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Why Suburbia Sucks

• sndean 10y ago
  I grew in up the northern Virginia suburbs outside of Washington DC where certain bike paths (the Washington and Old Dominion specifically) enabled my friends and I to ride our bikes from farm fields in the west to downtown Arlington/DC in the east. It would take all day to do, we'd stop along the way at shops for food/drinks, and it was amazing. Because of that and other experiences, IMO suburbia is made for kids on bikes.
• ozborn 10y ago
  I suspect many (perhaps most) of the people reading that article agree that suburbia sucks - the tricky part is fixing it.
  • ars 10y ago
    Or maybe don't fix it because there is nothing wrong with it and people actually like it? Have you (or the author) considered that not everyone is like you? People like different things.
  • ape4 10y ago
    Making other choices available and not expensive would be a start.
    • jcoffland 10y ago
      Through regulation?
  • jacobolus 10y ago
    The fix is hard, requiring decades to reach the necessary policy changes, and decades more for those to play out in built infrastructure. Changes are needed to zoning, road design, price of parking, state and municipal tax allocations, etc. The primary problem is that suburban sprawl is cheap for residents, because it is very heavily subsidized, defers many of its costs to the future, and completely ignores the costs of nasty externalities like pollution and environmental destruction. Based on the required infrastructure per capita, if prices matched costs, living in the city should be dramatically cheaper than living in sprawl. In practice, because well designed cities are old, with limited capacity, and it is illegal to build new ones in many places, living in a nice city ends up being much more expensive than living in sprawl.
    • mooreds 10y ago
      > The fix is hard, requiring decades to reach the necessary policy changes, and decades more for those to play out in built infrastructure. I agree that finding the issued in place would be time consuming, expensive and difficult. However, it is possible we are seeing a different way of fixing the issue: migration back to the urban core with the downtown revitalization of many cities. Or building new areas that have different characteristics: Stapleton here in Colorado is a mixed use neighborhood built in the last decade or so. Not perfect, but a different set of mistakes.
  • nathanasmith 10y ago
    >>I suspect many (perhaps most) of the people reading that article agree that suburbia sucks - the tricky part is fixing it. "Fixing" it by doing what? Making it more like the urban core? That place already exists. If you like it then go live there. Obviously many people like the lifestyle of living in the suburbs. There is room in this country for more than one kind of neighborhood.
    • dietrichepp 10y ago
      I live in suburbia right now. I love to walk places—I walk to work, to the store, etc. But my town seems to be built for cars, cars, cars. The exchange with the interstate is huge, and takes forever to cross, by foot, because the signal timing is designed for cars. Then I cross parking lots to get where I want. I like the idea of having stores with parking in back, having more equal streets rather than privileged highway interchanges, etc. But in the meantime, having the forest closer to me is not worth the cost of spending more time in the concrete sprawl.
  • jayess 10y ago
    Typical of the nanny staters who think that they know what's best for everyone and their non-preferred lifestyle needs to be "fixed."
• ars 10y ago
  All (most of) those negatives you list I find to be positives. I can't stand those "charming" dense, oppressive cities.
  • zyxley 10y ago
    Consider the New England states, where there are a lot of organically-developed small towns that are low-density and low-population but still reliably avoid most of the problems in the article.
• rpedela 10y ago
  For just one small example of many: life in a subdivision cul-de-sac stops children exploring and becoming conversant with the wider world around them because it tethers their social lives and activities to their busy parents’ willingness to drive them somewhere. There’s literally nowhere for them to go. What is this post talking about? I grew up on a cul-de-sac, and I was always outside playing with my friends. When I was a little older, my parents would let me roam the neighborhood with my friends. We played all sorts of games and got into mischief. There are many downsides to suburbs, but that isn't one of them.
  • jedmeyers 10y ago
    And nowadays, even if you live in an apartment building in the city, there is no way your child is going to roam around and explore alone.
    • mooreds 10y ago
      Kids where I live do roam around the neighborhood, at least to some extent. I see them out and about.
      • gozur88 10y ago
        Not where I live. My brother has a house in a neighborhood that's full of young families, but if you walked through it you'd think it was a retirement community - not a kid in sight. All the children are carefully shuttled from one supervised activity to another. I'm not really sure why that is. Crime is almost nonexistent, and the weather is nice.
        • abalashov 10y ago
          That's by and large what I've seen in Atlanta as well.
    • germanier 10y ago
      At least in many parts of the US. Here in Germany I see plenty of children roaming around in the city every day.
• jcoffland 10y ago
  Suburbia, none of the benefits of the country with all the disadvantages of living in the city.
  • mooreds 10y ago
    Actually, American suburbia is responsible for the widest diffusion of land ownership in history (even if it is only a 1/4 acre or so). So it has got that going for it.
  • KB1JWQ 10y ago
    I can see this. It tends to be the "safe" middle group between urban and rural while having none of the benefits of either.
    • gozur88 10y ago
      I guess it all depends on what you want. From my perspective suburbia has all the advantages of both without the disadvantages.
• mattdeboard 10y ago
  Having lived & worked quite a long time in wildly different metro areas -- Santa Clara/Mountain View, Indianapolis, Austin -- this article raises more questions for me more than anything. What is a suburb, by the author's definition? It seems like it's an area outside the urban core of a city, I guess. But here in Austin, I'm buying a house away from the urban core of downtown, in a subdivision, but it's in a largely undeveloped area 2-3 minutes by car (and 10-15 by bike, at most, thanks to the bike lanes that connect the subdivision) of a mixed-use development area with a lake, park, museum, shops etc. Is this suburban? I consider it suburban but I have trouble connecting what the author is talking about to this spot. Now in Indianapolis, there were some suburbs. I lived in one growing up. It was indeed far from anything with absolutely no public transpo. Nowadays (I left in 2014) it's slightly better, in terms of availability, as there is a metro bus service. But the accommodation for the bus routes is awful. It's perpetually underfunded, the bus stops are often -- I am not joking -- in ditches, no shelters at the stops, etc., etc. It's almost like the city has gone out of its way to make it clear the bus is for "the poors." But what's the fix? Decades upon decades of urban planning have reinforced this notion. So... what is to be done about it? In South Bay, I rented a tiny apartment (~650sqft) for, at the time, the outrageous price of $1200/mo. This was ca. 2008. I'm told such units are much higher now. In areas of such inflated housing prices, isn't suburbia supposed to be a pressure valve? People move farther away from where they work and play in exchange for lower housing costs? I am out of touch with the housing scene in the Bay Area nowadays aside from the same articles everyone else gets on HN, so my question is an honest one. But the author's disdain for suburbia -- supported by concrete reasons though it may be -- seems like it might not be so strident if he were living elsewhere.
