).
Pffft. I am Marxian (see the “profit” thread), and I think Obama is clearly center-left in his policies and outright liberal in his disposition.
I was stunned to read recently that the average American commute is 25 miles. The average! I would have thought this would be a 90th percentile commute at that distance, and I had already thought we had a sprawl problem.
I’m sorry if I offended you by shining a light on your lifestyle, but you can’t pretend that this isn’t what is going on in many cities.
Liberals and Democrats are most definitely not the same thing. Liberals are in a world all their own. Yes Democratic voters may support some liberal policies, but Liberals themselves are almost a different species in American society. They may be spread out at first, but their ultimate goal is to coalesce with over liberals. If they have money this occurs in trendy city neighborhoods.
It doesn’t hit close to home. I’m a low earning liberal living in a city. I moved here from the suburbs, which were way cheaper, but I like the amenities like public transportation.
You trade in stereotypes and can’t distinguish reality from fantasy. It would be pretty hard for someone like you to insult me.
Doesn’t seem to be the world you and I are living in. It’d help if you’d at least acknowledge that you’re generalizing instead of acting like you’ve stumbled onto some universal sociological findings.
We don’t have much of that in Tampa. Incompetent government, sometimes, but rarely corrupt. (The county government is another matter, but it’s gotten better since the 1980s.) The police are hardass but not crooked or brutal that I ever heard of, the schools better than they used to be, and there’s no neighborhood where you can’t get a good meal.
