13 ms·

The Suburbs Will Die: One Man's Fight to Fix the American Dream

138 points by e15ctr0n 12y ago

cwal37 12y ago
Reading on the topic: The Geography of Nowhere: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geography_of_Nowhere http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geography_of_Nowhere The City in History: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_in_History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_in_History
- humanrebar 12y ago
  Here's an hour of an economics professor talking to Charles Marohn about Strong Towns: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/05/charles_marohn.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/05/charles_marohn.html
CalRobert 12y ago
Unfortunately if you don't want to live in an environment like the one this person helped build, it seems necessary to be either extremely rich or comfortable with high crime rates, or willing to leave the country entirely.
- Pxtl 12y ago
  Nonsense. There's plenty of middle-ground between Detroit and Manhattan.
- _dark_matter_ 12y ago
  I don't think that's true at all. I can think if several areas in the cities I've lived in that have densely packed houses, condos, or apartments within walking distance of some stores and public transportation. There is a huge swath of possibilities that lie between downtown and the suburbs. You may have to give up that one acre property, though.
  - CalRobert 12y ago
    And they were affordable? I am genuinely interested. I think when I wrote that I was unfairly thinking of SF, LA (well, Santa Monica and Venice), NYC, DC, etc.
- cwal37 12y ago
  That's not really accurate. Suburbs have a lower overall amount of crime, but you need to think about relative rates of crime based on the number of people living in an area. Here's a simple study that discusses a lot of that: http://proceedings.esri.com/library/userconf/proc00/professional/papers/pap508/p508.htm http://proceedings.esri.com/library/userconf/proc00/professi... Personally, I found it pretty easy to live in two different college towns (less than 100k pop), not own a car, and enjoy relatively walkable areas. Then I moved to TN for work and got laughs in the interview when I asked about public transportation. I imagine the suburban reflex kicks in strongly for some people once they have a kid or two.
  - enjo 12y ago
    Crime rates and school rankings are the two places where the general populations inability to understand statistics really come home to roost.
    - avn2109 12y ago
      Intuitively this seems right, but I wouldn't mind hearing more about what exactly the general populace is misunderstanding there.
      - enjo 12y ago
        The biggest thing with crime rates is understanding relative risk. The crime rate in another neighborhood may be 40% higher than yours, but that by itself is relatively meaningless. The reality is that in the vast majority of places in the United States you are very unlikely to be the victim of the crime. Even if you stay in a particular neighborhood for decades. I've never been able to ascertain wether the insistence that suburbs are much safer comes from not understanding the actual risk, or something more sinister (racism - probably unintentional).
  - ch4s3 12y ago
    @enjo Especially since the best marker for performance in school is parent involvement, if you're a really involved parent the school your child is in ends up having a lot less effect than people think.
- TheIronYuppie 12y ago
  I'm not sure I follow your middle point. Per capita, density does not necessarily equal worse crime rates. E.g. NYC (Dense - http://www.city-data.com/city/New-York-New-York.html http://www.city-data.com/city/New-York-New-York.html) vs. Houston (Sprawl - http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Houston-Texas.html http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Houston-Texas.html)
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- akgerber 12y ago
  That's maybe true in California, but not in the Midwest, or even in a lot of the older railroad suburbs on the East Coast.
zavulon 12y ago
I read the entire article, and I guess I missed it - what's the proposed solution?
- ghouse 12y ago
  Quit subsidizing sprawl?
  - zavulon 12y ago
    Right, I got that part.. but then what? Small towns die out, and everyone moves to the big city?
    - trevorgerhardt 12y ago
      Take the city model to the suburbs. You don't need more than 100k people to have dense, pedestrian focused development.
      - TillE 12y ago
        Precisely. My general theory is that you could significantly improve most suburbs by knocking down a block (or even just half a block) near the center of the suburb and building a mini "downtown" - a commercial area interspersed with a few modestly-sized apartment buildings. That's far from the optimal design if you're starting from scratch, but it solves a lot of problems without massive changes. I grew up in American suburbia and hated it. It wasn't even one of the worst examples, but you still literally could not walk to the local LIRR station or to the park, which were just 1-2 miles away. Absurd. Build commercial areas and some more sidewalks, and it would've been much less terrible.
    - ch4s3 12y ago
      Small towns can be fine if they have a compact walkable downtown, and are suitably close to job centers. Rural small towns and old rust belt towns are likely to die slow deaths regardless.
bayesianhorse 12y ago
If you want to live the American dream, go create a start up in Europe...
- Chronic29 12y ago
  Why? So the European governments can spy on you?
ufmace 12y ago
My skepticism of suburbs has mostly been about how the long distance and personal car dependence they create tends to isolate people and households. Build a suburban "gated community" for safety, give everyone a huge lawn that they're obligated to constantly maintain, don't allow any commercial buildings in because they're considered ugly, and you get an environment where it's pretty tough to get anywhere without a car. Add in the poor pedestrian infrastructure, intimidating high-speed traffic, and some irrational fear of how anybody under 18 out of eyesight of a parent for a second is about to be kidnapped, and you get a neighborhood where everyone seems actively discouraged from knowing anything about their neighbors. Seems to me that this is what creates the unsafe environment that everyone was trying so hard to get away from. It's interesting to read that many suburbs may also be logistically unsustainable.