  • TulliusCicero 10y ago
    He's attacking American-style, super-sprawly suburbs, not suburbs in general.
    • mattdeboard 10y ago
      Well fine but that's what I'm saying in my first paragraph. There's a particular kind of suburb he's talking about but it definitely is not inclusive of all suburbs.
• alkonaut 10y ago
  Seems a lot of the arguments is based around the fact that suburban developments are poorly designed, not that the idea of suburban life is flawed. The "kids have nowhere to go unless their parents drive them" argument I don't understand - is there something preventing a forest from being next to a block of flats? The point of not living in the city for me is being closer to nature. I live in suburbia because I (or my kids) can bike to the lake or walk in the forest. I agree an endless sprawl of square blocks is a bad idea - but developers and city planners surely realize that people aren't willing to pay for non-city life unless it actually delivers the benefits of not living in a city (space, possibility to walk, good air, low noise, safety, proximity to nature).
  • zyxley 10y ago
    > Seems a lot of the arguments is based around the fact that suburban developments are poorly designed, not that the idea of suburban life is flawed. Well, yeah. A well-designed area isn't "suburbia", it's "a small town that happens to be adjacent to a larger city".
    • alkonaut 10y ago
      So the term is a sort of derogatory used only for badly designed sprawling suburbs without proper access to e.g nature?
      • zyxley 10y ago
        "Suburbia" as a term in the US pretty definitionally includes single-family homes on small plots, single-use zoning, homogenous family incomes and home values, and a strict street hierarchy with culs-de-sac. Add all these up and you tend to get 'bad design' by default. Remove these and you get something resembling an organically developed small town instead of suburbs.
        • alkonaut 10y ago
          I see. Still don't understand why these zones, however badly designed, aren't properly mixed with reasonably sized pockets of undeveloped land such as forests. It would make the value much higher, make the environment better, make people healthier and so on. It should be a no-brainer in terms of city planning. It doesn't have to be organically grown "proper" suburbs. They just have to be planned to get the same appeal.
• increment_i 10y ago
  Suburbia exists because people want a quiet, relatively safe place for their kids to grow up. I didn't realize this until I had children myself. I remember reaching my teenage years and cursing the dull, boring, culturally bankrupt suburbian neighborhood I grew up in. I left the minute it became feasible. Fast forward to now, and I'm right back in the 'burbs, in a house where my kids have access to safe streets, parks, and decent schools. I realize now that it was never my parents' responsibility to raise me in a place I would find interesting, but to give me the best possible start in life they could. If I can give my kids a similar start, I hope they can safely reach the age where they can go off and experience the adventure of the big cities and abroad when they're ready, just like I did.
  • ricardobeat 10y ago
    You are mistaken to believe that only a suburb fits the quiet & safe criteria (or even is the best fit). A traditional european city apartment, with a central courtyard, parking in the back, mixed use zone, is likely safer and just as quiet, yet you are within walking distance of shops, schools and public transport and are still in contact with other humans. I can't imagine a better environment for raising a child (except maybe some kind of dense rural community).
    • patrickburke 10y ago
      This might be true but the option for Americans is the American city or the American suburb. A lot of bloggers who rail against the suburbs juxtapose it against some beautiful European city. I think there's a handful of American cities with good urbanism, where as Europe has presumably thousands.
  • YuriNiyazov 10y ago
    The safety that someone under 12 requires is very different than the safety that someone over 12 requires. Seems like the teenage you were content with just cursing your dull suburban neighborhood, rather than setting your neighbors' houses and cars on fire for shits and giggles. Yes, it is part of parental responsibility to provide an environment stimulating enough that vandalism, arson, or drugs aren't an attractive option.
• CameronBanga 10y ago
  I'm trying to find words to describe my distain for this article, but I can't think of anything that isn't seen as a direct attack on the author, which isn't my goal. Basically America is bad because we had space for cars when they were invented? There are plenty of places in America where you can get by without a car. I live in "suburbia". A small city of 30,000 in Indiana called Valparaiso. We have a vibrant downtown and where you can live, shop, eat, go to shows, etc. We have public transportation with a local bus line and also bus service into Chicago. I think the author is just finding excuses for being unhappy.
  • ZenoArrow 10y ago
    > "I live in "suburbia". A small city of 30,000 in Indiana called Valparaiso. We have a vibrant downtown and where you can live, shop, eat, go to shows, etc. We have public transportation with a local bus line and also bus service into Chicago." Then you don't live in the type of suburbia the author was referring to. A small city with a variety of activities close by and decent public transportation is a million miles from the type of monotonous residential sprawl the author is referring to.
  • jacobolus 10y ago
    According to Wikipedia, Valparaiso Indiana was a regional transportation hub in the mid 19th century. I suspect it has considerably different city plan than more recent “suburbs”. Try comparing an online map satellite view of Valparaiso to some new housing development from >1990, and you’ll observe dramatic differences.
    • TheRealDunkirk 10y ago
      Eh, I doubt it. Around the core -- maybe -- but Valpo (and Merrillville) are bedroom communities for Gary and Chicago. That's WHY there's a commuter train into Chicago. I expect it's brimming with white-dominated, cookie-cutter neighborhoods, exactly as described by the article.
