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the270.com wrote
Ha ha ha, the suburbs are the new cool
By wyliemac | October 11, 2007
With all due respect to the Columbus Underground urban apologists, but you really ought to rethink your urbanery (i.e. urban snobbery). I know you don’t want to admit it. But the suburbs are cool. Need proof? Check out Detail’s “Is it time to move to the suburbs?”
So let’s think local. And for me, Dublin is local. We’ve got TehKu. We’ve got Corazón. We’ve got Old Dublin. We’ve got Giant Dancing Bunnies. And of course, we’ve got giant freakin Corn. Oh yea, we’ve got the Dublin Irish Festival.
Yea, we might not be a very walkable city. But we’ve got excellent bike paths. So please CU urban guys, stop putting the ‘burbs down. You know who you are.
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Please keep this conversation civil.
THANKS!
8)
Agree- Perception being the key word!
While riots certainly did not help to stop or slow white-flight, the exodus had already started before the riots. In Sugrue’s book ([url]http://www.amazon.com/Origins-Urban-Crisis-Inequality-Princeton/dp/0691121869/ref=sr_1_1/103-1065183-5343003?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1192215590&sr=1-1[/url]) he explains that companies and jobs left Detroit long before their infamous riots. In fact, the lack of jobs was one of the factors for the riots.
I’m not from Columbus though, so I’m a little shaky on my Columbus history. Any big riots here? Or just the typical “no school busing” stuff?
If things do get really bad (peak oil, climate change, etc) then suburbanites with a small patch of land may actually be in good shape. If things break down they might be able to grow lots of veggies, although it will be a completely different lifestyle than they have now.
Somehow I think that suburbia will survive without the current luxuries. The way I’m reading this, it seems to me that you don’t think that people will adapt or we won’t make advances that will enable our way of life to continue.
Actually I agree with cab124. Our current way of life won’t continue, but I don’t know if that will occur in 10 years, 20 years, or 100 years. Of course people will adapt, even the most out-of-shape Hummer-driving suburbanite can adapt. So it doesn’t mean that all people will just fall over and die, we’ll continue to exist in some form.
This whole “peak oil” discussion reminds me of how people thought we were going to run out of food before the agricultural revolution. Sure, lack of food probably limited population growth for a long time, but we worked it out, and now there are billions of humans. Lack of oil will slow us down for a while, something will come along and we’ll have Mr. Fusion powering our cars or something.
I think this is very hopeful thinking. Extremely hopeful. Especially given the general lack of awareness about peak oil, and the current state of the national politicians and national media.
I doubt that whatever happens that people will abandon the suburbs. They’ll change and adapt just like everything must to survive.
I do agree with this. Like I said, we humans will survive. Just our way of life may be radically different.
I’m sure some of you reading this think I’m a nut, or some crazy hippie. I really really hope that my thoughts on this are wrong. I hope Mr. Fusion does come along. But I doubt it.
Aren’t most McMansions built recently, and therefore would probably be pretty energy efficient? At least more insulated than, let’s say, an 1925 Craftsman that’s in Clintonville? Would have an updated furnace, double pane windows, etc…. I don’t think the cost of heating is going to be that large of an issue.
However, if the person who owned the craftsman also upgraded they would likely be heating a drastically smaller amount of space, in effect negating any potential gain by said McMansion. Besides I know more than enough people to count who shut off both the heat and AC to their little used rooms because they can’t afford to pay to keep those rooms at a comfortable temperature, yet they never see the illogic in why they have the space to begin with. Go figure.
If fewer people use the highways, won’t they need to be maintained less? Instead of keeping a 5 lanes up to code, maybe just one or two.
Please mark the date that someone actually tears up a road to make it smaller. :wink: A roadway lane doesn’t exist independently of the surrounding lanes so if you neglect one, it will at some point affect the others. Not that we’re really maintaining our existing roadways to their best anyhow, if that bridge collapse didn’t say that loud and clear.
Though some people consider him somewhat of an alarmist, I think that James Howard Kunstler makes some fairly persuasive arguments regarding just how great an effect the future shortage of oil may have on suburban (and even urban) America. No more Caesar salads trucked in from California, as he likes to point out.
At that point, it won’t matter what is cool or what is preferred.
Somehow I think that suburbia will survive without the current luxuries. The way I’m reading this, it seems to me that you don’t think that people will adapt or we won’t make advances that will enable our way of life to continue.
This whole “peak oil” discussion reminds me of how people thought we were going to run out of food before the agricultural revolution. Sure, lack of food probably limited population growth for a long time, but we worked it out, and now there are billions of humans. Lack of oil will slow us down for a while, something will come along and we’ll have Mr. Fusion powering our cars or something.
Who knows.
I doubt that whatever happens that people will abandon the suburbs. They’ll change and adapt just like everything must to survive.
You can’t really draw a valid comparison from the Agricultural Revolution (AR) except to make the most general statement that humans can adapt, something I don’t think anyone’s is questioning, making the corollary between the two situation tenuous at best. Human’s can adapt as a rule, but they don’t always choose to and any serious study of past civilizations will uncover more than enough evidence of ones that failed because they did not adapt to looming resource shortages (which do in fact happen). Further, population growth wasn’t held in check for a lack of raw materials, but from a lack of methods needed to exploit them more efficiently. Peak oil, however, refers to a lack of raw materials irregardless of the numerous methods used to exploit it. While it’s entirely possible we could develop new resources in exchange for dependence on oil, there’s certainly more whistling past the graveyard going on than a serious effort to confront a potential oil resource shortage.