- modoc 12y ago
  Your vision of a suburb has very little to do with the reality of my suburban existence. It's like someone from the country talking about the horribly dangerous ugly city with its filthy air, roving gangs shooting strangers, and huge rats running in the streets. I'm not saying suburbs are perfect, but you've basically thrown up a stack of strawmen here.
  - pnathan 12y ago
    IME of suburbia, the grandparent's comment is spot-on. I live in a city, and it's kind of ugly, kind of dangerous in many places, there are random shootings of strangers. The air, thankfully, is good. The rats in the streets would be kind of awesome! :)
  - lliwta 12y ago
    I generally agree, except that the not being able to get around without a car bit is really True in my experience. edit: It's easy to know your neighbors in suburbia if you're outgoing, and things vary from street to street. But there generally is way less interaction than if you were to have a neighborhood pub at the end of your street, or side-to-side porches everyone lounges on during summer nights. It tends to be that you know the neighbors you get along with and ignore everyone else. In city environments, it's more like you interact with everyone because, well, no choice.
pnathan 12y ago
I don't like suburbs. Why? - I don't like the constant driving to get anywhere. - I don't like the malls, the big box stores, the "clone" button that seems applied across the landscape. - I don't like the giant roads carving their way around, splitting communities. - I don't like the squandering of resources on lawns! individual houses! low-density housing! I can say, with confidence, I'd like to live in a place where I own my house, where I have some property to do with as I please, where children can play nearby on grass, and where I don't sweat getting rent raised. On the other hand, I can easily see own a very small piece of land and having access to some neighborhood commons as part of a community.
- binarymax 12y ago
  The way I differentiate in my brain, because I'm an 80's kid: I do like "Ferris Beuler's Day Off" style suburbs. I do not like "Edward Scissorhands" style suburbs. I grew up in the former, and given the opportunity, I'd like my future kids to do the same.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - 0xdeadbeefbabe 12y ago
    I'd like my children to grow up in the "The Burbs" style suburbs.
  - 3pt14159 12y ago
    I think I'm too young to understand your references. What's the difference between those types of suburbs?
    - extra88 12y ago
      One difference is vastly more wealth. The Scissorhands suburb was a classic "Levittown" suburb in non-classic colors: relatively small & inexpensive single-story homes that are virtually identical, each home has a lawn in the front and back but not a lot of space on the sides, not a lot of trees or even shrubbery because it's a development built in a relatively short period of time on what used to be farmland. Bueller's suburb is decades older, much closer to the "urban" it's a "sub" of, Chicago, which grew over time. Much bigger houses, all two-story, with bigger plots of land and plenty of trees providing shade and privacy. The houses are more varied because they were built over a longer span of time by different people. Both had sidewalks but there are ones like the Scissorhands suburb that don't. Neither has much economic or ethnic diversity. Because it developed over time, Bueller's suburb may have more integrated retail and services while Scissorhands' is strictly a bedroom community.
pmorici 12y ago
When I think of the suburbs I think of each house having it's own well and septic system. Gas, electric, and phone are the only provided utilities and they come from private companies not a local government. This article seems to be talking about something different more like a low density city with city provided sewer and water.
- 9999 12y ago
  I'm not sure why you were downvoted, some suburbs are exactly as you describe. Perhaps the vast majority are not like that in the US?
  - ch4s3 12y ago
    The vast majority have sewer systems. When you cluster a lot of houses into a smallish area, septic tanks become problematic.
- brixon 12y ago
  What you call suburbs others would call the country. But it can be varying degrees. I live in a gated neighborhood in a private planned subdivision with city water, city sewer, natural gas, cable, electric, and phone. Less than a mile from my house is city planned subdivision (blocks) with well water, septic systems, cable, electric, phone and partially paved streets.
Zigurd 12y ago
Recently a researcher at Toyota predicted that self-driving cars would perpetuate suburbia and enable more driving. A door-to-door ride in my own car would be far faster than riding the Boston area commuter rail, which has an inconveniently sparse schedule, and then the Red Line into Cambridge. The only reason to take the commuter rail is to avoid the chore of driving. The diesel locomotives are not cleaner or more efficient.
- ghaff 12y ago
  I fully expect that this is correct if you hypothesize the availability of fully (or even largely) autonomous vehicles--however long they take to make it onto the roads. It's only logical. Make driving a "better" experience in the minds of many people in the sense of allowing them to do things in the car other than watch the road and you'll get more driving. To the degree that autonomous vehicles could perhaps ease urban parking, that would make using them more attractive as well. I don't think anyone really knows how self-driving + electric cars are going to exactly play out in the coming decades, but I fully expect them to make individual car use more attractive, not less.
- pouetpouet 12y ago
  Nobody knows. Robotaxis are a bit like carsharing, they change the economics. A private ownership car bears a lot of fixed costs, and each mile get cheaper. Once you own one, you are likely to use it all the time. With pay-as-you-go robotaxis the incentives are different. Going car-free will be easier. Self driving cars will relieve downtowns/walkable places from dead parking space. That means more destinations reachable by foot/bike. Why use a car when you can use your feet? Self driving cars also means that roads will be safer for pedestrians and cyclists. Congestion won't go away. Now you can read/work/play in your car, but that's about it. Last but not least, sprawl is still unsustainable in terms of infrastructure.