      • jacobolus 10y ago
• 55555 10y ago
  Unless this is the speaker of a very similar TED Talk, this guy borrowed tons of soundbites in the process of writing this article. Edit: just finished reading it. He has plagarized 10+ 'jokes', and most of his content was heavily 'inspired', from this excellent TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_suburbia https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_sub... . Very very uncool.
  • themgt 10y ago
    Agreed, I noticed that too. I was hoping he'd just subconsciously lifted some phrases, but the amount of the overall similar content/structure and the specificity of phrases do really kinda push it to the level of plagiarism.
    • abalashov 10y ago
      Hi, author here! I am very familiar with Kunstler's talk and do cite it from time to time, but it's hard for me to see the basis for the notion that I ripped it off. Kunstler is hardly the only one to make New Urbanist architectural talking points or to formulate them in the way that he does, notwithstanding his rather specific sense of humour. That said, I just rewatched Kunstler's talk (for the first time in maybe a year or two?), and I can certainly see why you say what you do, though I don't agree that it rises to the level of plagiarism; I sat there and made my formulations quite originally. It's probably a case of subconscious diffusion, as you suggest. I added a citation for his talk to the bottom of the post to reflect the discernible overlap. That said, you really need to look at some other critical literature in this sphere. If you do, you might be led to accuse Kunstler of plagiarism! :-)
      • themgt 10y ago
        Thanks for adding the cite. To me that's enough to put this in the clear. It is a great summary of our problems here in the USA.
        • abalashov 10y ago
• cjrjdjcjnf 10y ago
  So how's that war on suburban sprawl going in San Francisco? Oh right...
• colmvp 10y ago
  I've split my life living downtown (SF, NYC, London, Melbourne, TO) and in the suburbs. Outside my house the only thing I hear is the wind tossing about with the trees. Can't hear my neighbors or traffic or people on the street. Contrast that to when I lived in areas where the bars or homeless/mentally unstable individuals would keep me up all night. And I love all the space. Yes, it's a double edge sword. But I have lot more space for my hobbies such as bike ownership/maintenance, musical instruments, photography studio... I can sit in my backyard and just meditate or play music. When I lived downtown, I had to rent space or just forego certain things. Lastly, I like how there's less population density. Downtown, good luck if you want a seat at the nearby cafe. Whereas my local cafe which has ample parking also has ample open seats. I'm not trying to say surburbia > urban living. They just have very real differences that suit different people and life stages.
  • TulliusCicero 10y ago
    It's amazing all the people posting comments here who completely missed the point of the article. The author is NOT saying that suburbs are bad. The author is saying that American suburbs are bad. There is a difference, and that difference is the entire point of the article. Seriously, did you even read it?
    • djrogers 10y ago
      Some of us LIKE American suburbs. The author is stating as an objective fact something which is entirely subjective in nature - a sadly common mistake among the overly cynical.
      • TulliusCicero 10y ago
        He's sharing his opinion. Do you really not ever say something like "X sucks" when it's just an opinion? I'm sure the author is well aware that it's not an objective fact.
    • bklimt 10y ago
      Why are you assuming that none of us defending suburbs are American? There's a reason so many people like to live in them.
• manachar 10y ago
  Suburbia, with all their HOAs and such are the physical manifestation of the cultural preferences of a large majority of Americans. The following quote perfect illustrates the goals: "The idea, of course, is that the peaceful slumber of the suburbanite should not be interrupted by the noise generated by the transaction of commerce or any other public-sphere human activities" Most Americans want to have an estate where they aim to live independently and completely unaffected by their neighbors. They don't want to hear them, see them, or ever have to directly interact with them unless desired. This can be often rationalized as safer because if other people are physically less likely to interact in any fashion they are less likely to cause harm. It can also be rationalized as better financial sense as these "ticky-tacky" boxes are designed to be bland and therefore have mass appeal. HOAs especially help this as they prevent your neighbor's choices from impacting your resale value. As long as Americans continue to value trying to live a life as separate and as unaffected as possible you will have something very much like Suburbia Most who rail against suburbs (like me), do so because we have a different set of values and beliefs about community. For those who like suburbs it's about trying to build a personal community that you opt in to be part of. This idea that community or your social network is something each gets to determine for themselves is seen in a lot of political debates. This fuels charter schools, school vouchers, zoning laws, etc. It's interesting because it cuts across political boundaries.
  • cowsandmilk 10y ago
    > Suburbia, with all their HOAs and such are the physical manifestation of the cultural preferences of a large majority of Americans. My numbers put the number of Americans in HOAs in the suburbs at ~16%. Suburbs without HOAs ~37%. So, a small majority of Americans live in suburbs and a much smaller number live in a suburb with an HOA. More Americans live in urban areas (~26%) than in a suburb with an HOA. As to preferences, my anecdotal experiences have been that I know people who moved to suburbs out of necessity due to cost, but I have never met someone, other than the homeless and those in subsidized housing, living in an urban area due to cost instead of personal choice.
• ChicagoDave 10y ago
  I'd agree about the negative impact of suburbia for completely different reasons. The culture created by it has the nature of a bubble where its occupants don't ever interact with anyone "different". Clothes, jobs, mannerisms, jokes, religions, activities, food...are all the same. This dulls people's sense of empathy in a considerable and damaging way. Instead of being able to think critically and with empathy, suburbia drives people to view all of their sameness as a "good thing". We need to break these bubbles, redraw our towns and cities with integrated services, focused on walking, biking, and as little driving internally as possible. You car for should be intra-city travel. Not for going around a fence to the grocery store that's 1000ft away.
  • criddell 10y ago
    > We need to break these bubbles, redraw our towns and cities with integrated services, focused on walking, biking, and as little driving internally as possible. You car for should be intra-city travel. How about you live the way you want to live and let me live how I want to live? I choose living in the suburbs because that's where I'm happiest right now. When I was younger, I loved the energy and action of the city. In my mid-40's, I love the peace and community of my suburb although I suspect once self-driving cars are within reach, I'm going to move even further away from the city.