I’m still waiting for cold fusion since I don’t really see myself riding with a fusion reactor in the trunk anytime soon. :shock:
What are suburbs today was once the “frontier”, subject to raiding parties, pretty defenseless outside of self-defense, and generally a pretty inhospitable place for the “soft” city dweller. The advent of the interstate system and the upgrade in communications capabilities made the extension of services easier, and the perception of “safety” expanded outside the typcial city. Of course riots, demostrations, etc eroded the perception of “safety” linked to cities as most people (myself definitely NOT included) don’t yearn for revolutions on a regular basis. What once was “safe” is now the “frontier” and what once was the “frontier” is now “safe”. A key indicator is that older couples who’ve raised their progeny now are moving back into the city (meaning it’s not families coming here who think they’ve have the most to risk, but those who think they have the least).
Surbubia’s day of reckoning is just starting to dawn as endlessly increasing extension of services requires a continuous massive allocation of resources, resources they just can’t provide for themselves with such low population density. As such, their bill is just beginning to come due in the same way the riots, demostrations, and the like were the bills marked decades past due to the cities. For refernce, go look up some fascinating articles recently on some of the suburban ghost towns out in Arizona due the to home bubble popping, a certainly minor bubble comparing to people’s perceptions of resource availibility.
The next couple decade(s) will certainly be interesting in that I think we’ll see if the suburbanites have the stomach to fight for the resources they’ll need to keep their lifestyle choices afloat.
Regarding suburban development in the United States, you must understand that there was no such thing as a “suburb” prior to the 1830′s. You either lived in the city, or you lived in the country. The largest cities formed a nexus of commerce. Most commercial activity was tied to waterways, since that was the only viable method to move goods safely and cheaply– roads mainly served to move goods to and from waterways. So if we think about Columbus, the Scioto and Olentangy rivers were the equivalent of I70 and I71 and I270 to the folks then.
But there were no zoning laws, no building permits, no health and safety laws. So if I wanted to put a tannery next to your residence, and have cow guts and hooves in a pile next to your house, I could do it. The city streets were pretty much a mass of horse shit, debris, trash, decaying food, and in many cases human waste. It must have been an olefactory delight. The water was often contaminated by human waste, and if you lived in the city, you would likely have to pump it from a communal well into a bucket you brought home. 900 square feet would house a family. comfortably. The concept of vacation didn’t exist. The toilet was in the yard… or down the street. And you pretty much had to walk everywhere. In the snow. In the slush. In the mud. In the heat. In the steaming piles of horse manure. Germ theory hadn’t been thought up yet. Epidemics were rampant. Heat meant burning coal. Air quality sucked. In short, cities were dirty busy and often unhealthful places in the 19th century.
When you think about the physical conditions of cities, you wonder less why guys like Thomas Jefferson was so dedicated to the “agrarian ideal”. So as transportation options improved throughout the century, it is no wonder that people moved to the edges of cities. But then as now, you still had to get to work each day, so you had to balance the needs of health and family with the needs of work and commerce. So by 1869 when Fredrick Law Olmstead designed Riverside, we can begin to understand how magical the idea of country living in reach of the city must have seemed.
And honestly, we are still struggling with the same questions today.
Read the National Park Service National Register Bulletin on Historic Residential Suburbs to get a good history of suburbanization.
Agree- Perception being the key word!
While riots certainly did not help to stop or slow white-flight, the exodus had already started before the riots. In Sugrue’s book ([url]http://www.amazon.com/Origins-Urban-Crisis-Inequality-Princeton/dp/0691121869/ref=sr_1_1/103-1065183-5343003?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1192215590&sr=1-1[/url]) he explains that companies and jobs left Detroit long before their infamous riots. In fact, the lack of jobs was one of the factors for the riots.
I’m not from Columbus though, so I’m a little shaky on my Columbus history. Any big riots here? Or just the typical “no school busing” stuff?
If things do get really bad (peak oil, climate change, etc) then suburbanites with a small patch of land may actually be in good shape. If things break down they might be able to grow lots of veggies, although it will be a completely different lifestyle than they have now.
I wasn’t saying the riot and demostrations themselves caused people to flee from cities, though they likely acted as an accelerant for those who were still in them and later left. They certainly cemented though, with undoubtedly the media’s help, the image of the city as a harsh and uninviting (read “unsafe”) place to exist. That image, for better or worse, is still trying needing to be scrubbed out of people’s minds. Whether or not the suburbs or the city is safer is a question that has so many variables that it’s a gross oversimplification to even try to answer it except using the narrowest of scopes.
