Bicycles seem to be obsolete in my neighborhood. All the young kids (without drivers licenses) drive golf carts up & down the streets. To clarify, my neighborhood is not near any golf course. As someone who grew up on hand-me-down clothes and low-income housing, the golf carts seem ridicoulousy extravagent.
Do you also want your kids to be prisoners in their house unless you are willing to cart them anywhere they want to go? I exagerate a little bit, but the whole idea of a soccer mom driving her kids every which way didn’t get invented for no reason.
That was certainly how I felt about it as a teenager. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad now, having the internet, but it was quite isolating then. I have absolutely no desire to live in a “bedroom community” now because I hated it so much in high school- every time Mr. Neville and I have looked for places to live, being able to walk to shops and restaurants was a priority.
The homogeneity is probably a feature, not a bug. While political attitudes cause most people to focus on racial homogeneity, I think that many people seek the suburbs for homogeneity of behavior and attitude, and that can explain a considerable amount of suburban flight. It’s no secret that American cities underwent urban decay starting in the 60’s and increasing drastically in the 70’s and 80’s.
The main symptom of this was crime. The murder rate rose up to a hundred times higher in the inner-city neighborhoods than the surrounding suburbs, in some cases. But besides major, violent crimes, there were also smaller problems. Vandalism spread without bounds. In many cities it became tough to find any outdoor surface that wasn’t covered in spray paint.
In addition to crime, there were trends in cities that were legal but highly undesirable. Most people do not want to live near to bars, strip clubs, porn shops, and other low-class business. This is especially true for those with children, for obvious reasons. As these types of businesses proliferated in downtown areas, it’s quite understandable that people would flee for the suburbs.
As we’ve seen in this thread, two common complaints are that you can’t walk anywhere in the 'burbs, and that homes and businesses are too homogeneous. But that’s exactly why people like them. The street plans were designed with the specific intention of keeping out the bad urban element. Zoning ordinances were written specifically to block unwanted businesses, because that’s what the people want.
From our house my older son can walk to 3 different parks, 3 different pools, an outdoor shopping mall, some open space preserve, and his high school. My younger son sticks to the parks with supervision, but he is only in kindergarten.
The soccer mom issue is due more to over scheduling than to neighborhood layout. Kids being a prisoner in their home is dependent on the parents.
Wow. Not a single cart around here that I have ever seen. We have tons of kids on bikes, biking to school, taking long rides, etc. It helps that we have great bike trails where I live.
Same here. It wasn’t so bad when I was young because there were a lot of kids in the neighborhood. But as soon as you are old enough to want to do something more than play tag with your friends the suburbs begin to really suck.
To a degree that’s true. But what can I do when all the best jobs in my field are located there?
Although it’s not so bad. I can get into San Francisco entirely on public transit, and have done it many times.
Ed
I think there is some confusion over the term “suburbs”. only the largest cities have evolved into apartmentized concrete jungles. They didn’t start out that way. The majority of cities (in the US) consist of a core mercantile center, nearby industry, and neighborhoods. I live in a city neighborhood that is the same as the area I grew up in except my childhood neighborhood wasn’t incorporated. It was slightly more spread out but that is a matter of degree. Much of the traditional aspects of city neighborhoods are vanishing because mom&pop stores can’t compete.
I see no advantage to living in a large city because the same utilities exist. The only exception is the ratio of roads to population and that has to measured against the expense of elevated or underground transportation. Suburbs allow more space for gardens and other self-sustaining ventures that make people less dependant on outside forces.
To elaborate on my last post a little bit, suburbia’s current incarnation is quite intentional because it stops crime. There’s serious research to back this up. In his book Defensible Space, Oscar Newman studied crimes rates in thousands of neighborhoods. His book:
(All taken from this article.)
It’s not just a sense- I HAVE been out of New York City since 1986. And every time I go back to visit my family, I see that a lot of things HAVE changed. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, sometimes for both or neither.
When I was a kid, my neighborhood was about 40% Greek, 30% Italian, 20% Irish, and 10% everything else. Today? The Greeks are still there, the Irish are largely gone, the Italians are waning. The newcomers? Middle Easterners and yuppies! But while the demographics have changed, I still see very little interaction between the white yuppies and the Middle Easterners.