  - Zigurd 12y ago
    I suspect local economics dominates the issue. Even the ticky tacky hundreds-of-townhouses-all-the-same sprawl into the garlic fields (are there still garlic fields?) south of San Jose will not feel any pinch from... what? San Francisco is full and Silicon Valley spews wealth. San Jose should benefit from higher density and more urban cultural life, but it's not going to make a dent in demand. If the money is there, the sprawl will remain. Conversely, if it isn't, there won't be any urban revitalization.
bane 12y ago
I will absolutely trade my ridiculously sized house in the burbs (within walking distance of a bank, grocery, bike store, gym, Tae Kwon Do school, movie theater, two salons, 3 doctors and 3 dentists and a psychiatrist, a mix of about a dozen local and chain eating options, an optometrist, high-end toy store, dry cleaners, wine store, 2 ice cream parlors, and a 5 minute drive to more local ethnic food than you can shake a stick at soon to get a local library, and dozens of miles of bike and hiking trails and three large swimming pools) for an equivalent sized domicile of my choice in my choice of neighborhoods in Manhattan tomorrow if he wants to make that trade. After which, I'll probably sell that place in Manhattan for the $30-40 million I can get, buy another house back in my old suburb and a vacation house in Southern Spain and retire/angel fund my choice of startups till I die.
- Brakenshire 12y ago
  If you are in reasonable walking distance of all those things, and it pleasant to walk to them, I would say almost by definition you don't live in a suburb, or rather, that is not the kind of place that people are complaining about. You must be just as horrified as anyone else at the prospect of living in a subdivision where you are miles away from anything apart from houses, or where you literally cannot walk to town, or from one shop to another across the road, because of a lack of pedestrian access.
  - bane 12y ago
    Let's just say modern suburbs are quite different than they used to be. There's been lots of lessons learned and as a buyer, I won't buy in an area that's not at least of this style. Is it as convenient as a dense city? No, but my standard of living makes the affordable parts of most cities look like tenement housing in comparison. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy cities as much as the next person. But economics is a major problem that cities have to overcome. Equivalent housing in a city is one or two orders of magnitude more expensive. Cities are great for lots of things but I don't use most of those things more than ever once in a while even while living in a city. May as well live someplace nicer the other 90% of the time and take the the easy access public transport in when I really want to see a museum or go to a concert or whatever.
wainstead 12y ago
Kunstler says it quite well too: https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_suburbia https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_sub...
recalibrator 12y ago
The only ones who truly profit from urban sprawl are land developers. They wipe out forests and wildlife to make a quick buck on cheap low-density housing. The taxpayer foots the bill to have the grid and city services extended for these suburbs. So the taxpayer loses, nature loses, and the losers who bought these ugly disposable houses are losers. Only the land developers profit.
- gohrt 12y ago
  > The taxpayer foots the bill to have the grid and city services extended for these suburbs. The taxpayer is who gets the services.
bubbleRefuge 12y ago
From the perspective of someone who was pushed to the burbs due to better schools and facilities for kids, one thing I notice is that urban apartment complexes here in the states don't have the playground facilities that you find in big cities in developing countries. For example, when I visited the city of Sao Paolo Brazil, I stayed in an upper middle class apartment complex which had land at the base of the building walled off into a private park which had a hybrid soccer/basketball court, playground facilities, pool, and plenty of space for kids to run wild. Don't see that here in the states ( except pool ).
cpwright 12y ago
I question the logistical challenges here. If it is truly not that dense, why bother with sewers at all. My little slice of suburbia has no sewers, instead all of it is septic (and where I grew up cesspools). It's 100% on the owner to maintain. Also, why bother spending money to widen streets. Let the streets stay as they were when they were first built. If you're going to go off trying to bring everything up to code as of now, instead of code when it was built, there will be never ending expenses. I wonder if really the property taxes are just too low in this particular town. I pay 2-2.5% of my homes value in taxes each year, and my town/school district have to budget prudently, but are able to pay their bills and not rack up unsustainable debt. The only two departments I really care about are sanitation, and highway. Even sanitation can be eliminated with private garbage as many other towns have. I do however expect the town to pave and plow my street. Beyond that, everything could be accomplished with user fees.
transfire 12y ago
1. Require higher standards. Infrastructure needs to last decades, not years. We used to build things that well. There is no reason we can't again. Then the big bucks we pay up front would be worth it. Unfortunately we have been moving in the opposite direction, to fill the coffers of cheap fat cats. 2. Zoning laws must change. It is ridiculous the a suburban family has to drive to the Super Walmart for a gallon of milk. When I was young there was a local convenience store just down every street (and not just crappy junk filled 7-11s). 3. Trains. Apparently they are cheap enough to get immigrants to their jobs, but too expensive for middle America? The B.S. around trains needs to end, and a new age of private passenger rail promoted. If you don't beleive me (b/c you'd rather believe political talking points) you best get a'Googling. 4. To go along with the trains, why is my municipal airport all but useless? Is anyone else getting tired of ever bigger airports and ever smaller seats? Who decided airports needed to be malls and that all flights needed to herd people into a handful of national feed lots? I figure at this rate airports will have indoor roller coasters within the next 20 years. What we need to do instead is transition to point-to-point flights on mass produced jets. Currently jets are all hand made. Good grief! 5. And ditch that 9-5 business. It's time we split the work and go 8 to 2 and 2 to 8. More jobs, business are open longer, and yet fewer people on the roads. My 5 cents. Penny for your thoughts?