I would argue though that there are major forces at work which will have drastic impacts on people’s current lifestyles if they don’t anticipate them and at least band together to deal with them. Though it would be nice to assume suburbanites would revert to a happy pastoral people picking their vegatables, if I were a betting man I’d place my money on greed. The Indians bet on the fact that the Europeans would be happy with log cabins and some maize, but that didn’t exactly work out for them now, did it? :wink:
The salient concern of mine is ecological sustainability. Two schools of thought come the closest to achieving sustainability (in my mind, not that either wouldn’t be possible in the suburbs with enough land and/or will power) are “back to the land” and “minimizing the ecological footprint†Back to the land consist of trying to live a simple, self sufficient lifestyle through eco-villages and permaculture. Minimizing your ecological footprint I feel is best done through city living by riding a bike, getting most or all of your food from CSA’s, composting and recycling, living in small co-inhabited places and all of the rest. I attempt a bit of the latter, definitely do not do all of these things, but strive to.
http://www.noimpactman.typepad.com/
http://www.thatroundhouse.info/
While I said I feel it is possible to do either of these things in the suburbs, they inherently make additional challenges to doing so. Most suburbs I feel would frown at the eco village permaculture society next to the golf course in the gated community.
You know, besides the horse shit, and maybe that’s because I don’t see mounted police that often here, I can pretty much point out the exact same things in the Short North on High. :D
There’s research on London’s history (NYTimes reported on it) that was published recently that indicates that more people’s ancestry actually ties back more often than not to a family tree of city-dwellers rather than country dwellers. Though it’s true that high density popluations often act as incubators for disease, resistance to disease also arose there as well. If I’m quoting the study correctly, it suggested almost a 1/3 of London inhabitants died in a yearly cycle, but that those who survived were more than likely the long term city dwellers and not the country folk who moved in to replace the dead. The key point historically is in spite of all negatives we now attribute to those past population centers, people kept moving into them even as the dead were piling up.
Though its factually true that there weren’t zoning, safety, etc laws on the books, few recognized the unsafety in said tannery next door and more than likely they didn’t attribute much thought to it. If science hasn’t discovered it yet, it’s not much likely you or I are going to worry about it. Looking at the agrarian ideal through decades of hindsight or post-modern eyes, it looks rather rosy, but cities have historically been, and going back farther than any city on this continent, havens for intellectual stimulation, universities, arts, etc, and not just a place for commerce. Cities have suffered because the perceptions of them have suffered, but they’ve got a track record of centuries, while suburbs have as you said, have been at best, a flash in the pan. Suburbs may in the end turn out to be just a slight detour on the road to more dense and ever-more vertical cities, but I think I’ll be long gone before that’s completely played out.
This whole conversation has taken on an air of nerdism I’m just not comfortable with LOL!
seriously though, go smart people! ;)
seriously though, go smart people! ;)
I don’t know if Walker wants me to distill it down to:
Fuk Da’ ‘Burbs :shock:
(as we say in the city :D j/k)
LOL..hey, I’m actually enjoying the read and it’s interesting as hell…I can just no longer participate ;)
David Brooks- from On Paradise Drive
I’m not talking about the game of golf, the actual act of walking through eighteen holes and striking a little white ball. For most people, the game is too expensive and time-consuming. I’m talking about the golf ideal, the golf vision of perfection, the golf concept of chivalry, valor, and success. At least in its American incarnation, golf leads to a definition of what life should be like in its highest and most pleasant state.
In the ideal world as defined by golf, everything is immaculate. The fairways are weedless stretches of soft perfection. The greens are rolling ponds of manicured order. The sand traps are raked smooth. The homes along the fairways look scrubbed and affluent. Even the people are neat; everybody is dressed casually but nicely.
But golf is more than just an environment. It suggests its own state of spiritual grace, a Zenlike definition of fully realized human happiness. In the realm of golf, that state of grace is called par. And par is the established suburb’s version of nirvana.
When a golfer is playing at par, his swing is sweet and his manner is confident. He has slipped away from the tensions that usually bedevil him on the course, and he has achieved a state of harmony. He is still competitive, driven, and success-oriented, yet he feels an inner calm. He has defeated his primary foe — anxiety — and operates in a mystical groove. Everything seems simple, manageable. In this victorious state, it seems almost normal that he is wearing a pastel yellow sweater and comfortable-looking green slacks.
Like Tiger Woods, Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, and Lee Trevino, each in his own way, the chivalric golfer has mastered the fine art of false modesty. Golfers never puff themselves up, as boxers do. They fill the air with half-humorous declarations of their own shortcomings. The chivalric golfer, when playing at par, has a narrow emotional range. He does not lose his temper and throw his clubs in the pond; neither does he dance on the green. He may punch the air once or twice in an approved and highly Protestant manner. After the round, he may allow that he felt good out there. But every comment will be three notches more modulated than it needs to be.
The chivalric golfer is able to look calmly at the problem in front of him and focus his concentration on it. He is backed, as all American life is, by a great body of management theory, personal advice, and self-help takeaways. The golf life is filled with clinics, advice columns, and personal coaching. The golfer is also equipped with state-of-the-art technology. Everything he owns is made from titanium; the club he swings on the long tee has a head roughly the size of an oil drum and the technical pedigree of an Exocet missile.
Yet out there on the course, he alone is the master of his fate. He spends a good part of his time looking at things. First he looks at the fairway, then he looks at the ball. Then he looks at the green. He is manifestly good at looking at things. His face is calm yet focused. He makes subtle calculations in that engineering-like brain of his. He consults with his caddy in the ego-massaging manner of a far-seeing CEO at a board meeting. He has that slacks-and-pastels thing going. Then he decides and strides manfully up to the ball, exuding purpose. He strikes the ball, and the ballet begins all over again.