    • eropple 10y ago
      > How about you live the way you want to live and let me live how I want to live? If the price of living where you want to live factored in the significant externalities of it, you might have a point. But suburban and exurban areas in the United States largely don't pay their way with regards to most governmental services (and have a significantly higher ecological footprint, also not accounted for).
      • criddell 10y ago
        That's not a problem with the suburbs, that's a policy problem. I realize that it costs more per capita to supply infrastructure to us out here and I certainly don't mine paying a premium. Plus, moving suburbanites into city centers can cause problems too. For example, Austin has been building some very nice condo towers right downtown. These buildings have attracted people that, like me, want peace and quiet. So for the past few years, there's been quite a bit of tension between these new residents and bars and nightclubs that have existed for a long time. The bars have lost some of the fights and the character of downtown is changing.
• atemerev 10y ago
  As a European who likes cars and enjoys driving, during my visit to America I have found all these planning choices charming and convenient. Except the need of daily commuting, of course. It reduces the joy of driving to dull routine. Why remote working is so unpopular, I don't know.
• phd514 10y ago
  I used to live on the UES of Manhattan and now live in flyover country on a half-acre wooded lot in a house that is 6x larger than my studio apartment and yet costs less -- the extra space is quite useful for kids and a work-from-home office. There are pros and cons to both arrangements and I certainly miss some things that NYC had to offer, but articles like this exaggerate the advantages of city living. Other comments have pointed out some of them, so I'll point out just one item -- the geographic proximity of rich and poor in cities is way overblown. There may have been poor people living within a couple hundred yards of luxury apartments in NYC, but that doesn't mean there was any interaction between them. NYC is very stratified by socioeconomic status and living geographically close to people in other socioeconomic classes does not change that at all.
• grecy 10y ago
  > the predominant suburban design of the US of the worst features of life here, viewed from the perspective of a European immigrant like me, Really? As an immigrant, I always though the worst features of life in the US are the 10x higher murder rate, millions of desperate people with no health care, etc. and the crushing debt placed onto young people looking to educate themselves. I would change those things long before changing urban planning.
  • devdas 10y ago
    Quite a bit of the crime rate comes from suburban development, and the highway system.
    • chillaxtian 10y ago
      how so?
    • michaelbuddy 10y ago
      Yes of course. Suburbs and highways cause rape. Nice try.
  • abalashov 10y ago
    And I've written about those, too. :-) But while it doesn't have the same rhetorical gravitas, everyday quality of life is surprisingly important to one's experience of a place.
• carsongross 10y ago
  If you would like this rant in book form, throwing in some well-deserved broadsides at architects, I highly recommend: http://www.amazon.com/Geography-Nowhere-Americas-Man-Made-Landscape/dp/0671888250 http://www.amazon.com/Geography-Nowhere-Americas-Man-Made-La... I would also add the radical individualists of the 60s who made the cities unlivable for families.
• lordnacho 10y ago
  As someone who grew up in Europe, I've been to visit friends and relatives in the US quite often. Quite often I think what this guy writes. Between the two coasts, there is a homogeneity of architecture that is quite amazing for a European to watch. In Europe, it's quite noticeable where you are, and everywhere has enough character that you can remember it. In the US, stuff looks like SimCity. I often ask, how did you guys (my cousins/friends) ever grow up here? When I was a kid, there were football courts within walking distance. There were larger grass fields in town that you could easily cycle to. If you met another kid, you could take the bus, train or bike to hang out, and when you hung out, you could move from place to place. Like ride out to a theme park north of Copenhagen and then to the beach nearby, then to town centre for some fast food and cinema. You could do that. When you're hanging around at home and get hungry, you can go to a convenience store. Without driving. When I look at a place like Boulder or Kenosha, I wonder how on Earth the kids get around. Distances seem to be vast, and I didn't see a train line (they must have them though?). I saw some buses, but not many. They looked like they would take a while to get you anywhere, because I was driving and it took ages. Also, at least in Colorado, there's vast areas that seem to have nothing but prairie dogs. At least you have the mountains there. I recall American classmates talking about hanging out at the mall. This was always a curious thing for me, but when you go there it makes sense. Malls are the only places that have a variety of offerings, within walking distance of the next thing. You have to walk through a ridiculously sized car park, which I guess means land is cheap. A multi-storey parking house would make more sense otherwise. These huge car parks also mean that your drive to anywhere is dominated by car parks, because even commercial zones that aren't huge malls are kinda like malls anyway, just with a few shops next to each other. And about those shops... the proliferation of chains contributed enormously to the SimCity feel of the country. You can go anywhere and find the same brand of everything. I haven't travelled much in the interior, but I got the impression that pretty much everywhere that wasn't coastal was built in the same way. Same low-rise, big car park in front, wide streets, no life. Another issue with malls is they're a big landlord. Their incentives are not towards having a bunch of independent little shops, each with their own little complaints. It's much easier for them to say "hey {Starbucks/Sonoma-Williams/J Crew/etc}, how about you rent a space in 12 of our malls?". And then a really quite large area will get served with the same stuff. By contrast, places like NYC, Chicago, DC, and SF seemed somewhat more familiar. Thought SF was a bit weird though, as it needs to look more like NYC. A peninsula is not that different from an island, especially when there's hills. Instead you get low-rise quite centrally. Much has been written here on the political economy of this.
• fiatmoney 10y ago
  Suburbia allows you to ensure that your neighbors are able to afford to buy, rather than rent, a minimum quantity of land & construction (and usually therefore have a large amount of their net worth locked up in the value of that property), that they can afford transportation to and from wherever the nearest commercial center is, tends to limit population flows, and insulates the neighborhood from anyone who doesn't have their own independent transportation. This selects for a higher quality of neighbor, which has positive externalities (eg, "Good Schools" and low crime rates) that balance the obvious costs. Alternate legal mechanisms for enforcing these constraints have been banned, so we use the zoning code and make a lot of theoretically neutral noise about Property Values.
  • caoilte 10y ago
    That's a really long-winded way of saying redlining ;-).
    • fiatmoney 10y ago
      "Redlining" is a specific practice that has been banned for decades.
