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.
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.
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.
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/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".
> 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.
>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.
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.
They can't came unless major revolutions happen because the country is not organized like "dense cities, vast residential-only suburbs and the countryside", France compared to USA it's much smaller so while not that dense compared to the rest of the EU there is no room to grow big cities and endless suburbs, beside that most french love to be outside (the opposite for the part of the USA I know) so they love to have small farms, schools with nature around, marching under the trees etc, they do NOT like the "artificial nature" of a suburb not much the artificial environment of a dense city.
The point though it's simply that USA suburbs could easily became much better simply adding a bit of commerce, while dense cities can't be made livable without redesigning so rebuilding them. In costs terms improving a USA-style suburb is damn cheap even in an era of recession and scarce resources, quick and done could create a new-old-local-economy that's essentially the "Strong Town" economic model, minus the density because with today tech we need more space. Rebuild a city... Good luck... The Saudis (who are stuffed of money) have tried ONE city alone and they essentially give up. IMF in Turkmenistan funded Arkadag, a substantial failure even if the country is rich in resources and a dictatorship strong enough to do pretty anything without much opposition in between. Now try to imaging something "a bit bigger" like NY...
Long story short: in the past cities was a NEEDED nightmare, full of pollution, issues, but full also of services, of knowledge, factories, ... the core of any economy in any country, the place where innovation happen, decisions was made and so on. With modern logistics (starting from the '80s) it became cheaper moving factories away where land was cheaper and there was no local constraint to expansions or costs for contraction when needed, with modern remote work the office is not needed anymore because "paper works" are now digital, do not demand local physical presence etc so cities have lost essentially their last purposes. They are now just needed by big finance that to fund itself need consumer depending on anything, not owning nothing to be kept in line with social score and prices. We can't re-create the old "small town" model, simply because today jobs and tech demand something else, while we can re-create a distributed model apt to the present world, able to cope with climate, social and technological change using not too much resources to be made.
Do you really think an NT tower can implement the green new deal heating, cooling and functioning on p.v.? Do you think we can even made so much needed steel to build new, well insulated, Sun shielded etc ones with renewables? On the other side we can cut trees and produce panels, lumbers etc for small homes on renewable, modern architecture scale well for all climate, some design element changes, like the thickness of the insulation, the elements to shadow the Sun in summer etc, but the overall design it's the same from poles to the tropics, heating and cooling, ventilation systems as well, so we have the largest industrial scale possible, we still can't be only on renewables on scale, factories consume still too much, producing steel so far need coke and so on, but we can made a big step toward general electrification is this model, we can't in cities. Yes, you can electrically heating a '60s tower, but we can't produce enough electricity for all buildings if they all demand that much and we can't anyway evolve an existing building more than a bit. In single family homes adding p.v. is very easy in nearly all buildings where it's reasonable to install p.v., placing a big hot water tank for thermodynamic heating it's not much an issue as well, recharging and EV at home similarly and so on. On contrary you can't do much in a condo without rebuild it in most cases. That's the real point.
We witness a big pro-urban campaign backed by big money because big money need smart cities, but the rest of the humanity need something else and actually we can't even build smart cities for all while we probably can build accommodations for all in a spread model, not so comfy for all perhaps, but still enough to live and evolve.
At the same time, is it too much to ask for a sidewalk? That’s the thing that bothers me the most. Many suburbs seem built to be actively hostile to walkers, rather than just inconveniently sprawling.
> At the same time, is it too much to ask for a sidewalk? That’s the thing that bothers me the most. Many suburbs seem built to be actively hostile to walkers, rather than just inconveniently sprawling.
No it is not, suburbs with sidewalks are better suburbs. They should all have them (on both sides) and it should be a code requirement.
But suburbs with a deficit of sidewalks are not "Horror Movie[s]," like these obnoxious urbanists, who are apparently creeped out by the existence of parking, want to propagandize them as.
There's a difference between random, unincorporated urban sprawl and a planned suburban town. You are describing the former. The latter has infrastructure, sidewalks, town square or city center, and government services.
Many neighborhoods assume cars for everything. Even local parks have giant parking lots.
However some cities get it. Things like a parking lot by the park, but surrounded on 3 sides by dead end streets, that allow bikes and pedestrians directly into the park. Combine that with some paths in the park and the pedestrians and bikes have a lower distance than the cars.
Combine that with green belts (again with dead end streets up to the green belt) and you have highly desirable housing that allows bikes use the green belts to make for pleasant bike commutes, dog walks, and makes having a small home/yard MUCH more pleasant. It lowers the average temperature of the city, makes things less convenient for cars and more convenient for bikes, pedestrians, and public transit.
At the end of the bike path (usually a major road) put in a bus stop and a bridge for the pedestrians or bikes that want to keep on going.
It's really not that hard, but cities can be friendly to bikes and pedestrians and still usable by cars. It does work, it can substantially move the needle on the percentage of commutes that happen without cars.