Much of traditional suburban America aspires to golf’s paradisiacal vision. The modern suburb enshrines the pursuit of par. It is not a social order oriented around creativity, novelty, and excitement. The suburban knight strives to have his life together, to achieve mastery over the great dragons: tension, hurry, anxiety, and disorder. The suburban knight tries to create a world and a lifestyle in which he or she can achieve that magic state of productive harmony and peace.
When you’ve got your life together, you can glide through your days without unpleasant distractions or tawdry failures. Your DVD collection is organized, and so is your walk-in closet. Your car is clean and vacuumed, your frequently dialed numbers are programmed into your cordless phone, your telephone plan is suited to your needs, and your various gizmos interact without conflict. Your spouse is athletic, your kids are bright, your job is rewarding, your promotions are inevitable, everywhere you need to be comes with its own accessible parking. You look great in casual slacks.
You can thus spend your days in perfect equanimity. You radiate confidence and calm. Compared to you, Dick Cheney is bipolar. You may not be the most intellectual or philosophical person on the planet, but you are honest and straightforward, friendly and good-hearted. As you drive home, you observe that the lawns in your neighborhood are carefully tended, so as to best maintain the flow of par. Your neighbors all know that one cannot allow too much time to pass between mowings, and one cannot mow when the grass is wet, lest it lead to clumpings and unevenness. One cannot cut the grass too short, lest one stress the lawn. One cannot leave one’s garbage can out at the end of one’s driveway long after the garbage has been collected, lest one disturb the par of the streetscape.
All of these things are done in the name of good order, so essential to the creation of par. Perhaps in your area, the members of the community association serve as defenders of the par. They might be the ones who guard against disharmonious housepaint hues and overly assertive flagpoles. In other areas, sheer social pressure might direct everybody in the common pursuit of par. Bitter sarcasm is frowned upon, for it represents a crease in the emotional surface of the neighborhood. Brightly colored annuals in the window boxes are praised, for they enhance cheeriness. Loafers are approved of, for they send off relaxation vibes. Kids in the cul-de-sac are jointly monitored, for kids are at once the suburbs’ whole point, yet the focus of so many anxious thoughts, that they are a potential chasm in the flow of par.
Now we are out in the outer suburbs, the great sprawling expanse of subdevelopments, glass-cube office parks, big-box malls, and townhome communities. This new form of human habitation spreads out into the desert or the countryside, or it snakes between valleys, or it creeps up along highways and in between rail lines. This kind of development seems less like a product of human will than an organism. And you can’t really tell where one town ends and the other begins, except when, as Tom Wolfe observed, you begin to see a new round of 7-Elevens, CVS’s, Sheetzes, and Burger Kings.
We don’t even have words to describe these places. Over the past few decades, dozens of scholars have studied places like Arapahoe County, Colorado; Gwinnett County, Georgia; Ocean County, New Jersey; Chester County, Pennsylvania; Anoka County, Minnesota; and Placer County, California. They’ve coined terms to capture the polymorphous living arrangements found in these fast growing regions: edgeless city, major diversified center, multicentered net, ruraburbia, boomburg, spread city, technoburb, suburban growth corridor, sprinkler cities. None of these names has caught on, in part because scholars are bad at coming up with catchy phrases, but in part because these new places are hard to define.
You can’t even sensibly draw a map because you don’t know where to center it. Demographer Robert Lang tried to draw a map of a zone north of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He located all the roads and office parks and arbitrarily drew the borders. If he’d slid his map north, south, east, or west, some roads and buildings would have disappeared, and others would have appeared. But there would have been no noticeable change in density, no new and definable feature, just another few miles of suburban continuum.
And yet people flock here. Seventy-three million Americans moved across state lines in the 1990s, and these places — across Florida, north of Atlanta, shooting out beyond Las Vegas, Phoenix, Denver, and so on — drew them in. You fly over the desert in the Southwest or above some urban fringe, and you notice that the developers build the sewers, roads, and cul-de-sacs before they put up the houses, so naked cul-de-sacs to nowhere spread out beneath you. One day I stood and watched a crew carve a golf course out of the desert near Henderson, Nevada, one of the fastest-growing cities in America. A year later, and fifty thousand people are living where there was nothing.
People move to these centerless places in search of the things people have always sought in a home: extra counter space in the kitchen, abundant storage space in the basement, and plenty of closets. Those are the three most important amenities to home buyers, according to market research. More grandly if more ironically, people move because they want order. They want to be able to control their lives. They’ve just had a divorce with their old suburb because it no longer gave them what they craved. They’ve had it with the forty-five-minute one-way commute in northern California. They’re tired of wrestling with the $400,000 mortgage in Connecticut. They don’t like the houses crowded with immigrants that are appearing in their New Jersey neighborhoods. They want to get away from parents who smoke and slap their kids, away from families where people watch daytime talk shows about transvestite betrayals or “My Daughter Is a Slut,” away from broken homes, away from gangs of Goths and druggies, and away from families who don’t value education, achievement, and success.