- gohrt 12y ago
  > When I was young there was a local convenience store just down every street (and not just crappy junk filled 7-11s). Do you think zoning laws prevent 7-11 from selling milk, or do you think 7-11 sells what the market buys?
- im_a_lawyer 12y ago
  All of you are approaching this the wrong way. Suburbia was born out of government policies, not because a bunch of towns decided to plan their cities differently. Here is what you do: Keep government away from the mortgage market. Bring back the historic minimum of ~20% downpayments at ~6% interest. End mortgage interest deduction. Basically scrap every stupid law that has been passed in the last 50 years that has the keywords "home ownership", "american dream" blah blah blah in them because it has done nothing but the opposite. Raise the gas tax so we don't have to bail out our highways using general funds and to pay off our accumulated infrastructure debt which is estimated to be at a trillion dollars. The result: No more free mortgages to every peon on the street to further inflate housing costs. Real home-ownership. Gas goes up to $7 a gallon and suddenly you'll start seeing buses and sidewalks everywhere... places like this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/Cincinnati-suburbs-tract-housing.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/Cincinnat... become worthless overnight. Cities and neighborhoods will naturally start organizing themselves towards a more traditional and sustainable pattern. Problem solved.
towski 12y ago
It's the economy, stupid.
pavedwalden 12y ago
When I imagine this borrowing pattern repeated across every town in America, I start to wonder how this affects the economy. Does anyone know how large a share of the American financial sector all of this municipal borrowing accounts for?
cpursley 12y ago
After having spent a month in Russia, another large country with significant distance between cities, it appears they have solved the problem. Instead of building out, they've built dense vertical cities where everything you need is within close walking distance. And around 40% of Russians have a dacha, or 'summer house', located in enclaves within pubic transit distance from their city where they can stretch their feet and/or work the soil. My guess at the reasons Russian cities developed this way is due to central planning and costs to build and maintain roads. Now, I'm not advocating central planning. The reasons suburbs exploded were due to the subsidization of once unaccessible land by the federal government via interstates. Take away the pricing distortions from land and we'll have to build up. A solution to this is market based - sell of the interstate system and let users fund them.
Mz 12y ago
I am an environmental studies major who wanted to be an urban planner. I gave up my car a few years ago. At the time, I was living in The Deep South. There was a bus stop a ten minute walk from my apartment and another one in front of my office building. No bus went directly from one to the other. By car, it was a 7 minute drive. On foot, it was a one hour walk. By bus, I think it would have taken about 2 hours. I walked and caught rides and was usually at work in about 15 or 20 minutes. Our modern concept of suburbs was born just after WW2. We had 4 years of dual income, no kids families saving up to half their income and unable to have kids due to the men being at war overseas. WW2 was immediately preceded by The Great Depression. As their reward for defeating evil, Americans just wanted a house of their own. There wasn't enough housing to meet the demand and the nation came together as a whole to create policies and financing mechanisms whole-clothe and we began throwing up Levittowns all over the place. Decades later, our demographic has changed and we remain prisoners of policies born overnight to service the preponderance of nuclear families. We have a lot fewer nuclear families with SAHMs and small kids yet our entire world, so to speak, is aimed at creating a dream for a generation that is dying out. (My father fought in WW2 and he died last fall. He was just short of his 89th birthday.) I now live in San Diego county. Transit and density here make it almost like a little slice of Europe, but with better weather. I think I will eventually be able to get the life I want, without a car. I wish this man all the best in the world. He has quite the uphill battle ahead of him.
LordKano 12y ago
I like the suburbs. I like that I have about 1/6 of an acre of land that my house sits on. I can grow a garden. My children have a safe yard to play in. I have a nice warm and dry garage in which I can perform my automotive repairs. I can barbecue without choking my neighbors with the smoke from my grill. I can play loud music late at night and not bother everyone nearby. I have trees from which we get organic, pesticide free fruits. Suburbs will never die, as long as there are still people like me. The author's epiphany seems to have come from the realization that despite his engineering background and his status as an "expert", he still didn't know as much as the hoi polloi about what was best for their neighborhoods but he still didn't learn the correct lesson. The problem was caused by other "experts", to whom the state deferred for determining the standards in the first place. Every town is different. Every town has different needs. Forcing them to all use the same plan has consequences, even if he was not able to see them. Widening those streets and removing those trees only encouraged people to drive faster and caused more accidents and deaths. It was a bad idea to help people drive faster through residential neighborhoods. Were he not so enamored with enforcing external standards, he might have been able to see that.

