7 ms·

American Suburbs Are a Horror Movie and We're the Protagonists

29 points by ivanleoncz 2y ago

db48x 2y ago
Millions of people all across the country built homes in suburbs because they wanted peace. They’re not horrifying. Even if you personally find them dull, they are a nice way to live for many others. Even if yours is badly built, many are not. Parking garages are not creepy, they’re just utilitarian. They overstate their case by pointing to one place that they don’t like and generalizing that to all suburbs.
- eesmith 2y ago
  The term "wanted peace" includes the millions of people who built homes in the suburbs due to anxiety over desegregation in the cities, and preferred the peace of living in an area with an almost all white population, of similar economic status, and where the laws inhibited change in the status quo.
  - adingus 2y ago
    Are you implying that living in the suburbs is racist?
    - eesmith 2y ago
      I'm specifically saying that some of the people moved to the suburbs for racist reasons. See for example "blockbusting", as a way to profit off from fearmongering to white homeowners, and encouraging movement to the suburbs. These racist reasons included ones the new suburbia dwellers would have described as "wanted peace", making that quoted phrase one which requires additional scrutiny. It is a classical logical fallacy to go from the reality that millions of people moved to Levitown-like suburbs for the perceived peace of its racially restrictive covenants to infer that all people moved to the suburbs for that reason.
    - stvltvs 2y ago
      There's the term "white flight" for a reason.
    - nunez 2y ago
      The existence of suburbs was heavily driven by racism, and some suburbs are still.
  - db48x 2y ago
    No, they literally wanted peace after coming home from a horrifying world war. Or from a horrifying non—world war.
    - eesmith 2y ago
      That's hardly a fair characterization of the many reasons people - mostly white - moved to the suburbs over a period of decades. https://oxfordre.com/americanhistory/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001/acrefore-9780199329175-e-64 https://oxfordre.com/americanhistory/display/10.1093/acrefor... for example characterizes the period 1945–1970 as when "suburbia witnessed the expansion of segregated white privilege, bolstered by government policies, exclusionary practices, and reinforced by grassroots political movements". Levittown famously deed-restricted non-whites from buying a house in that suburb. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown says: > The first black family to buy one of the houses, the Myers, who bought a second-hand house in Pennsylvania's Levittown in 1957, experienced attacks on their house, and up to 500 people gathering outside. If those hundreds of people solely "wanted peace", why were they attacking others? Even in the 1980s, one of my father's coworkers - both born post-war - asked why he didn't move out from our immediate post-war suburb housing, which was increasingly non-white, to the newer suburbs where things were more "peaceful". My father laughed about that a few months later when a house a few blocks from his coworker caught fire. It has been used to process cocaine.
mannyv 2y ago
[flagged]
- sien 2y ago
  Yep. There are surveys on what people want, from 2021 : https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/12/16/americans-are-less-likely-than-before-covid-19-to-want-to-live-in-cities-more-likely-to-prefer-suburbs/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/12/16/america... The numbers in 2021 of preference : 19% Urban, 46% Suburban, 35% rural.
  - tivert 2y ago
    So, you're saying that 81% of Americans want the wrong things? /s
- 10-1-100 2y ago
  Did you know that in most of the US it's illegal to build anything other than car-dependent single family suburbs? For many top US cities over 70% of the land is zoned _exclusively for car-dependent detached single family homes_. Many urbanists simply want walkable neighborhoods to be _literally legal to build_ so that they can live and raise families without as much risk from cars, which are in a race to the bottom with guns as the number one killer of kids in the US. The bar almost could not be lower. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/18/upshot/cities-across-america-question-single-family-zoning.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/18/upshot/cities... Edit: You may also not be aware that your detached single family neighborhood is, on average, financially insolvent and can only survive with subsidies from continued sprawl or from denser inner cities. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/14/americas-growth-ponzi-scheme-md2020 https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/14/americas-growt... You imply that people have the freedom to not move to the suburbs if they don't like them because "this is America", but don't seem to be aware that there is decades of policy at every level restricting people from doing exactly that.
  - kkfx 2y ago
    I'm in the French Alps, so a spread area, NOT designed to sell cars, and well we have walkable areas without physical ads (shop windows) in nature and the simplest difference between the USA suburbs is just the fact that here homes and commerce are mixed, so you have a supermarket nearby a blacksmith, few other shops and so on, while some works at home in presence, like a barber with the shop in the basement. Long story short it's EASY to correct USA suburbs defects, just allowing mixing residences and commerce. While it's next to impossible evolving cities without rebuilding them. You'll never see a green new deal done NY, and we haven't enough natural resources to rebuild cities, while we can rebuild spread areas without making heat island of thermal mass, subsidence, health issues, big pollution and so on, the sole looser are the finance capitalists who need large cities to own en mass and rent en mass, selling services that are useless and unfeasible in a spread area. The Strong Town model is definitively possible in a mixed suburbs like here in the Alps, while it's impossible in a modern city.
rabbits77 2y ago
There's a bit of contradiction in the article. The main objection is the author's feeling of uneasiness in open spaces. "liminal spaces" created by, for example, large parking lots. The author then complains that these wide open spaces are not "walkable". What? They are certainly walkable by their very design! What they are not, it seems is the real objection, are cozy spaces lined with tacqueiras and coffee shops.