The outer-ring suburbs have very few poor people, and relatively few rich people. While many of the successful people in inner-ring suburbs are professionals — doctors, lawyers, professors, and journalists — many of the people in outer-ring suburbs are managers in marketing, sales, execution, and planning. The professionals don’t think of themselves primarily as capitalists; as competitive, revenue-maximizing machines oriented toward the bottom line. Managers are much more likely to measure their success this way. The subtle distinction leads to a whole shift in attitudes, opinions, and political preferences. Managers are more likely to be competitive, sports-oriented, and, as political analysts Ruy Teixeira and John Judis have noticed, Republican. Professionals are more likely to be verbally skilled, university-oriented, and Democratic.
Sometimes people move to the exurbs to get away from the upscale snobs moving into the inner-ring neighborhood where they grew up. I recently ran into a woman in Loudoun County, Virginia, where AOL is located, who said she had spent most of her life in Bethesda, Maryland, today an affluent inner-ring suburb next to Washington. “I hate it there now,” she said with venom in her voice. As we spoke, it became clear that she hated the gentrification, the new movie theater that shows only foreign films, the explosion of French, Turkish, and new-wave restaurants, the streets full of German cars with Princeton and Martha’s Vineyard stickers on the back windows, the doctors and lawyers and journalists with their educated-class one-upsmanship.
She sensed they looked down on her, and she was probably right. So she did what Americans always do when something bothers them. She moved on. The philosopher George Santayana once observed that Americans don’t solve problems, they leave them behind. If there’s an idea they don’t like, they don’t bother refuting it, they simply talk about something else, and the original idea dies from inattention. If a situation bothers them, they leave it in the past.
The exurban people aren’t going to stay and fight the war against the inner-ring traffic, the rising mortgages, the influx of new sorts of rich and poor. They’re not going to mount a political campaign or wage a culture war. It’s not worth the trouble. They can bolt and start again in places where everything is new and fresh. The highways are so clean and freshly paved you can eat off them. The elementary schools have spick-and-span playgrounds, unscuffed walls, and all the latest features such as observatories, computer labs, and batting cages.
The roads in many of these places are huge. They have names like Innovation Boulevard and Entrepreneur Avenue. They’ve been built for the population levels that will exist in two decades, so today you can cruise down flawless six-lane thoroughfares in trafficless nirvana, and if you get a cell-phone call, you can pull over to the right lane and take the call because there is no one behind you.
People who move out here are infused with a sense of what you might call conservative utopianism. On the one hand, those who move to the exurbs have made a startling leap into the unknown. They have, in great numbers and with great speed, moved from their old homes in California, Illinois, Wisconsin, New York, and elsewhere to these places that didn’t exist ten years ago. The places have no past, no precedent, no settled conventions. The residents have no families or connections here. There are no ethnic enclaves to settle into, and no friends. Sometimes people move here without even a job.
When they make the decision to move, they are picturing for themselves what their new lives will be like. They are imagining waterskiing buddies and Little League teams. They are imagining happy high school graduations, even though that high school may still be nothing but a steel frame. They are imagining outings with friends at homestyle Italian restaurants that don’t exist yet, outings to Science Olympiads with unformed teams, road trips to spring training with friends they haven’t met, who are now sitting in their old suburb and haven’t contemplated moving here. But they will.
And while they are making a radical change in their lives, they are really pursuing a conservative vision. It is no accident that people in the exurbs, while instinctively apolitical and often cynical about the political process, are, when they vote, overwhelmingly Republican. These places are sometimes seventy-thirty Republican, and if you look at every state where Republicans scored an upset senatorial victory in 2002 — Georgia, Colorado, and Minnesota, to name a few — they did so with huge gains from the fast-growing exurbs.
The exurbs are built to embody a modern version of the suburban ideal. Demographic studies show that they look like 1950s suburban America — intact two-parent families, 2.3 kids, low crime, and relatively low divorce rates. You sometimes get the impression that these people have fled their crowded and stratified old suburbs because they really want to live in an updated Mayberry with BlackBerries.
There is nobody here who is socially far above or below you (at least until the country clubs get built and the tennis rankings come out). Unlike in the cities or the inner-ring ‘burbs, there is relatively little social competition. You can go through your entire life — at home, at the office, in church — wearing comfortable, conservative nonthreatening casual wear that emphazises khaki, navy blue, and other unobtrusive colors. Postmen get hernias lugging all the Lands’ End catalogs.
This is, after all, where those cheery people who broadcast on the morning drive-time radio shows live. The exurbs are the new epicenters of competitive cheerleading and other sports that you can do while smiling. Theology is too troubling a topic for general conversation, and politics is not that interesting, so the new neighbors converse happily about how much better the traffic is here than wherever they used to live. People talk a lot about sports, the kids’ ice-hockey league, NBA salary levels, college football, or the local over-sixty softball league — the one in which everybody wears a knee brace and it takes about six minutes for a good hitter to beat out a double. Since nobody can understand what their neighbors actually do — she does something with cell phones, he’s involved in some sort of marketing — residents are likely to be known by their leisure-time interests: He’s the one who spends his life e-mailing practice schedules to the soccer parents, she organizes the drill team, she’s scuba woman and perpetually off in the Caribbean underwater, he’s Carnival Cruise man, longing to tell you how many restaurants there were on his last vacation boat.