138 points by e15ctr0n 12y ago

Reading on the topic: The Geography of Nowhere: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geography_of_Nowhere http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geography_of_Nowhere The City in History: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_in_History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_in_History

humanrebar 12y ago
Here's an hour of an economics professor talking to Charles Marohn about Strong Towns: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/05/charles_marohn.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/05/charles_marohn.html

CalRobert 12y ago

Unfortunately if you don't want to live in an environment like the one this person helped build, it seems necessary to be either extremely rich or comfortable with high crime rates, or willing to leave the country entirely.

Pxtl 12y ago
Nonsense. There's plenty of middle-ground between Detroit and Manhattan.
_dark_matter_ 12y ago
I don't think that's true at all. I can think if several areas in the cities I've lived in that have densely packed houses, condos, or apartments within walking distance of some stores and public transportation. There is a huge swath of possibilities that lie between downtown and the suburbs. You may have to give up that one acre property, though.
- CalRobert 12y ago
  And they were affordable? I am genuinely interested. I think when I wrote that I was unfairly thinking of SF, LA (well, Santa Monica and Venice), NYC, DC, etc.
cwal37 12y ago
That's not really accurate. Suburbs have a lower overall amount of crime, but you need to think about relative rates of crime based on the number of people living in an area. Here's a simple study that discusses a lot of that: http://proceedings.esri.com/library/userconf/proc00/professional/papers/pap508/p508.htm http://proceedings.esri.com/library/userconf/proc00/professi... Personally, I found it pretty easy to live in two different college towns (less than 100k pop), not own a car, and enjoy relatively walkable areas. Then I moved to TN for work and got laughs in the interview when I asked about public transportation. I imagine the suburban reflex kicks in strongly for some people once they have a kid or two.
- enjo 12y ago
  Crime rates and school rankings are the two places where the general populations inability to understand statistics really come home to roost.
  - avn2109 12y ago
    Intuitively this seems right, but I wouldn't mind hearing more about what exactly the general populace is misunderstanding there.
    - enjo 12y ago
      The biggest thing with crime rates is understanding relative risk. The crime rate in another neighborhood may be 40% higher than yours, but that by itself is relatively meaningless. The reality is that in the vast majority of places in the United States you are very unlikely to be the victim of the crime. Even if you stay in a particular neighborhood for decades. I've never been able to ascertain wether the insistence that suburbs are much safer comes from not understanding the actual risk, or something more sinister (racism - probably unintentional).
- ch4s3 12y ago
  @enjo Especially since the best marker for performance in school is parent involvement, if you're a really involved parent the school your child is in ends up having a lot less effect than people think.
TheIronYuppie 12y ago
I'm not sure I follow your middle point. Per capita, density does not necessarily equal worse crime rates. E.g. NYC (Dense - http://www.city-data.com/city/New-York-New-York.html http://www.city-data.com/city/New-York-New-York.html) vs. Houston (Sprawl - http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Houston-Texas.html http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Houston-Texas.html)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
akgerber 12y ago
That's maybe true in California, but not in the Midwest, or even in a lot of the older railroad suburbs on the East Coast.

zavulon 12y ago

I read the entire article, and I guess I missed it - what's the proposed solution?

ghouse 12y ago
Quit subsidizing sprawl?
- zavulon 12y ago
  Right, I got that part.. but then what? Small towns die out, and everyone moves to the big city?
  - trevorgerhardt 12y ago
    Take the city model to the suburbs. You don't need more than 100k people to have dense, pedestrian focused development.
    - TillE 12y ago
      Precisely. My general theory is that you could significantly improve most suburbs by knocking down a block (or even just half a block) near the center of the suburb and building a mini "downtown" - a commercial area interspersed with a few modestly-sized apartment buildings. That's far from the optimal design if you're starting from scratch, but it solves a lot of problems without massive changes. I grew up in American suburbia and hated it. It wasn't even one of the worst examples, but you still literally could not walk to the local LIRR station or to the park, which were just 1-2 miles away. Absurd. Build commercial areas and some more sidewalks, and it would've been much less terrible.
  - ch4s3 12y ago
    Small towns can be fine if they have a compact walkable downtown, and are suitably close to job centers. Rural small towns and old rust belt towns are likely to die slow deaths regardless.

bayesianhorse 12y ago

If you want to live the American dream, go create a start up in Europe...

