I should clarify, I am using the term “suburban” to mean “less dense” development, rather than to signify any sort of specific city boundaries. I would, for example, consider large parts of Los Angeles to be suburban in nature, even though the areas I’m talking about are within the city boundaries.
There is a whole array of regulations, subsidies and regulations that incentivize people towards less-dense living and away from more dense living. Kimstu mentioned the home mortgage deduction, and I’ve mentioned zoning regulations already. Other things include, subsidizing highway and road development without providing equivalent subsidies for mass transit or pedestrian or bicycle transport. Or paying to maintain roads in less-dense environments that don’t have as dense traffic patterns. Or placing height restrictions on buildings. Or providing better funding for certain public schools vs. other public schools. Or failing to properly capture all the externalities from car usage. There is a whole list of these things that mean that the true cost of suburban dwelling isn’t captured by the people who live there and that the government has distorted the market to incentivize people to live in suburban environments.
For me, since I don’t care either way whether people live in less-dense or more-dense environments, I don’t see why the government should be purposefully favoring one over the other.
Good important point. There’s the city and there’s the City. There’s the country and there’s the Country. There’s the burbs and there’s the Burbs.
I am reminded of the thread awhile ago where folks argued and argued about how cheaply per day you “eat healthy”
Eventually, they figured out at one extreme folks were talking about free range totally organic chicken bought in new york city while the other extreme was talking about fresh frozen peas bought by the buckeload in middle of nowhere usa rather than 3 meals a day a mcdonalds. A rough analogy, but still…
So, what do we mean by burb vs city vs country here anyway?
Could you provide cites for 19th-century American leftist/progressive movements that opposed urbanization? I’m not seeing evidence for this as a leftist cause.
Here’s the problem. Suburbs are fine if you live someplace like Newton, MA which is a 15-20 minute ride to Boston. If you live in an exurb like where I grew up in Connecticut, they can be very isolating. There aren’t a lot of common areas where people just go and meet people and you usually have to drive like 30-40 minutes to get there. Everything takes 30-40 minutes to get there and it’s 30-40 minutes of driving through a wasteland of identical trees and houses. And the only place to get to is the mall, some assorted bars and restaurants and some office parks.
On the other hand, cities aren’t that great either. Other than Manhattan and a few others, you really still need a car because no one lives downtown. Appartments tend to be small and expensive. And let’s face it, it sucks having to walk everywhere when the weather is bad.
In some places, a big attraction of the suburbs is the school systems. For example, Washington DC schools are generally held in much lower repute than those of several suburban systems in Maryland and Virginia.
ITR champion could you post a link to the Washington Post article? The WaPo search function sucks.
I think one piece of evidence supporting the belief that the current suburb model is not sustainable is the fact that so many of them are collapsing. If you look at Washington DC, home prices have dropped all over the region and in the city by as much as 16% in some zip codes, but by more than 50% in the exburbs beyond Manasas http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/26/AR2009022603438.html
As for the original question, why the hatred for the suburbs? One problem is that modern suburbs are often designed to make life without a car impossible. I grew up in the burbs of Northern Virginia and the newer suburbs not only didn’t have sidewalks, most of the streets end in clud de sacs so you had to drive just to go to a store a half a mile away. This car culture tends to cut people off from one another. Older, closer in suburbs often don’t have this same problem because neighborhoods are more interconnected. It is in the newer exburbs where life seems to be one big traffic jam along major arteries from strip mall to strip mall. As to the question of why the government should care how peole choose to live, government is responsible for providing things like roads, hospitals and schools to people and if they are living in an unsustainable way, then government will never be able to provide the necessary services. It would seem to make good sense to create incentives for people to live in a way that is sustainable.
It’s amazing to find that there are some people who argue (and rightfully so) that cooping up animals is inhumane, and would rather prefer that they should be allowed free-range…yet some of those same people can turn on a dime and expect humans that live in suburbia should be guilted into higher density living standards.
Sorry, not buying what you’re peddling. We are social animals, yet we too need our space or our sanity pays a price.
What do prices dropping in the exurbs have to do with the sustainability of the suburbs? We’re talking about the suburbs here, you seem to be focused on the exurbs, apples and oranges really… Also, please provide a cite that ‘so many’ are ‘collapsing’. How many is so many? 10%, 50%? You also realize that ‘so many’ urban areas are also in trouble because of the housing boom and/or years of population drain.
You then proceed to, like many others, paint the suburbs with a brush that is not true for many of them (i.e., no sidewalks, unwalkable, traffic jams, etc.). Your experience with one suburb in Virginia does not = every suburb in the U.S. You realize that right?
“The average commute time for some suburbs is also shorter than previously believed – in some places no worse and sometimes better than those experienced by inner city residents.” Cite.
In addition, many jobs are now located in the burbs. There has been a huge change in where employers set up shop (see the chart in this cite). If we want people to live near their jobs, in many cases, this means living in the, gasp, suburbs.
I am trying to figure out what incentive mrAru and I are getting for living where we are.
Hm, we pay taxes, we are just now paying off our mortgage. We pay utility bills. We buy groceries, and raise some poultry and do some light gardening, though we could probably boost the amount of self production higher if we needed to.
We don’t get any subsidy as we haven’t defaulted on anything, I haven’t even filed for unemployment yet [odd as it may sound, I had enough legal and medical appointments I haven’t gotten around to it yet, it is on the schedule for tomorrow]
My town has 2500 people spread out so much we literally have a crossroads with a grocery store, and a small pretty much brand new strip mall with a convenience store, booze store, drug store, family owned restaurant and <huge yippee here> chinese take out place. There is a single 50 foot long strip of sidewalk in town, in front of the school. I live 5 miles from this tiny haven of civilization.