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the expression of a man who is about to buy a first-class barbecue grill. He walks into Home Depot or Lowe’s or one of the other mega-hardware complexes, and his eyes are glistening with a faraway visionary zeal, like one of those old prophets gazing into the promised land. His lips are parted and twitching slightly.
Inside the megastore, the man adopts the stride American men fall into when in the presence of large amounts of lumber. He heads over to the barbecue grills, just past the racks of affordable house-plan books, in the yard-machinery section. They are arrayed magnificently next to the vehicles that used to be known as riding mowers but are now known as lawn tractors, because to call them riding mowers doesn’t fully convey the steroidized M1 tank power of the things. The man approaches the barbecue grills with a trancelike expression suggesting that he has cast aside all the pains and imperfections of this world and is approaching the gateway to a higher dimension. In front of him is a scattering of massive steel-coated reactors with names like Broilmaster P3, Thermidor, and the Weber Genesis, because in America it seems perfectly normal to name a backyard barbecue grill after a book of the Bible.
The items in this cooking arsenal flaunt enough metal to survive a direct nuclear assault. Patio Man goes from machine to machine comparing their various features — the cast-iron/porcelain-coated cooking surfaces, the 328,000-Btu heat-generating capacities, the 2,000-degree tolerance linings, multiple warming racks, lava-rock containment dishes, or built-in electrical meat thermometers. Certain profound questions flow through his mind. Is a 542-cubic-inch grilling surface enough, considering he might someday get the urge to roast a bison? Can he handle the TEC Sterling II grill, which can hit temperatures of 1,600 degrees, thereby causing his dinner to spontaneously combust? Though the matte-steel overcoat resists scratching, doesn’t he want a polished steel surface so he can glance down and admire his reflection while performing the suburban manliness rituals such as brushing tangy teriyaki sauce on meat slabs with his right hand while clutching a beer can in an NFL foam insulator in his left?
Pretty soon a large salesperson in an orange vest — looking like an SUV in human form — comes up to him and says, “Howyadoin’,” which is “May I help you?” in Home Depot talk. Patio Man, who has so much lust in his heart, it is all he can do to keep from climbing up on one of these machines and whooping rodeo-style with joy, still manages to respond appropriately. He grunts inarticulately and nods toward the machines. Careful not to make eye contact at any point, the two manly suburban men have a brief exchange of pseudo-scientific grill argot that neither of them understands, and pretty soon Patio Man comes to the reasoned conclusion that it would make sense to pay a little extra for a grill with V-shaped metal baffles, ceramic rods, and a side-mounted smoker box.
But none of this talk matters. The guy will end up buying the grill with the best cup holders. All major purchases of consumer durable goods these days ultimately come down to which model has the most impressive cup holders.
Having selected his joy machine, Patio Man heads for the cash register, Visa card trembling in his hand. All up and down the line are tough ex-football-playing guys who are used to working outdoors. They hang pagers and cell phones from their belts (in case a power line goes down somewhere) and wear NASCAR sunglasses, mullet haircuts, and faded T-shirts that they have ripped the sleeves off of to keep their arm muscles exposed and their armpit hair fully ventilated. Here and there are a few innately Office Depot guys who are trying to blend in with their more manly Home Depot brethren, and not ask Home Depot inappropriate questions, such as “Does this tool belt make my butt look fat?”
At the checkout, Patio Man is told that some minion will forklift the grill over to the loading dock around back. He is once again glad that he’s driving that Yukon XL so he can approach the loading-dock guys as a co-equal in the manly fraternity of Those Who Haul Things.
As he signs the credit-card slip, with its massive total price, his confidence suddenly collapses, but it is revived as wonderful grill fantasies dance in his imagination:
There he is atop the uppermost tier of his multilevel backyard dining and recreational area. This is the kind of deck Louis XIV would have had if Sun Gods had had decks. In his mind’s eye, Patio Man can see himself coolly flipping the garlic-and-pepper T-bones on the front acreage of his new grill while carefully testing the citrus-tarragon trout filets simmering fragrantly on the rear. On the lawn below, his kids Haley and Cody frolick on the weedless community lawn that is mowed twice weekly courtesy of the people who run Monument Crowne Preserve, his townhome community.
Haley, the fourteen-year-old daughter, is a Travel-Team Girl who spends her weekends playing midfield against similarly ponytailed, strongly calved soccer marvels such as herself. Cody, ten, is a Buzz-Cut Boy whose naturally blond hair has been cut to lawnlike stubble, and the little that’s left is highlighted an almost phosphorescent white. Cody’s wardrobe is entirely derivative of fashions he has seen watching the X Games. Patio Man can see the kids playing with child-safe lawn darts alongside a gaggle of their cul-de-sac friends, a happy gathering of Haleys and Codys and Corys and Britneys. It’s a brightly colored scene — Abercrombie & Fitch pink spaghetti-strap tops on the girls and ankle-length canvas shorts and laceless Nikes on the boys. Patio Man notes somewhat uncomfortably that in America today the average square yardage of boyswear grows and grows, while the square inches in the girls’ outfits shrinks and shrinks. The boys carry so much fabric they look like skateboarding Bedouins, and the girls look like preppy prostitutes.