Chronic29 12y ago
Why? So the European governments can spy on you?

ufmace 12y ago

My skepticism of suburbs has mostly been about how the long distance and personal car dependence they create tends to isolate people and households. Build a suburban "gated community" for safety, give everyone a huge lawn that they're obligated to constantly maintain, don't allow any commercial buildings in because they're considered ugly, and you get an environment where it's pretty tough to get anywhere without a car. Add in the poor pedestrian infrastructure, intimidating high-speed traffic, and some irrational fear of how anybody under 18 out of eyesight of a parent for a second is about to be kidnapped, and you get a neighborhood where everyone seems actively discouraged from knowing anything about their neighbors. Seems to me that this is what creates the unsafe environment that everyone was trying so hard to get away from. It's interesting to read that many suburbs may also be logistically unsustainable.

modoc 12y ago
Your vision of a suburb has very little to do with the reality of my suburban existence. It's like someone from the country talking about the horribly dangerous ugly city with its filthy air, roving gangs shooting strangers, and huge rats running in the streets. I'm not saying suburbs are perfect, but you've basically thrown up a stack of strawmen here.
- pnathan 12y ago
  IME of suburbia, the grandparent's comment is spot-on. I live in a city, and it's kind of ugly, kind of dangerous in many places, there are random shootings of strangers. The air, thankfully, is good. The rats in the streets would be kind of awesome! :)
- lliwta 12y ago
  I generally agree, except that the not being able to get around without a car bit is really True in my experience. edit: It's easy to know your neighbors in suburbia if you're outgoing, and things vary from street to street. But there generally is way less interaction than if you were to have a neighborhood pub at the end of your street, or side-to-side porches everyone lounges on during summer nights. It tends to be that you know the neighbors you get along with and ignore everyone else. In city environments, it's more like you interact with everyone because, well, no choice.

pnathan 12y ago

I don't like suburbs. Why? - I don't like the constant driving to get anywhere. - I don't like the malls, the big box stores, the "clone" button that seems applied across the landscape. - I don't like the giant roads carving their way around, splitting communities. - I don't like the squandering of resources on lawns! individual houses! low-density housing! I can say, with confidence, I'd like to live in a place where I own my house, where I have some property to do with as I please, where children can play nearby on grass, and where I don't sweat getting rent raised. On the other hand, I can easily see own a very small piece of land and having access to some neighborhood commons as part of a community.

binarymax 12y ago
The way I differentiate in my brain, because I'm an 80's kid: I do like "Ferris Beuler's Day Off" style suburbs. I do not like "Edward Scissorhands" style suburbs. I grew up in the former, and given the opportunity, I'd like my future kids to do the same.
- deleted 12y ago
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- 0xdeadbeefbabe 12y ago
  I'd like my children to grow up in the "The Burbs" style suburbs.
- 3pt14159 12y ago
  I think I'm too young to understand your references. What's the difference between those types of suburbs?
  - extra88 12y ago
    One difference is vastly more wealth. The Scissorhands suburb was a classic "Levittown" suburb in non-classic colors: relatively small & inexpensive single-story homes that are virtually identical, each home has a lawn in the front and back but not a lot of space on the sides, not a lot of trees or even shrubbery because it's a development built in a relatively short period of time on what used to be farmland. Bueller's suburb is decades older, much closer to the "urban" it's a "sub" of, Chicago, which grew over time. Much bigger houses, all two-story, with bigger plots of land and plenty of trees providing shade and privacy. The houses are more varied because they were built over a longer span of time by different people. Both had sidewalks but there are ones like the Scissorhands suburb that don't. Neither has much economic or ethnic diversity. Because it developed over time, Bueller's suburb may have more integrated retail and services while Scissorhands' is strictly a bedroom community.

pmorici 12y ago

When I think of the suburbs I think of each house having it's own well and septic system. Gas, electric, and phone are the only provided utilities and they come from private companies not a local government. This article seems to be talking about something different more like a low density city with city provided sewer and water.

9999 12y ago
I'm not sure why you were downvoted, some suburbs are exactly as you describe. Perhaps the vast majority are not like that in the US?
- ch4s3 12y ago
  The vast majority have sewer systems. When you cluster a lot of houses into a smallish area, septic tanks become problematic.
brixon 12y ago
What you call suburbs others would call the country. But it can be varying degrees. I live in a gated neighborhood in a private planned subdivision with city water, city sewer, natural gas, cable, electric, and phone. Less than a mile from my house is city planned subdivision (blocks) with well water, septic systems, cable, electric, phone and partially paved streets.

Zigurd 12y ago

Recently a researcher at Toyota predicted that self-driving cars would perpetuate suburbia and enable more driving. A door-to-door ride in my own car would be far faster than riding the Boston area commuter rail, which has an inconveniently sparse schedule, and then the Red Line into Cambridge. The only reason to take the commuter rail is to avoid the chore of driving. The diesel locomotives are not cleaner or more efficient.

ghaff 12y ago
I fully expect that this is correct if you hypothesize the availability of fully (or even largely) autonomous vehicles--however long they take to make it onto the roads. It's only logical. Make driving a "better" experience in the minds of many people in the sense of allowing them to do things in the car other than watch the road and you'll get more driving. To the degree that autonomous vehicles could perhaps ease urban parking, that would make using them more attractive as well. I don't think anyone really knows how self-driving + electric cars are going to exactly play out in the coming decades, but I fully expect them to make individual car use more attractive, not less.
pouetpouet 12y ago
Nobody knows. Robotaxis are a bit like carsharing, they change the economics. A private ownership car bears a lot of fixed costs, and each mile get cheaper. Once you own one, you are likely to use it all the time. With pay-as-you-go robotaxis the incentives are different. Going car-free will be easier. Self driving cars will relieve downtowns/walkable places from dead parking space. That means more destinations reachable by foot/bike. Why use a car when you can use your feet? Self driving cars also means that roads will be safer for pedestrians and cyclists. Congestion won't go away. Now you can read/work/play in your car, but that's about it. Last but not least, sprawl is still unsustainable in terms of infrastructure.
- Zigurd 12y ago
  I suspect local economics dominates the issue. Even the ticky tacky hundreds-of-townhouses-all-the-same sprawl into the garlic fields (are there still garlic fields?) south of San Jose will not feel any pinch from... what? San Francisco is full and Silicon Valley spews wealth. San Jose should benefit from higher density and more urban cultural life, but it's not going to make a dent in demand. If the money is there, the sprawl will remain. Conversely, if it isn't, there won't be any urban revitalization.