- timeon 2y ago
  Walkable means that you can walk to something, not just walk to another house.
  - red-iron-pine 2y ago
    Walkable in the sense that I can meet most of my needs via walking. I live 2 blocks away from a grocery store, for example. There is a 24 hour pharmacy roughly the same distance, and a couple coffee shops + a gas station + McDonalds not too much further away. There is an expansive set of tennis courts and beach vollyball area within walking distance, and next to it is a great park & playground. A bit further in the other direction is an elementary school with playgrounds, and beyond that, at the edge of what I'd consider walkable, is a splash park. Get on a bike and the offerings double. Meanwhile, my parents are 20 minutes away from anything outside of a single gas station. Plenty of nice houses, and at least one school and fire dept., but they basically have to drive into town -- even though they're surrounded by houses -- just to snag a simple coffee or quick grocery store run.
  - rabbits77 2y ago
    the article states this person is walking in commercial area. that is what is creating the liminal space. she’s not strolling through the woods. she’s basically just bothered that her neighborhood isn’t gentrified enough yet.
pasttense01 2y ago
Another question is how are kids supposed to get around in that environment? Particularly crossing stroads to visit their friends.
- nunez 2y ago
  They drive
kkfx 2y ago
I was living, now circa 8 years ago, in a big city, now I'm living in the french Alps and I have exactly ZERO intention to come back in a prisons named city. USA suburbs for my little US experience have a simple issue: they are residential ONLY. Here we have sparse homes AND commerce of various kind, in few km/miles from my home there are a handful of other homes, but also a small supermarket, a blacksmith shed, a brico-like shop (semi-finished wood like panels, lumbers etc and metal products, paint, ...) a multi-service small center (from tobacco shop to parcel shipping and so on), as a result we move of course, but much less than in the USA. In cities on contrary instead of living in nature, moving in nature, we commute between big buildings used for less than half a day, to seed physical ads (shop windows) in between them, wasting a gazillion of natural resources, being unable to evolve due to density, being in a thermal mass island to augment the effects of climate changes, having waterproofed so killed, a vast area of soil, created subsidence problems, disrupted the natural water cycle for a much bigger then the city radius, ... to the point nearby some coastal cities sharks get too much cocaine from humans. Dear city-lovers: in the past cities was NEEDED, not a good place anyway but a needed one, because of scarce, slow and expensive logistics, paperwork who need offices, absence of modern TLCs etc, nowadays cities have grown big enough to being unmaintainable, ghettos for poor and desperate slaves of the finance capitalism who NEED CITIES to keep up, the sole, without any other purpose. Did you now the Green New Deal? Well, allow me, since I've built a new home, with p.v., a bit of energy storage, BEV etc to tell a thing: the Green New Deal work. But work ONLY in small buildings, single family homes, hens etc. NOT in cities. Oh, yes you can theoretically build new cities, the Saudis knows a bit with their failed Neom project, failed like the ancient Fordlandia or modern Arkadag, Prospera, Innopolis, ... smart-lagers for citizens-inmates to be exploited by giants, so costly we can't even build a first generation of smart cities, while we can and we build and have already built countless new green new deal compliant homes. Cities are modern mainframe, needed by the cloud+mobile world witch is a fragile and distopic one. To correct suburbs just buy and destroy some homes there if the density it's too much and insert some sheds with various shops, and you'll discover how is easy to live with them. Than you'll discover again the strong-town classic physical work from home with the barber shop in the basement and the barber's home on top because hey, we have hairs to be cut, teeth to treated and so on whenever we live, so instead of having X dentist in a dense area of a city we have the same number of dentists spread as we are spread. The sole who loose are the giants because in single family homes we own and we are naturally pushed to own instead of rent, there is room for LOCAL economy while giants struggle to be spread and so on. If you want a clean planet remember cities are polluted and incompatible with nature, humans are part of the nature and integrated in it live well.
jmclnx 2y ago
>There were two reasons why. One was that there is no easy path to our grocery store (unless you’re in a car, of course): Where I live, walking in suburbs is not an issue, neither is biking, no matter where. But a relative had a 4 month summer job stint in the midwest and they put him up in a wealthy suburban home. So, I brought my bicycle to explore the area for a 2 week visit. Riding in that area was damn scary, and I have ridden my bicycle many places, including NYC, Philadelphia, Montreal and Boston. I would never do that again where he lived. There were no shoulders or sidewalks on any of the regular roads. The drives seemed intent on killing me on purpose, during the rides I was being beeped at and sideswiped non stop. Visiting other areas in the midwest since, I would drive around and seems those areas are designed for cars and nothing else. So I would think in Texas, this would be true even to a greater extent. All I can say to the person, is good luck.
- slowmovintarget 2y ago
  Michigan, especially the Detroit area, is kind of a car state. There are some newer suburbs of Detroit that did a better job, but yeah, the Motor City was geared toward cars. (I grew up there.)
slowmovintarget 2y ago
Should be tagged with 2022, and the flagging makes sense. This whole site appears to be an urbanist propaganda site. Suburbs are evil, suburbs are racist, suburbs are stealing our money, suburbs are... Here's how to "organize" a Community Action Committee to rail against suburbs The thing about big cities is the government has way more control over your daily life if you're stuck in one place.