Nonetheless, Patio Man envisions a Saturday-evening party — his adult softball-team buddies lounging on his immaculate deck furniture, watching him with a certain moist envy as he mans the grill. They are moderately fit, sockless men in Docksiders, chinos, and Tommy Bahama muted Hawaiian shirts. Their wives, trim Jennifer Aniston lookalikes, wear capris and sleeveless tops, which look great on them owing to their countless hours on the weight machines at Spa Lady. These men and women may not be Greatest Generation heroes, or earthshaking inventors such as Thomas Edison, but if Thomas Edison had had a human-resources department, and that department organized annual enrichment and motivational conferences for midlevel management, then these people would be the marketing executives for the back-office support consultants to the meeting-planning firms that hook up the HR executives with the conference facilities.
They are wonderful people. Patio Man can envision his own wife, Cindy, the Realtor Mom, circulating among them serving drinks, telling parent-teacher-conference stories and generally stirring up the hospitality; he, Patio Man, masterfully wields his extra-wide fish spatula while absorbing the aroma of imported hickory chips — again, to the silent admiration of all. The sun is shining. The people are friendly. The men are no more than twenty-five pounds overweight, which is the socially acceptable male-paunch level in upwardly mobile America, and the children are well adjusted. This vision of domestic bliss is what Patio Man has been shooting for all his life.
Patio Man has completed his purchase, another triumph in a lifetime of conquest shopping. As he steps into the parking lot, he is momentarily blinded by sun bouncing off the hardtop. He is no longer in that comfy lifestyle center where he and his family took their lunch. Now he is confronted by the mighty landscape of a modern big-box mall, one of the power centers where exurban people do the bulk of their shopping.
Megastores surround him on all sides like trains of mighty pachyderms. Off to his right there’s a Wal-Mart, a Sports Authority, and an Old Navy large enough to qualify for membership in the United Nations. Way off on the horizon, barely visible because of the curvature of the earth, is a Sneaker Warehouse. Just off the highway beyond, is a row of heavily themed suburban chain restaurants, which, if they all merged, would be known as Chili’s Olive Garden Hard Rock Outback Cantina — a melange of peppy servers, superfluous ceiling fans, free bread with olive oil, taco-salad entrées, and enough sun-dried-tomato concoctions to satisfy the population of Tuscany for generations.
This parking lot is so big you could set off a nuclear device in the center and nobody would notice in the stores on either end. In fact, in the modern American suburbs, there’s often not just one big-box mall, there are archipelagos of them. You can stand on the edge of one and look down into a valley and see three more — huge area-code stretches of parking area surrounded by massive shopping warehouses that might be painted in racing stripes to break up the monotony of their windowless exteriors. If one superstore is at one mall, then its competitor is probably down the way. There’s a PETsMART just down from a PETCO, a Borders near a Barnes & Noble, a Linens ‘n Things within sight of a Bed Bath & Beyond, a Target staring at a Kmart staring at a Wal-Mart, a Best Buy cheek by jowl with a Circuit City.
Patio Man doesn’t know it yet, but cutting diagonally across the empty acreage in the very lot he is standing in, bopping from megastore to megastore, is his very own beloved wife, Realtor Mom. She’s cruising across the terrain in her minivan, but it’s no ordinary minivan. If crack dealers drove minivans, this is the kind they’d drive. It’s a black-on-black top-of-the-line Dodge Grand Caravan ES, with phat spoilers, muscle grillework, road-hugging foglights, and ten Infinity speakers that she controls with little buttons on the back of her steering wheel because reaching over to the knobs is too much effort.
Her eyes narrow as she heads for the Sam’s Club megastore. She sees an empty parking spot just next to ones set aside for pregnant women and the handicapped, not over twenty yards from the front door. As she zooms in, she notices competition coming from the northeast. There’s a rule in the suburbs: The bigger the car, the thinner the woman. And sure enough, here comes a size-six Jazzercise wife in a Lincoln Navigator, trying to get her spot. But the Navigator woman has made two horrible mistakes. First, she’s challenged a minivan driver who is in no mood to appear even more tame and domesticated. And second, she doesn’t seem to realize that in America it is acceptable to cut off any driver in a vehicle that costs a third more than yours. That’s called democracy. So Realtor Mom roars her massive kid-hauling Caravan and swerves into the spot just ahead of the Navigator. If the Navigator woman wants to park this close to the store, she’ll have to put on her turn signal and wait behind that family piling into the Odyssey, the one that will take till sundown to strap everybody in and read a few chapters of Ulysses before they pull out.
Realtor Mom is halfway through her shopping expedition. She’s already trekked through the Wal-Mart Super- center to pick up a CD head cleaner and a can of Dust-Off. America clearly entered a new phase in its history when Wal-Marts started supersizing; it was as if somebody took a blue whale and decided that what it really needed was to be quite a bit bigger.
Though Realtor Mom likes Wal-Mart, it’s the price club that really gets her heart racing, because price clubs are Wal-Mart on acid. Here you can get laundry detergent in 41-pound tubs, 30-pound bags of frozen Tater Tots, frozen waffles in 60-serving boxes, and packages of 1,500 Q-tips, which is 3,000 actual swabs since there’s cotton on both ends. These stores have been constructed according to the modern American principle that no flaw in design and quality is so grave that it can’t be compensated for by mind-boggling quantity. The aisles here are wider than most country lanes. The frozen-food section looks like a university-sized cryogenics lab, and the cutlery section could pass as a medieval armory. The shelves are packed from the linoleum floor clear up to the thirty-foot fluorescent-lighted ceilings with economy-sized consumer goods on massive wooden pallets. Sometimes you look up and consider what would happen if there were an earthquake right now, and you think, Great, I’m going to be crushed to death under a hillside of falling juice boxes.