• osweiller 10y ago
  These sorts of articles are so profoundly boring, but somehow the whole "Suburbia sucks" thing recurs on here like clockwork. If you don't like the suburbs...don't live in the suburbs? I personally love the suburbs. In fact, in the post-commuting world I think the suburbs are a better future model than dense living. At the same time I don't declare dense living dead. And as an aside, these sorts of articles virtually always take some incredibly myopic view and project it across the entire country or world. In suburbs where I live, appropriate retail is mixed in the suburb. I have walked, countless times, for freshly baked bread and a coffee at the local grocer. Many multi-resident buildings have mixed use where small shots are at the bottom. Etc. The world isn't the 1950s.
• MisterBastahrd 10y ago
  I've yet to read a single article about why surburbia sucks that would be convincing to me as a better alternative than my life growing up in suburbia. If I wanted to play in a field, I went to the field. If I wanted to explore the woods, I went to the woods. Too far to walk? I had a bike, and a skateboard. I didn't have to spend my life walking on pavement from concrete box to concrete box, surrounded by indifferent adults... and just the idea of it sounds positively suffocating to me.
  • abalashov 10y ago
    I didn't have to spend my life walking on pavement from concrete box to concrete box, surrounded by indifferent adults I agree -- that sounds quite terrible indeed!
• qaq 10y ago
  It's an age thing to an extent, I shared a lot of similar opinions (lived in DC then in European large city from 20 to 37) and now enjoy living in a suburb with my family and kids.
• hasenj 10y ago
  One thing I can't fathom about cities in North America is this sharp division between residential areas and shopping areas. I'm by no means a world expert, but the places I've been to (Middle East where I grew up, Japan which I visited a couple of times) don't have this sharp distinction. Sure, there are residential areas and there are shopping areas, but every residential area will have many small shops here and there. You don't need a car to shop for groceries. You can just go down the street and there's likely a small store within 10-15 minutes walking distance that will have most of the things you need. In North America it seems rather normal to have blocks and blocks of nothing but houses. To buy groceries, you need a car drive (anywhere from 10 to 40 minutes) to get to some plaza (or a mall) with big name stores like Wal-Mart or Target. This has always bothered me. I think the only exception is the core downtown areas of big cities, but living there has its own downsides. Too expensive, too noisy, can sometimes be somewhat shady.
  • update 10y ago
    I live in a newer U.S. city and this couldn't be any further from the truth. e.g. Walmart is < 2 miles away.
    • hasenj 10y ago
      You just happened to be located close to it. It's still designed to accommodate people coming in with their cars. Unless it's a different kind of Walmart, there is usually a huge parking lot, and entry on foot is a bit cumbersome sometimes.
    • vinceguidry 10y ago
      Do you walk to this Wal-Mart? I live one mile away from the closest grocery store and I still drive.
    • abalashov 10y ago
      I don't see how that rectifies the essential grievance. A Walmart ~ < 2 miles away is substantially similar to a Walmart 10 miles away for all intents and purposes. And, as I mentioned in my post, even if it were 0.25 mi away, there are all kinds of artifices in suburbia that commonly stop one walking there.
• forrestthewoods 10y ago
  I can't possibly roll my eyes hard enough. But if the author thinks suburbia is bad I'd hate to hear what he'd say about my rural upbringing. Meanwhile I'd consider an urban upbringing the worst option. Give me rural America for kids any day of the week. Suburbia works in a pinch. But dense urban? Urgh, no thank you.
  • ZenoArrow 10y ago
    I don't think the same criticisms of suburbia apply to rural areas. The main issue I personally have with suburbia can be summed up in one word; boredom. Nothing interesting to see, not much that's interesting to do. Rural life on the other hand is far better, the act of living rurally is engaging, and the sights and sounds of nature are far more interesting than the sights of identikit housing and the muffled sounds of suburbia. I suspect you may dislike dense urban if you're associating it with places that are run down and without good city planning. Good city planning definitely includes parks and other open spaces, so it's not some monotonous concrete jungle. Let me put it to you like this, if you lived in Venice, what do you think you would dislike about it?
    • to3m 10y ago
      The smell? My main memories of visiting Venice (20 years ago...) were also: general lack of greenery, not many open spaces, and a pervasive delapidated shabbiness. Also, it's built on marshland. So I'm not sure the good city planning bit applies either ;) Also, constant churn of tourists... not sure how I'd feel about that as a parent. But if I had one of those grand Venetian apartments I might be OK about living there as an adult. The lack of greenery might end up a bit trying however.
      • ZenoArrow 10y ago
        Okay, perhaps Venice wasn't the best example. How about Barcelona?
  • abalashov 10y ago
    As far as I can see, suburbia is the worst possible option, since it has neither of the virtues of city living nor the virtues of the countryside, but the downsides of both.
• humbleMouse 10y ago
  I am surprised to see all of the pro-suburbia comments here. I enjoyed this article and found it lines up with many of my criticisms of suburbia. The suburbs to me are a soul sucking place that gives me the heebie-jeebies. With that said, my opinion reflects my experience living in Minneapolis. When I visit other cities like Seattle or San Francisco, I am turned off by the ridiculous density and the inability to go to a coffee shop and not wait in a huge line (looking mostly at SF here). As a white person who went to an inner city highschool where white people were the minority - I notice a huge difference in my world view than people who grew up in suburbs with predominantly white people. The suburbs around Minneapolis absolutely disgust me. I work in the western suburbs of Minneapolis and constantly deal with co-workers saying underhanded racist/classist comments all the time.
  • matwood 10y ago
    I think what you are seeing is that not all suburbs are created equal. I grew up in the burbs and live in the burbs now. Nothing in the article matches up to my experience. I am also on the coast in a smaller city so it is hard to have explicit city and explicit burb.
    • humbleMouse 10y ago
      That is definitely what I am saying. Minneapolis is an interesting place because rent/home prices are actually more in the suburbs than in the cool parts of the city. Furthermore, our highways are structured basically so that there are rings of highways that circle around the city. You can drive for miles on these highways and it is nothing but flat open land with cookie cutter houses and the same shops and strip malls. We do have some big lakes and I can understand why some people like living on lakefront property with boats and whatnot. However, real estate is so cheap in Minneapolis that it boggles my mind more big companies don't open up shop in the city. Hopefully this is something that will change as time goes on and more people move here.