29 points by ivanleoncz 2y ago

Millions of people all across the country built homes in suburbs because they wanted peace. They’re not horrifying. Even if you personally find them dull, they are a nice way to live for many others. Even if yours is badly built, many are not. Parking garages are not creepy, they’re just utilitarian. They overstate their case by pointing to one place that they don’t like and generalizing that to all suburbs.

eesmith 2y ago
The term "wanted peace" includes the millions of people who built homes in the suburbs due to anxiety over desegregation in the cities, and preferred the peace of living in an area with an almost all white population, of similar economic status, and where the laws inhibited change in the status quo.
- adingus 2y ago
  Are you implying that living in the suburbs is racist?
  - eesmith 2y ago
    I'm specifically saying that some of the people moved to the suburbs for racist reasons. See for example "blockbusting", as a way to profit off from fearmongering to white homeowners, and encouraging movement to the suburbs. These racist reasons included ones the new suburbia dwellers would have described as "wanted peace", making that quoted phrase one which requires additional scrutiny. It is a classical logical fallacy to go from the reality that millions of people moved to Levitown-like suburbs for the perceived peace of its racially restrictive covenants to infer that all people moved to the suburbs for that reason.
  - stvltvs 2y ago
    There's the term "white flight" for a reason.
  - nunez 2y ago
    The existence of suburbs was heavily driven by racism, and some suburbs are still.
- db48x 2y ago
  No, they literally wanted peace after coming home from a horrifying world war. Or from a horrifying non—world war.
  - eesmith 2y ago
    That's hardly a fair characterization of the many reasons people - mostly white - moved to the suburbs over a period of decades. https://oxfordre.com/americanhistory/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001/acrefore-9780199329175-e-64 https://oxfordre.com/americanhistory/display/10.1093/acrefor... for example characterizes the period 1945–1970 as when "suburbia witnessed the expansion of segregated white privilege, bolstered by government policies, exclusionary practices, and reinforced by grassroots political movements". Levittown famously deed-restricted non-whites from buying a house in that suburb. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown says: > The first black family to buy one of the houses, the Myers, who bought a second-hand house in Pennsylvania's Levittown in 1957, experienced attacks on their house, and up to 500 people gathering outside. If those hundreds of people solely "wanted peace", why were they attacking others? Even in the 1980s, one of my father's coworkers - both born post-war - asked why he didn't move out from our immediate post-war suburb housing, which was increasingly non-white, to the newer suburbs where things were more "peaceful". My father laughed about that a few months later when a house a few blocks from his coworker caught fire. It has been used to process cocaine.