I'd much rather have 0.15 acres with a local park that connects to a greenbelt where I can bike to work than 1 acre that I have to maintain myself and forces me to drive everywhere I go. I've noticed that decent bike/green belt networks (where you can commute on bike without spending most of your time on busy streets with bike lanes) are often the most desirable city in the area.
A good one I saw was a neighborhood separated from a shopping center by a wall. If there was a gate you could walk 100 yards to stores. But because the wall you had to walk 7/10ths of a mile.
Suburbs can be built with sidewalks and bike paths.
I'm in a suburb in Australia where I can walk across one road to get to a small local shops or about 15 minutes safe walk from a reasonable sized supermarket.
I can ride on bike paths for 15 km to my job as well.
There are some places in the US like this. I used to ride on bike paths to work near Washington DC.
I'm in a wealthy suburb of Salt Lake City where I can walk to the nearest grocery store, or take my kids to school in a cargo bike on miles of protected bike paths. It's wonderful, but it's also much more expensive to live here than in suburbs without those sorts of amenities. I'm a bit of a sucker for online urbanism (I've spent a lot of time in the Netherlands and it's hard not to want that sort of infrastructure here in the US) but I always feel a bit icky about how "strong towns" basically mean rich towns in the US.
So how is grand parent "against" side walks? In fact I totally welcome it and if you look at places like Australia the public transport is jointly amazing too - that too "radially" from downtown. All without sacrificing or demonizing suburb dwellers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The whole reason that people _like_ suburbs is that they are not mixed in with commercial uses. The houses are only near other houses, plus a few churches, parks, cemeteries, schools, etc. If you take that away, you take away what people like about them.
You are the one using words like “horrifying”. Folk who like the suburbs just think that the store should be further away than the church. That’s all. The store isn't horrifying, it’s just commercial.
It has nothing to do with how often you visit, or how many of them there are. A store is a commercial place, and that’s exactly why it should be further away. People who prefer the suburbs don’t want to live next to commercial uses.
> A store is a commercial place, and that’s exactly why it should be further away
I still fail to understand why, of course I understand that some people like sweet coffee vs others who like it bitter and others who do not like it anyway but I fail to understand a reasoning for suburbs and commercial spaces.
Commerce might means traffic back and forth and that's a good reason to not want it near a home, but SMALL commerce does not means much traffic anyway and "nearby" does not means "aside". A cemetery it's the same, I see reasons not wanting it aside homes, but the opposite... Well... I understand that for some a church nearby is important, but it's still not a residential home and host ceremonies so have various peoples and cars coming and going so again I see reasons not wanting it aside a home and still not much reasons not wanted it nearby.
Anyway, IF local resident like having church and cemeteries but not small store it's perfectly fine, my original comment was about the discussed articles where I do not agree in general, in conclusion in particular, but I agree about some sub-rubs problems.
So a small corner store or 7-11 type operation is "commercial use" and somehow bad?
What kind of thing are you imagining in your head when you say "commercial use"? A massive 10 acre parking lot with a 2 acre steel and glass megastore?
The thing I'm thinking about is most likely smaller than an average house in American suburbia and with a smaller plot. It's not a place where a family of 7 will drive with their gigantic truck and buy groceries for two weeks. It's something you (or your kids) can walk/bike to if you need to grab a few bottles of soda and snacks for a movie night. Or you stop by on the way home from work to get tonights dinner. You also can't buy 48 brands of cereal, maybe 2 or 3 of the most popular ones.
I think you've never experienced a small corner/neighbourhood store and your view of "commercial" is skewed to American Size things where everything is next to a 6 lane stroad with parking lots larger than many European cities.
Why? What's wrong in a supermarket, a 500m² (~5400ft²) shed one km (0.6 miles) from your home? It's not open 24/7, it does not smell or smoke, generate special noise, heat and so on. In between a pine wood, a small lake, a bit of grass. My nearest neighbor "pollute" much more with:
- noisy party in summer till early morning
- smelly fertilizer for his garden
- noisy DIY hobby in early morning and late evening
of course the supermarket receive a truck to resupply and many cars of buyers but hey, it's one km away in nature. Similarly the blacksmith shed it's not at a spit of some homes, it's around 1km away. The local elementary school is at few km from most homes. It's still a spread area but you do not need to run 40+40km just to buy a bottle of milk. There are also some polluting factories, but of course they are planted at a sufficient distance from any home.
Nothing, to you. But commercial places are commercial. The idea behind a suburb is that the only thing near you are your neighbors, and a few amenities such as churches and parks and elementary schools. The sound of a party or of children playing is not noise. Even the drone of a lawn mower is not noise. If you can smell your neighbor’s fertilizer, then you don’t live in a suburb (or he used way too much and killed all his plants).
Well, and why this specific idea should persist? Or more precisely why the alternatives should be dense cities, suburbs or isolated countrysides instead of a mixture of them?