RickJay’s analysis is largely correct. A first generation Russian Jewish family and a first generation Irish family in New York City 75 years ago had little in common, didn’t want to live together, and formed tight-knit communities that largely avoided each other. Today, their grandkids can (and do) buy houses in the same suburbs. Hence, the “homogenous” suburb I live in has WASPs, Jews, blacks, (East) Indians, Latinos, Vietnamese, et al. Thus, my quasi-suburban son has a MUCH more diverse group of neighbors than I did at his age, in America’s largest city!
Other things have changed, too. The Mom-and-Pop stores that city lovers like Jane Jacobs idealized have dwindled away over the years. The Greenwich Village that Jane Jacobs idealized simply doesn’t exist any more. When I was a kid, there WEREN’Y any big chain stores in my neighborhood. But they’re all there now, from Home Depot to Victori’a Secret.
There’s still a lot to love in New York, but increasingly, you have to be rich to enjoy those things.
I just wish once I’d hear a suburbanite come out and admit “I prefer living with a heavy white majority” instead of using code words that say the same thing. But you’re getting pretty close there… keep trying…
Same here. Too many people appear to be ass-talking. They want everyone to live on freaking Trantor (for those who’ve read Asimov) because it’s more energy efficient. Give me a break. Subsidies? Tell me about all the bullshit surcharges I pay to keep New York City’s transit system afloat. We have jobs out here in the suburbs. I’ve lived here all my life and the longest commute I’ve ever had is 20 minutes and that was by choice. I could have found a closer job. Many people live in NYC proper who work out here. Great. But I work in NYC the shmucks charge me a NYC income tax. Who’s sustaining who?
Don’t like the suburbs? Fine keep it to yourself. I loathe your grimy, noisy, rat infested urban blight but you don’t here me call for its downfall.
Your neighborhood was only 40% Greek in the 80s? No kidding, I would have assumed more. I am going out on a limb here and am inferring your home from your name.
I am not really sure how much interaction you could expect to see from brief returns home, but I suppose that is beside the point.
I live in a very mixed neighborhood in northern Manhattan. It used to be almost exclusively Irish, was then populated mostly by crack pipes, and then changed dramatically again in the past twenty years. We have a lot of second and third generation Dominicans in my neighborhood, many of whom are solidly middle class. We also have a large number of successful artists of all flavors and colors. If you are reasonably middle class, my neighborhood is a wonderful melting pot.
But if you are a first generation immigrant or are poor, it is much more difficult. This is the ugly side of the big city, to be sure. But I grew up in Westchester, where socialization broke down along the same lines. The kids from the more affluent part of the suburb and the less fortunate kids did not really mix.
Maybe. Their children moved to the suburbs, and their grandchildren, like myself, have moved back into the city.
Sure, but I am going to guess that they are all affluent or at least middle class. I don’t know what Astoria was like in the 80s, so you tell me.
Yeah, you have to take the good with the bad. If you want something like the old village, you pretty much have to go to Newark. That aspect is quite sad. It is also getting very difficult to enjoy what the city has to offer without a lot of money. I wonder what effects the current economic instability will have on the priorities of the people who live here, and how these priorities will shape the city’s landscape.
My neighborhood homeowner’s association is run by the Klu Klux Klan. I have no comment on their philosophy but they do seem to keep the property values up.
As opposed to all the bullshit surcharges you pay to support the highway system?
You don’t want to go there. Really.
I grew up in the suburbs and moved to the city a few years ago. I’m someone who is affected by my environment, and the city feels alive compared to the 'burbs. I like to see lots of people going here and there and everywhere. Encourages me to get off my ass and go do something too (sometimes).
Also, I know it’s not necessarily true of all suburbs, but the ones around here are pretty damn ugly in general. Little boxes made of ticky-tacky. Not for me.
That could be true in some cases. For the suburb I live in, no race is in the majority. In fact, whites do not even make up the plurality. (Asians do.)
Ed
Oh, come on. I live in a suburb. Perhaps it’s different in Canada or something, but moving to the 'burbs doesn’t get you into whitey-land. This is where everyone in Toronto moves to once they can afford a house, and half the people in Toronto aren’t white. It DOES get you into a nice house with a yard, where you feel okay with your kid being outside, which is why people want to live here.
You can almost see the waves of immigration moving out from the city. I used to live in Mississauga, which is surely the bggest, burbiest burn there is; 40% non-white. Sri Lankans, Indians, and Pakistanis are long firmly entrenched in the 'burbs, the Chinese are increasing, and now you’re starting to see more Caribbean families getting nice places in the 'burbs. It’s just normal here and nobody really thinks much of it.