bane 12y ago

I will absolutely trade my ridiculously sized house in the burbs (within walking distance of a bank, grocery, bike store, gym, Tae Kwon Do school, movie theater, two salons, 3 doctors and 3 dentists and a psychiatrist, a mix of about a dozen local and chain eating options, an optometrist, high-end toy store, dry cleaners, wine store, 2 ice cream parlors, and a 5 minute drive to more local ethnic food than you can shake a stick at soon to get a local library, and dozens of miles of bike and hiking trails and three large swimming pools) for an equivalent sized domicile of my choice in my choice of neighborhoods in Manhattan tomorrow if he wants to make that trade. After which, I'll probably sell that place in Manhattan for the $30-40 million I can get, buy another house back in my old suburb and a vacation house in Southern Spain and retire/angel fund my choice of startups till I die.

Brakenshire 12y ago
If you are in reasonable walking distance of all those things, and it pleasant to walk to them, I would say almost by definition you don't live in a suburb, or rather, that is not the kind of place that people are complaining about. You must be just as horrified as anyone else at the prospect of living in a subdivision where you are miles away from anything apart from houses, or where you literally cannot walk to town, or from one shop to another across the road, because of a lack of pedestrian access.
- bane 12y ago
  Let's just say modern suburbs are quite different than they used to be. There's been lots of lessons learned and as a buyer, I won't buy in an area that's not at least of this style. Is it as convenient as a dense city? No, but my standard of living makes the affordable parts of most cities look like tenement housing in comparison. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy cities as much as the next person. But economics is a major problem that cities have to overcome. Equivalent housing in a city is one or two orders of magnitude more expensive. Cities are great for lots of things but I don't use most of those things more than ever once in a while even while living in a city. May as well live someplace nicer the other 90% of the time and take the the easy access public transport in when I really want to see a museum or go to a concert or whatever.

wainstead 12y ago

Kunstler says it quite well too: https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_suburbia https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_sub...

recalibrator 12y ago

The only ones who truly profit from urban sprawl are land developers. They wipe out forests and wildlife to make a quick buck on cheap low-density housing. The taxpayer foots the bill to have the grid and city services extended for these suburbs. So the taxpayer loses, nature loses, and the losers who bought these ugly disposable houses are losers. Only the land developers profit.

gohrt 12y ago
> The taxpayer foots the bill to have the grid and city services extended for these suburbs. The taxpayer is who gets the services.

bubbleRefuge 12y ago

From the perspective of someone who was pushed to the burbs due to better schools and facilities for kids, one thing I notice is that urban apartment complexes here in the states don't have the playground facilities that you find in big cities in developing countries. For example, when I visited the city of Sao Paolo Brazil, I stayed in an upper middle class apartment complex which had land at the base of the building walled off into a private park which had a hybrid soccer/basketball court, playground facilities, pool, and plenty of space for kids to run wild. Don't see that here in the states ( except pool ).

cpwright 12y ago

I question the logistical challenges here. If it is truly not that dense, why bother with sewers at all. My little slice of suburbia has no sewers, instead all of it is septic (and where I grew up cesspools). It's 100% on the owner to maintain. Also, why bother spending money to widen streets. Let the streets stay as they were when they were first built. If you're going to go off trying to bring everything up to code as of now, instead of code when it was built, there will be never ending expenses. I wonder if really the property taxes are just too low in this particular town. I pay 2-2.5% of my homes value in taxes each year, and my town/school district have to budget prudently, but are able to pay their bills and not rack up unsustainable debt. The only two departments I really care about are sanitation, and highway. Even sanitation can be eliminated with private garbage as many other towns have. I do however expect the town to pave and plow my street. Beyond that, everything could be accomplished with user fees.

transfire 12y ago

1. Require higher standards. Infrastructure needs to last decades, not years. We used to build things that well. There is no reason we can't again. Then the big bucks we pay up front would be worth it. Unfortunately we have been moving in the opposite direction, to fill the coffers of cheap fat cats. 2. Zoning laws must change. It is ridiculous the a suburban family has to drive to the Super Walmart for a gallon of milk. When I was young there was a local convenience store just down every street (and not just crappy junk filled 7-11s). 3. Trains. Apparently they are cheap enough to get immigrants to their jobs, but too expensive for middle America? The B.S. around trains needs to end, and a new age of private passenger rail promoted. If you don't beleive me (b/c you'd rather believe political talking points) you best get a'Googling. 4. To go along with the trains, why is my municipal airport all but useless? Is anyone else getting tired of ever bigger airports and ever smaller seats? Who decided airports needed to be malls and that all flights needed to herd people into a handful of national feed lots? I figure at this rate airports will have indoor roller coasters within the next 20 years. What we need to do instead is transition to point-to-point flights on mass produced jets. Currently jets are all hand made. Good grief! 5. And ditch that 9-5 business. It's time we split the work and go 8 to 2 and 2 to 8. More jobs, business are open longer, and yet fewer people on the roads. My 5 cents. Penny for your thoughts?