      • phil21 10y ago
        Minneapolis also isn't what it was 20 years ago. I grew up on the Northside, and it was a pretty economically depressed area still on the decline swing of things. This included most portions of NorthEast as well. I'm glad I had the experience, but today the community is far more vibrant. I think you will see those rent/home prices invert rather rapidly as the current first time home buyer generation starts to realize Minneapolis is not the Minneapolis of their parents. I also completely agree re: the soul-soucking nature of Minneapolis suburbia though. Can't imagine a more horrid place for mental health.
• forgotAgain 10y ago
  tl;dr I don't like the environment I've chosen to live in so that environment sucks.
• mruniverse 10y ago
  It seems like people like Suburbia. A lot of people buy houses and live in Suburbia. Something seems to be right about it. Maybe we should look at is popularity before saying it sucks. Try to figure out why it's popular. What is going on there? That would be an interesting read.
  • djrogers 10y ago
    > Maybe we should look at is popularity before saying it sucks. Try to figure out why it's popular. What is going on there? That would be an interesting read. From what I've learned reading here today, I like suburbia because I'm one of the closed-minded, bigoted sheep, and the only cure is for me to live in a City. See how well this works? If everything about suburbia is bad, and reinforces the bad parts of human nature, they don't need to look any deeper...
  • vasilipupkin 10y ago
    Well, America has a difficult racial tension problem. Decades of policy choices mean that inner city public schools can be problematic, so many people are forced to move to the suburbs. They don't necessarily like or dislike suburbs any more than city but they have to move to where decent public schools are
• slr555 10y ago
  Perhaps Mr. Balashov is thinking of the great urban centers of Europe like Moscow. Where it can take 2.5 hours to go 20 blocks and where the mass transit system embraces multi-culturalism and internationalism by only having signs in Cyrillic. I am sorry that Mr. Balashov has chosen to live in Atlanta, but I suspect he has little knowledge of Omaha. Growing up in such a place is quite idyllic. The creeks, the parks, the forest and the fields encourage children to play sports, have pets, picnic and stare up at the sky from amidst fields of boundless green listening to the sound of insects and birds instead of sirens. As Oscar Wilde said, "For heaven's sake, don't try to be cynical. It's perfectly easy to be cynical." It is easy to be cynical about suburbs and wax poetic about cities. Well I grew up in Kansas and have lived for 25 years in NYC (Manhattan). Also known as the capital of the world. I've been to Paris, Moscow, London, Dubai, Cairo, Buenos Aires, Brussels, Prague, Budapest, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Berlin, Munich, etc. And guess what I still love Kansas and Nebraska. Loathing suburbia is snobbery and a failure of imagination. My favorite Tarkovsky film is Nostalghia. The title refers to a very specific feeling that Russians experience when the miss their homeland.
• ThePhysicist 10y ago
  A very interesting read about architectural patterns at various scales -from the home itself to the city and agglomoration- is Christopher Alexander's "A Pattern Language": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language It contains lots of good examples on why some spaces are livable and why others are not. The book itself is a bit ideological but most of the described patterns are really great and give you a good understanding of why e.g. rural Italian or French villages have this nice vibe to them.
• lunchTime42 10y ago
  Completely unrelated, but maybe not. If the problm of the suburb traffic inspired the idea of the selfdriving car, so you can be productive while beeing stuck in traffic- why are there no group-commuters, that take a larger vehicle, so everyone can work ond the way, except for one driver, which can cycle?
• todd8 10y ago
  This reminds me of those lists, like the Places Rated Almanac (which might be more sophisticated now than it was years ago), where a list of criteria demonstrates that a particular place (in this case the suburbs) is inferior to other places. One can tick off a set of criteria and come up with a score or this case a blog post demonstrating why a place is better than another. I currently live is the suburbs of a city that wouldn't score high on these kinds of lists, no balanced seasons--practically no winter and no easy access to winter sports, no major league sports team, bad traffic, no major museums, limited cultural opportunities compared to other big cities, escalating real estate prices. These were actual categories in the Places Rated Almanac that would make my city seem to be undesirable. The problem with this approach and that of the blog "Why Suburbia Sucks" is that everyone weighs the costs and benefits differently. A more realistic title for the blog might be "Why Suburbia Sucks for Me, Right Now". (Or to better suit it's tone, "Why Suburbia Sucks for Me and Why You Should Feel It Sucks Too.) Is there a more objective or comprehensive way to assess Suburbia (or the quality of life in a particular city)? The answer is yes, simply watch what people do. I live in Austin, the fastest growing city in the US this year according to Forbes and it has been fast growing for many years. Why would people move here when it is so hot, has no major league sports teams, requires a long trip to go skiing or to the beach, and has bad traffic? People move here for a variety of reasons and they keep moving here faster than they move away. Likewise, the suburbs have an appeal that overcomes their disadvantages for other people. Other posters here have already explained some of the important factors that make people want to live in the suburbs. My problem with the original blog post is that it seems to express a desire to judge and decide what is best for others. Smart people often feel that if only they had there hands on the steering wheel then the world would be a better place. (Maybe they could make it a better place but maybe not.)