mannyv 2y ago

[flagged]

sien 2y ago
Yep. There are surveys on what people want, from 2021 : https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/12/16/americans-are-less-likely-than-before-covid-19-to-want-to-live-in-cities-more-likely-to-prefer-suburbs/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/12/16/america... The numbers in 2021 of preference : 19% Urban, 46% Suburban, 35% rural.
- tivert 2y ago
  So, you're saying that 81% of Americans want the wrong things? /s
10-1-100 2y ago
Did you know that in most of the US it's illegal to build anything other than car-dependent single family suburbs? For many top US cities over 70% of the land is zoned _exclusively for car-dependent detached single family homes_. Many urbanists simply want walkable neighborhoods to be _literally legal to build_ so that they can live and raise families without as much risk from cars, which are in a race to the bottom with guns as the number one killer of kids in the US. The bar almost could not be lower. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/18/upshot/cities-across-america-question-single-family-zoning.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/18/upshot/cities... Edit: You may also not be aware that your detached single family neighborhood is, on average, financially insolvent and can only survive with subsidies from continued sprawl or from denser inner cities. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/14/americas-growth-ponzi-scheme-md2020 https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/14/americas-growt... You imply that people have the freedom to not move to the suburbs if they don't like them because "this is America", but don't seem to be aware that there is decades of policy at every level restricting people from doing exactly that.
- kkfx 2y ago
  I'm in the French Alps, so a spread area, NOT designed to sell cars, and well we have walkable areas without physical ads (shop windows) in nature and the simplest difference between the USA suburbs is just the fact that here homes and commerce are mixed, so you have a supermarket nearby a blacksmith, few other shops and so on, while some works at home in presence, like a barber with the shop in the basement. Long story short it's EASY to correct USA suburbs defects, just allowing mixing residences and commerce. While it's next to impossible evolving cities without rebuilding them. You'll never see a green new deal done NY, and we haven't enough natural resources to rebuild cities, while we can rebuild spread areas without making heat island of thermal mass, subsidence, health issues, big pollution and so on, the sole looser are the finance capitalists who need large cities to own en mass and rent en mass, selling services that are useless and unfeasible in a spread area. The Strong Town model is definitively possible in a mixed suburbs like here in the Alps, while it's impossible in a modern city.

rabbits77 2y ago

There's a bit of contradiction in the article. The main objection is the author's feeling of uneasiness in open spaces. "liminal spaces" created by, for example, large parking lots. The author then complains that these wide open spaces are not "walkable". What? They are certainly walkable by their very design! What they are not, it seems is the real objection, are cozy spaces lined with tacqueiras and coffee shops.

timeon 2y ago
Walkable means that you can walk to something, not just walk to another house.
- red-iron-pine 2y ago
  Walkable in the sense that I can meet most of my needs via walking. I live 2 blocks away from a grocery store, for example. There is a 24 hour pharmacy roughly the same distance, and a couple coffee shops + a gas station + McDonalds not too much further away. There is an expansive set of tennis courts and beach vollyball area within walking distance, and next to it is a great park & playground. A bit further in the other direction is an elementary school with playgrounds, and beyond that, at the edge of what I'd consider walkable, is a splash park. Get on a bike and the offerings double. Meanwhile, my parents are 20 minutes away from anything outside of a single gas station. Plenty of nice houses, and at least one school and fire dept., but they basically have to drive into town -- even though they're surrounded by houses -- just to snag a simple coffee or quick grocery store run.
- rabbits77 2y ago
  the article states this person is walking in commercial area. that is what is creating the liminal space. she’s not strolling through the woods. she’s basically just bothered that her neighborhood isn’t gentrified enough yet.