gohrt 12y ago
> When I was young there was a local convenience store just down every street (and not just crappy junk filled 7-11s). Do you think zoning laws prevent 7-11 from selling milk, or do you think 7-11 sells what the market buys?
im_a_lawyer 12y ago
All of you are approaching this the wrong way. Suburbia was born out of government policies, not because a bunch of towns decided to plan their cities differently. Here is what you do: Keep government away from the mortgage market. Bring back the historic minimum of ~20% downpayments at ~6% interest. End mortgage interest deduction. Basically scrap every stupid law that has been passed in the last 50 years that has the keywords "home ownership", "american dream" blah blah blah in them because it has done nothing but the opposite. Raise the gas tax so we don't have to bail out our highways using general funds and to pay off our accumulated infrastructure debt which is estimated to be at a trillion dollars. The result: No more free mortgages to every peon on the street to further inflate housing costs. Real home-ownership. Gas goes up to $7 a gallon and suddenly you'll start seeing buses and sidewalks everywhere... places like this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/Cincinnati-suburbs-tract-housing.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/Cincinnat... become worthless overnight. Cities and neighborhoods will naturally start organizing themselves towards a more traditional and sustainable pattern. Problem solved.

towski 12y ago

It's the economy, stupid.

pavedwalden 12y ago

When I imagine this borrowing pattern repeated across every town in America, I start to wonder how this affects the economy. Does anyone know how large a share of the American financial sector all of this municipal borrowing accounts for?

cpursley 12y ago

After having spent a month in Russia, another large country with significant distance between cities, it appears they have solved the problem. Instead of building out, they've built dense vertical cities where everything you need is within close walking distance. And around 40% of Russians have a dacha, or 'summer house', located in enclaves within pubic transit distance from their city where they can stretch their feet and/or work the soil. My guess at the reasons Russian cities developed this way is due to central planning and costs to build and maintain roads. Now, I'm not advocating central planning. The reasons suburbs exploded were due to the subsidization of once unaccessible land by the federal government via interstates. Take away the pricing distortions from land and we'll have to build up. A solution to this is market based - sell of the interstate system and let users fund them.

Mz 12y ago

I am an environmental studies major who wanted to be an urban planner. I gave up my car a few years ago. At the time, I was living in The Deep South. There was a bus stop a ten minute walk from my apartment and another one in front of my office building. No bus went directly from one to the other. By car, it was a 7 minute drive. On foot, it was a one hour walk. By bus, I think it would have taken about 2 hours. I walked and caught rides and was usually at work in about 15 or 20 minutes. Our modern concept of suburbs was born just after WW2. We had 4 years of dual income, no kids families saving up to half their income and unable to have kids due to the men being at war overseas. WW2 was immediately preceded by The Great Depression. As their reward for defeating evil, Americans just wanted a house of their own. There wasn't enough housing to meet the demand and the nation came together as a whole to create policies and financing mechanisms whole-clothe and we began throwing up Levittowns all over the place. Decades later, our demographic has changed and we remain prisoners of policies born overnight to service the preponderance of nuclear families. We have a lot fewer nuclear families with SAHMs and small kids yet our entire world, so to speak, is aimed at creating a dream for a generation that is dying out. (My father fought in WW2 and he died last fall. He was just short of his 89th birthday.) I now live in San Diego county. Transit and density here make it almost like a little slice of Europe, but with better weather. I think I will eventually be able to get the life I want, without a car. I wish this man all the best in the world. He has quite the uphill battle ahead of him.

LordKano 12y ago

I like the suburbs. I like that I have about 1/6 of an acre of land that my house sits on. I can grow a garden. My children have a safe yard to play in. I have a nice warm and dry garage in which I can perform my automotive repairs. I can barbecue without choking my neighbors with the smoke from my grill. I can play loud music late at night and not bother everyone nearby. I have trees from which we get organic, pesticide free fruits. Suburbs will never die, as long as there are still people like me. The author's epiphany seems to have come from the realization that despite his engineering background and his status as an "expert", he still didn't know as much as the hoi polloi about what was best for their neighborhoods but he still didn't learn the correct lesson. The problem was caused by other "experts", to whom the state deferred for determining the standards in the first place. Every town is different. Every town has different needs. Forcing them to all use the same plan has consequences, even if he was not able to see them. Widening those streets and removing those trees only encouraged people to drive faster and caused more accidents and deaths. It was a bad idea to help people drive faster through residential neighborhoods. Were he not so enamored with enforcing external standards, he might have been able to see that.