• terda12 10y ago
  I agree. I live in suburbia and I feel like I'm slowly choked out of my humanity. Can't wait to move to a damn city or somewhere with more density. America's suburbia was designed for cars and cars only. Here's an anecdote. My little brother has after school band practice 30 mins drive away. What does he do after school? He can't walk home, so he has to wait for me to pick him up. He can't go out to a movie with his friends because it would involved several parents taking the time out of work to send his friends there, and pick them up. He can't walk home or ride the subway because it's a freaking sprawl of highways. Bus stations are few and far between, and hugely unreliable. Instead all he knows is the highway that connects the school to home, and relies on my driving instead of his own two legs to get him home. I wonder why Americans are obese, hmm. I watch animes that depict life in Tokyo. There is never a car involved. Kids just walk home after school, walking to a restaurant with their friends if they feel like it, hitting up a local 7-11. They can explore the local park, go to the movie theater, walk home with their friends if its on the same way. I've stayed in Paris for 2 weeks and could literally walk everywhere. It's amazing how good it feels to see a cool gelato shop in yelp, proceed to take the subway with a bunch of strangers, walk a bit to the gelato shop, buy my gelato, and sit in a nearby coffee shop eating it. And want to check out some comic books? There's a comic book shop around a mile away, let's walk there. People were not meant to live in suburbia. We are a social creature, we need to belong in a tribe, not a single home separate from the world.
  • coned88 10y ago
    On the other hand if he was allowed to walk home your parents would likely be arrested for child abuse.
    • terda12 10y ago
      You realize children walk home from school all over the world right? This isn't something new.
      • coned88 10y ago
        not in America anymore.
• Apocryphon 10y ago
  I have to wonder: do any of these pro-suburban commentators live in the Bay Area? And if so, do they live in San Jose, Fremont, or Daly City? Or do they live in San Francisco.
  • gozur88 10y ago
    I live in a Bay Area suburb and would not move to SF. Why do you ask?
• coned88 10y ago
  To me as somebody who was raised in NYC and still lives there. American suburbia is just lovely. I find nyc dead boring and claustrophobic. Yes there nice restaurants in the city but how many times do you want to eat out? How many shows or do you go to? How many of this and that. That's the conclusion for me. Sure there are restaurants I'd like to visit. I can commute to go eat once. I don't need to live there and once I have eaten at all the good places (which takes a few weeks at most) you're done. I'd hate for the suburbs to be undone. NYC is really not a pleasant place to live. So many lunatics walking around and people have no concept of space.
  • notlisted 10y ago
    Hear hear! 19 years in NYC. Wife 'forced' me to move to the burbs, but having tasted what life can be like you'd need to drag me back kicking and screaming to ever live there again. I laugh at those we left behind, who sincerely inquire "but don't you miss NYC?". Nope. Not one bit. Meet up in the park (because no back yard)? Join you for dinner at restaurant X (because no dining room)? Ha! Quality of life has improved tremendously. Family life: more activities together, fewer dinners outside because we had to escape the small confines of our 900 sqft 2Bd apartment. Social life: we actually have enough room to have friends over… and they come. BBQs in the back yard. Potluck dinners with the neighbors and their 3 kids. Friends who stick around, not friends who leave because they can't keep up with the rent increase/job loss. Kids all go to the same school, no need for private schools, no competition for "magnet schools". No tiger parents. Whenever we feel the need, less and less, we get a hotel room in NYC, go out to dinner in those "hot little joints" (mostly overrated, cronuts anyone?). Pure heaven, a 45min drive from the 'hustle and bustle'. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go mow my lawn and stare at the piliated woodpecker.
• fred_is_fred 10y ago
  The author of this story, who obviously has no kids, is confused as to why a family of 4 might not want to live in an apartment over a bar in downtown. That's my worst nightmare of life. I'll drive, thanks.
  • abalashov 10y ago
    I have a newborn and two young stepkids, and the five of us live in an apartment downtown, but not over a bar. :-)
• esoteric_nonces 10y ago
  I like wide open spaces and I'd live in the forest with no-one around for miles if I had the means and a suitable plot. Land, or at least a small garden or garage (in order of decreasing usefulness), is incredibly useful for woodworking, mechanical tinkering, painting large objects, basically any sort of real world craft that's not 'micro'. My social life is less important than the ability for me to sit on that bit of land that's mine and do things that I want to do. The urban equivalent of that seems to be going to find a specialist to do whatever you want doing. Basically, urban living is capitalism embodied - you can get some fantastic things done, better than you could ever do yourself, but you're trading for it. And you have to take part in the economy too.
• andrewfromx 10y ago
  In case anyone wants to study the 12 points over and over again I wrote them down: 1. Single-use zoning 2. Hierarchical traffic distribution 3. Set-backs from the street & parking ratios 4. Proximity does not mean pedestrian accessibility 5. Economic segregation by building type. 6. No street enclosure and definition 7. Useless, ugly and wasted space 8. Parking-first aesthetics, garage façades, no alleys, no interior yards 9. No street life or visible human activity 10. No public transport 11. Improper interface between city and highway 12. Lack of regional planning vision
• makecheck 10y ago
  The article lists a lot of major issues with suburbs, and I saw them all when I used to live in one. Something that wasn’t really mentioned is how utterly boring some of the everyday life choices are. And yet, because none of the choices necessarily sucks, people remain “just happy enough” and never really yearn for anything better. I’m sure this setup is great for corporations but it is sad for human beings. Just observe: I mean, every single shopping center seems to have nearly exactly the same chain restaurants and a Starbucks…EVERY ONE! And if by some miracle you do find something different, it is usually a “choice” between Home Depot and Lowe’s or a “choice” between McDonald’s and Wendy’s or something. Plenty of variety still exists outside of suburbs. The problem is that for people in suburbs, it would mean driving 45 minutes to even reach the alternatives, much less enjoy them regularly. And if you are averaging long drives all the time to/from work or to do anything else, the last thing you feel like you have time for is another long drive to experiment. I felt it sucking my soul. Long drives expose you to more traffic which leads to anger, etc. Driving wastes a lot of money (cars are expensive even when fuel is not high-priced). And I found myself slowly accumulating garbage to fill a large space. Ultimately I felt that it was a lot more sane to live smaller, in an “expensive” place closer to civilization. While it did cost a lot more per square foot, I saved money after not too long and I definitely felt better. And I have more variety now.
  • bryanlarsen 10y ago
    According to Tyler Cowen, the best food in America is found in suburban strip malls. It's found in ethnic restaurants that are in strip malls because the rent is cheap and there's a pocket of their community in that same area.