The nearest other town is Scotland in one direction [a small hole in the wall mom n pop grocery that almost shares a building with the post office, and a fire station, and a church] 10 miles in one direction, and Plainfield 14 miles in the other direction that is actually what most of you think of as a town, as in a Post magazine cover … and that is only because 395 runs through it.
Why yes, we do live in the ass end of nowhere … and there are more rural areas in the north east corner of the state as well …
To clarify, I personally don’t find a difference between the stiflingness of most suburbs and urban environments (not that I’ve lived in central city areas.) Communities up to very small cities feel less crowded (even if the place I would be living in in a small city is locally as crowded or more than the average suburb there is open air only a dozens blocks away in any direction at the most.)
There is a new development up a few blocks from work. Hundreds of houses. Or 4 houses, repeated dozens of times, depending how you look at it. And naturally those 4 have the same style, and the same shingles, same windows, same siding, same 4 shades of paint. Sitting on their perfect manicured little lots, green grass cut just so, no trees other than a few saplings, and to top it all off, a fence around the entire thing with a guard to keep the rest of the world out of the perfect, safe little community.
All in all, I have to say its one of the most depressing places I’ve ever seen in my entire life.
I’d like to live in the suburbs for all the reasons you mentioned. However, all of the suburbs I’ve ever seen consist of a crowded boulevard lined with endless repetition of the same chain restaurants and big-box stores surrounded by low-density cookie-cutter houses inhabited by an ethnically homogenous population driven by a car-driven pedestrian-free lifestyle. It’s offensive in multiple dimensions, and just driving through it makes me want to vomit. So although I’d like to live in the suburbs, it seems someone has intentionally designed them to make me physically ill just by proximity.
I’ve heard this quite a bit, but I don’t buy it. Consider, for example, that that cost of a four-bedroom house in my portion of Northern Virginia (Culpeper and Fauquier counties) seems to be generally between $200,000 and $300,000. By contrast, those who actually live in Washington, D. C., would pay at least $1,000,000 for a substantially smaller house. Even if oil prices rose to five dollars a gallon permanently, it’s still easy to calculate that the lifetime cost of living in the 'burbs is much lower than the cost of living in city. Also, car companies will make more fuel-efficient cars in the future, which will cut the cost of commuting. I agree that rising fuel prices might provide some financial pressure to move away from the most distant suburbs, but I doubt it will have a large effect.
It’s not just the one dimension of commuting to work.
It takes vast amounts of energy (petroleum) to pump drinking water and transport sewage from central processing plants to far flung suburbs.
It takes energy for all the delivery trucks to transport food to the grocery stores; USPS mail delivery; FedEx, etc. Garbage trucks for trash pickup, etc.
A spread out infrastructure of houses has enormous resource requirements. The USA has been able to maintain it because oil has been cheap relative (so far).
If there is a breakthrough is solar energy (costs and power conversion efficiency), then I think the suburbs can be sustained. Otherwise, there will be a housing crash because all those suburban neighborhood homes cannot be supplied with infrastructure services at affordable rates.
You can’t just look at a snapshot of real estate values ($200k in suburb vs $1million in Washington D.C.). You have to look at TCO (Total Cost Ownership) of direct and indirect costs if energy costs spike. The “indirect” costs will get charged back to the homeowner via higher food prices, water utility bills, etc. Or the services simply won’t be available because the companies determine that nobody can afford them.
Perhaps, but you also have to calculate how much time you spend commuting. My commute which involves dropping my wife off at work takes a half hour. We live in the District, she works downtown and I work in Alexandria. I know that if we lived in the further suburbs such as Prince William or Loudoun, our commutes would have an extra hour each way. Additionally, we only need one car. Any cost calculation for us would involve the cost of an additional car, i.e. fuel, monthly payment, insurance, tags, etc. It is also nice to be able to pop over to the corner store and buy a gallon of milk if I forget to pick it up.
The suburb that I grew up in had sidewalks but didn’t connect to anything. If I wanted to walk to the nearest shopping center, I had to get a ride as there were no sidewalks and I would have to walk all along a major road. If you wanted to pick up a gallon of milk, you needed to get in the car and drive, even though it was only a mile away.
The one thing that may push us out of the suburbs is the schools. I can see the attraction of some of the close in suburbs. DC government is often dysfunctional, and dealing with them is a pain in the rear. The library system is a joke compared to the one in Arlington, a close in suburb. DC in its own way is still pretty segregated.
That’s true. In my adult life, every single one of my jobs has been in the suburbs. And these are top-paying, professional jobs. If I lived in the city, my commute would be longer, not shorter.
I’m not anti-suburbia, I’m anti suburbia’s current incarnation, which as someone up-thread accurately described, is isolated neighborhoods connected by the traffic hell of 6 lane roads and strip malls.
It’s possible to create a suburban neighborhood that has all the attractions of suburbia (yards, garages, parks, etc.), but also functions as a walkable pleasing environment. One of the most desirable towns where I live is West Hartford, which is essentially a suburb of Hartford that was mostly built in the 20’s and 30’s. Here is a picture of home that meets anyone’s definition of suburbia, yet it’s just a few blocks from a bustling city center. Ironically, people actually pay a premium to live there; and its precisely because it has all of the pluses of suburbia but also functions on a more traditional urban level.