> The sound of a party or of children playing is not noise. Even the drone of a lawn mower is not noise.
If you casually came here for a vacations or something similar I can show you what I'm talking about... Yes theoretically children playing around a school should not make much noise, except when they do make many, with some of their parents helps picking them with a Harley, or a rusty old 4x4 with a holed muffler, often honking to attract their child attention, similarly a small electric lawn mower does not makes much noise, but a diesel small tractor at high rpm due to an old alternative mowing bar picking not only grass but also rocks and roots because the owner is not much good at regulating it's height from the seat and the ground is not a flat curated grass only surface but a mix of grass, pines wood, some brambles explicitly put due to same old litigation with another neighbor and his dogs freely moving around... Well... Ah, the fertilizer is manure discharged once per year by another neighbor from a farm trailer aside the border, than left here maybe few days because the neighbor who fertilize have something else to do... That's all part of the natural package. Here it's not like USA homes with a bit of short grass and white low fences, it's more vary, of course not at all terrible as described above but still have such aspects sometimes in the year.
You’re still missing the point. Regardless of how much you like your neighborhood, 50% of Americans would prefer to live in a suburb. Even if there were no constraints such as money or family obligations, they would choose a suburb consisting entirely of houses over your neighborhood which mixes residential and commercial uses. Your neighborhood might be great, but it isn’t what most Americans would choose. In fact, only about 20% would choose it; the rest want to live far out in the countryside with as few neighbors as possible.
That’s the key fact that folks like you miss: you’re the minority. And when you denigrate the suburbs, you are hurting your cause. You are insulting the people who see the suburbs as the ideal place for them to live.
Instead of going on about how the suburb they live in is not the dense urban city that they prefer, the folks who wrote this article should move to an existing city and then advocate to make it nicer. Don't try to turn a suburb into a city, turn a city into a better city.
Actually I'm not against the suburbs, I simply agree with the article (just a bit) that the classic suburb model have issues because you can't buy anything nearby and so you need long trips just to buy some milk, that's is. I'm definitively against the city model, because IMVHO there is no way to turn a city into a "better city"m a city is just "a tool" you can use and than dispose and rebuild another, witch is practically next to impossible and so costly that we can't do on scale.
BTW if peoples living in the suburbs like them there is no issues at all, I do not denigrate anyone of them. IF some would like to live still in single family homes BUT also with some shops around without being in the city than the solution it's easy in nature or adapting a suburb, that's because suburbs and empty space could be changed a small step at a time, while cities can't.
That's is. I'm definitively not pro-urban as the article author.
I do not call "urban" being spread in nature... Mixing does not means being ATTACHED. I have a supermarket, a small shed covered with solar panels at less than one mile from my home but still far enough I do not hear trucks resupplying it, nor customers cars. There is a blacksmith as well, it's near the supermarket but far enough from other homes. There are some polluting factories but they are FAR enough away from all other homes. We are far more spread than a typical USA suburbs with all homes stitched aside but we still have to travel much less to live. It's definitively not urban since there is nature all around, no traffic, no transports except for rare trucks, school-buses etc easy to overtake anyways because even on mountains roads offer enough space nearly everywhere.
It's simply a spread area, where there is no need for traffic lights, tall buildings, downtown and so on, where you can both work (not only from/at home) and live. It offer the advantages of the urban model and of the rural model together and essentially none of disadvantages of both.
USA have enough ground to spread their population, so... Instead of getting the worse of "extreme" model (dense city of high rise on one side, empty areas with just nothing for many miles) you can get the best of both models, what's wrong with that?
The thing is that it's literally ILLEGAL to build low-rise buildings in big parts of the US.
Like the Brownstones many people like, can't do that. Walkable cities like in major European cities (low-mid size buildings, stores and cafes on the low levels), illegal.
There is a midpoint between 500 sqm house in a suburb and a 30sqm apartment in a 5 million person city. But not in the US, you can't do that.
What most people actually prefer would be a 200sqm two story house, with stores and schools within walking or biking distance - with proper safe sidewalks, not those foot-wide weird concrete things Americans tend to build.
500sqm is huge! My house feels large with an office, 4 bedrooms, 2 living areas and a big kitchen, for a family of 5, and it's 260sqm. What do you do with the space? Do you have a cleaner? With a robot vac and a battery vacuum ours is fine but I wouldn't want to clean more than that.
Yeah, but both can be true. It can be possible to build a walkable suburb with SFHs and a downtown. That's how older suburbs in Baltimore, Northern NJ, DC and others were built.
My biggest issue with suburbs is that they are all built around the car being the ONLY method of transport. Public transit options are essentially non-existent and walking is extremely impractical due to everything being planned around cars.
When you combine this with the suburbs being cheaper than living the city, you get people who are, rightfully, pissed about the conditions they need to live in.
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.
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.
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.
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.