pasttense01 2y ago

Another question is how are kids supposed to get around in that environment? Particularly crossing stroads to visit their friends.

nunez 2y ago
They drive

kkfx 2y ago

I was living, now circa 8 years ago, in a big city, now I'm living in the french Alps and I have exactly ZERO intention to come back in a prisons named city. USA suburbs for my little US experience have a simple issue: they are residential ONLY. Here we have sparse homes AND commerce of various kind, in few km/miles from my home there are a handful of other homes, but also a small supermarket, a blacksmith shed, a brico-like shop (semi-finished wood like panels, lumbers etc and metal products, paint, ...) a multi-service small center (from tobacco shop to parcel shipping and so on), as a result we move of course, but much less than in the USA. In cities on contrary instead of living in nature, moving in nature, we commute between big buildings used for less than half a day, to seed physical ads (shop windows) in between them, wasting a gazillion of natural resources, being unable to evolve due to density, being in a thermal mass island to augment the effects of climate changes, having waterproofed so killed, a vast area of soil, created subsidence problems, disrupted the natural water cycle for a much bigger then the city radius, ... to the point nearby some coastal cities sharks get too much cocaine from humans. Dear city-lovers: in the past cities was NEEDED, not a good place anyway but a needed one, because of scarce, slow and expensive logistics, paperwork who need offices, absence of modern TLCs etc, nowadays cities have grown big enough to being unmaintainable, ghettos for poor and desperate slaves of the finance capitalism who NEED CITIES to keep up, the sole, without any other purpose. Did you now the Green New Deal? Well, allow me, since I've built a new home, with p.v., a bit of energy storage, BEV etc to tell a thing: the Green New Deal work. But work ONLY in small buildings, single family homes, hens etc. NOT in cities. Oh, yes you can theoretically build new cities, the Saudis knows a bit with their failed Neom project, failed like the ancient Fordlandia or modern Arkadag, Prospera, Innopolis, ... smart-lagers for citizens-inmates to be exploited by giants, so costly we can't even build a first generation of smart cities, while we can and we build and have already built countless new green new deal compliant homes. Cities are modern mainframe, needed by the cloud+mobile world witch is a fragile and distopic one. To correct suburbs just buy and destroy some homes there if the density it's too much and insert some sheds with various shops, and you'll discover how is easy to live with them. Than you'll discover again the strong-town classic physical work from home with the barber shop in the basement and the barber's home on top because hey, we have hairs to be cut, teeth to treated and so on whenever we live, so instead of having X dentist in a dense area of a city we have the same number of dentists spread as we are spread. The sole who loose are the giants because in single family homes we own and we are naturally pushed to own instead of rent, there is room for LOCAL economy while giants struggle to be spread and so on. If you want a clean planet remember cities are polluted and incompatible with nature, humans are part of the nature and integrated in it live well.

jmclnx 2y ago

>There were two reasons why. One was that there is no easy path to our grocery store (unless you’re in a car, of course): Where I live, walking in suburbs is not an issue, neither is biking, no matter where. But a relative had a 4 month summer job stint in the midwest and they put him up in a wealthy suburban home. So, I brought my bicycle to explore the area for a 2 week visit. Riding in that area was damn scary, and I have ridden my bicycle many places, including NYC, Philadelphia, Montreal and Boston. I would never do that again where he lived. There were no shoulders or sidewalks on any of the regular roads. The drives seemed intent on killing me on purpose, during the rides I was being beeped at and sideswiped non stop. Visiting other areas in the midwest since, I would drive around and seems those areas are designed for cars and nothing else. So I would think in Texas, this would be true even to a greater extent. All I can say to the person, is good luck.

slowmovintarget 2y ago
Michigan, especially the Detroit area, is kind of a car state. There are some newer suburbs of Detroit that did a better job, but yeah, the Motor City was geared toward cars. (I grew up there.)

slowmovintarget 2y ago

Should be tagged with 2022, and the flagging makes sense. This whole site appears to be an urbanist propaganda site. Suburbs are evil, suburbs are racist, suburbs are stealing our money, suburbs are... Here's how to "organize" a Community Action Committee to rail against suburbs The thing about big cities is the government has way more control over your daily life if you're stuck in one place.