• pieterhog 10y ago
  Suburbia kills us ADHD-people. Guess I'm not the only one here who sometimes feels an urgent need to move. And what is more convenient than walking (or biking) to the grocery store, your office, the metro tube, the bar or your friends' house? I grew up in Holland and Spain. No problem to walk or take a bicycle there. I've lived in New York City and it was fine (better then Barcelona for running and bicycle, because of cleaner air). But other US cities are just soooo stretched you that you can not do it on a bicycle. Not to mention that time in sone Canadian suburb when they called the police, for chrissake, because I walked on the pavement. Normal person don't walk, only thieves do,apparently ? Anyway, aren't suburbs "motion unfriendly" Is this changing nowadays? Now that it's known that being outside, & moving makes many people feel good?
• Mendenhall 10y ago
  Here I am trying to get even further into the rural and country setting with far far less people lol. I lived city and burbs and for me no comparison, as a kid we would go in the woods outback and make explosives and set them off, try that in the city. Endless bike rides with no adult supervision and wooded areas to disapear too. No real traffic compared to when I lived in cities, way less ambulances waking me up, gasp yes I like to sleep and dont want to hear the endless drone of humans. I enjoyed aspects of both city and suburb and completely understand people having preference to either. I just feel this article is very biased by personal preference, the tight closed in spaces he described sound like prison to me but author obviously enjoys. There are very real issues with suburban planning etc, but I find many(not all) who have issue with burbs are people with some sort of political agenda attached to their dislike.
• abalashov 10y ago
  Hi, author here. Just wanted to respond to a few broad themes I see in the comments: 1. "My neighbourhood isn't like that at all!" My criticism was directed at the specific type of vacuous sprawl commonly seen in new Sun Belt development. That's a mouthful to put in an article title, so I tried to make the distinction clear in the article by referring repeatedly to "older" and "traditional" neighbourhoods. I suspect this may be why the term "sprawl" came about, i.e. to more accurately capture the sort of thing I'm referring to. I would be the first to agree that a lot of the more dense suburban neighbourhoods found in the Northeast and around the older industrial cities of America are more livable than what I'm describing. And certainly, not all kids that grow up in suburban neighbourhoods, in cul-de-sacs or otherwise, have a miserable and isolated experience. At the same time, an awful lot of the USA looks like what I described. By the same token, rural != suburban to my mind, even though some of the same drawbacks are present in rural layouts. As I see it, suburbia is precisely that which offers none of the advantages of either urban living or the countryside, but the downsides of both. 2. "If you don't like suburbs, don't live there. To each his own." Yes, but 90%+ of the US looks like this, to varying degrees. There is a widely disseminated idea out there that this is the organic outcome of widespread social preference, a democratic coming-together of the citizenry in a consensus on how they want to live in the land of the free. As evidence, boosters of the phenomenon point to the fact that the majority of new building embodies the paradigm I lambast. It's just not true, though. In my experience, a large percentage of Americans simply aren't familiar with what the alternatives would look like. More importantly, there is enormous accumulated evidence that sprawl is an engineered policy outcome to some degree. One need not be a kooky conspiracy theorist to see that it's astronomically easier to get additional road-building approved (and subsidised with matching federal funds) and that there are lots of perverse legal and economic incentives for greenfield cookie-cutter subdivision development versus urban infill. Does that mean that everyone really clamours to live in urban settings deep down inside? Of course not. Some people genuinely like suburbia as I've described it--one can find abundant evidence of that in this discussion thread. However, I do not at all buy into the notion that there is such an overwhelming consensus in favour of that mode of life that almost all inhabited areas of the US are built to suit. For the most part, there just aren't many alternatives; it's amazing what humans can adapt to and put up with. Zoning committees, planners and government agencies have made sprawl an easy inertial default for a variety of historical reasons. That's how this has turned into a broad quality of life issue that merits broad, nationally scoped criticism. If suburban sprawl were confined to a relative niche of enthusiasts, I wouldn't have a problem with it. 3. "You're comparing ordinary towns with exceptionally beautiful and historic European capitals!" No, I'm not. My experience has been, however, that on their worst day, profoundly second and third-tier European cities and towns are infinitely more navigable and livable than the vast majority of the US. 4. I would never dispute that European cities bring their own problems and developmental antipatterns. 5. For those who say I don't understand because I'm too young or don't have kids: I'm 30 and have a 4 year-old, a 3 year-old, and a newborn.
• tptacek 10y ago
  If you like both the content and the tone of this post, you'll probably also like Christopher Alexander's _A Timeless Way Of Building_ and _A Pattern Language_, which has a similar tone and topic, but with a broader sweep.
• apenwarr 10y ago
  For a more nuanced view of this whole topic, I recommend the book The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. https://www.amazon.ca/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/067974195X https://www.amazon.ca/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/06... Many of the counterarguments in these comments (especially that smaller cities, or rural areas, are fine even when American suburbs are not) are actually reasonable, and Jacobs covers them in her book. Since it's from 1961, you might think the insights would be dated, but they're not. She was complaining even as these mistakes were being made, and it's fascinating to read so many of her predictions that we can now say clearly came true.
• jimbobimbo 10y ago
  Author compares apples and oranges though. The closes thing to a planned communities ("hellholes" as people refer them to in this thread) are so called "sleeper districts" in ex-USSR. Outskirts of towns, full of multi-storied apartment buildings, all looking the same, with a large "univermag" (supermarket) somewhere in the middle. I used to live in Greater New York area and it's full of little towns like Union, Springfield, Millburn that look and feel very close to the European towns the author likes that much. Even Short Hills - the "sleeper district" of the affluent East coast - looks amazingly good, and it's strictly residential. The deeper South you go, the more planned neighborhoods are there. But saying that "all US is like that" is a stretch.
  • abalashov 10y ago
    And yet, one did not need a driving licence to leave a "sleeper district", nor were their streets (save for main arteries) built out as pedestrian-hostile highways, and teenagers as well as adults had the same means to access the rest of the city.
    • jimbobimbo 10y ago
      So, essentially, it's just easier to get in and out of the hellhole.