The first time Realtor Mom went into one of the places and got a load of the size of the household goods, she naturally wanted to see what kind of person would come here shopping for condoms. But what’s truly amazing is that wherever you go in a price club, everybody in every aisle is having the same conversation, which is about how much they are saving by buying in bulk. Sometimes you overhear “If you use a lot, it really does pay” or “They never go bad, so you can keep them forever” or “It’s nice to have fifteen thousand Popsicles, since someday we plan on having kids anyway…” All the people in all the aisles feel such profound satisfaction over their good deals that they pile the stuff into their shopping carts — which are practically the size of eighteen-wheelers, with safety airbags for the driv-er — so that by the time they head toward the checkout, they look like the supply lines for the Allied invasion of Normandy.
But they feel they’ve accomplished something. In purchasing Post-it notes by the million, they have put something over on the gods of the marketplace. They have one-upped the poor nonclub members who have betrayed their families by failing to get the best deal. They are the savvy marketplace swashbucklers who have achieved such impressive price-tag victories that they will return home in glory to recount tales of their triumphs to tables of rapt dinner guests. Bragging about what a good deal you got is one of the many great art forms that my people, the Jews, have introduced to American culture.
This trip, Realtor Mom is saving a bundle on frozen sausage-and-pepperoni Pizza Pockets. She’s making a killing on tennis balls and vermouth-flavored martini onions. She has triumphantly advanced in the realm of casual merlot and inflatable water-wing acquisition. She has stocked up on so many fat-free, salt-free, lactose-free, and cholesterol-free items that the boxes she’s carrying might as well be empty.
She, too, heads back to her vehicle with a sense that she has shopped victoriously. In this complicated and time-stressed world, she has demonstrated, at least for an instant, her mastery of everyday life. She has achieved par.
As it transpires, she finishes her rounds just as Patio Man is pulling out of the mall with his backyard wondergrill tucked snugly into the back of his Yukon. She recognizes his dadstoy vanity license plate (she has the momscab companion plate), and she honks brightly to get his attention. Pretty soon they’ve both got their cell phones with the walkie-talkie features out four inches in front of their noses, and they chat affectionately about their tremendous purchases.
They drive home together. They turn left on Executive Avenue and head past the Chez Maison apartment complex and the Falcon Preserve gated-home community toward their own townhome cluster.
The town fathers in their suburb have tried halfheartedly to control sprawl. As Patio Man and his wife cruise over a hilltop and look down on the expanse of suburb below, they can see, stretched across the landscape, little puffs here and there of brown smoke. That’s bulldozers kicking up dirt while building new townhomes, office parks, shopping malls, firehouses, schools, AmeriSuites guest hotels, and golf courses. As a result of the ambivalently antigrowth zoning regulations, the homes aren’t spread out with quarter-acre yards, as in the older, more established suburbs; they’re clustered into pseudo-urbanist pods. As you scan the horizon, you’ll see a densely packed pod of townhouses, then a half-mile stretch of investor grass (fields that will someday contain thirty-five- thousand-square-foot Fresh Mex restaurants but are now being kept fallow by investors until the prices come up), then another pod of slightly more expensive but equally dense-packed detached homes.
Realtor Mom and Patio Man’s little convoy is impressive — 8,000 pounds of metal carrying 290 pounds of human being. They finally bear right into their community — their street has been given the imperious but baffling name Trajan’s Column Terrace — and they pull into their double-wide driveway in front of the two-car garage and next to the adjustable-height Plexiglas backboard.
Their home is a mini-McMansion gable-gable house. That is to say, it’s a 3,200-square-foot middle-class home built to look like a 7,000-square-foot starter palace for the nouveaux riche. On the front elevation is a big gable on top, and right in front of it, for visual relief, a little gable juts forward so it looks like a baby gable leaning against a mommy gable.
These homes have all the same features of the authentic McMansions (as history flows on, McMansions have come to seem authentic), but everything is significantly smaller. There are the same vaulted atriums behind the front doors that never get used and the same open-kitchen/two-story great rooms with soaring Palladian windows. But in the middle-class knockoffs, the rooms are so small — especially upstairs — that the bedrooms and master-bath suites wouldn’t fit inside one of the walk-in closets of a real McMansion.
As the happy couple emerges from the vehicles, it is clear that they are both visibly flushed and aroused. With the juices still flowing from their consumer conquests, it’s all they can do to keep from humping away like a pair of randy stallions right there on the front lawn under the shade of the seasonal holiday banner hanging above the front door. But that would violate the community association’s public copulation guidelines. So, with the kids away at their various practices, and not due to get carpooled home for another hour, the two erotically charged exurbanites mischievously bound up to the master suite and experience even higher stages of bliss on the Sealy Posturpedic mattress, on the stainproof Lycron carpeting, and finally and climactically, atop the Ethan Allen Utopia-line settee.
CM– you are f’in hilarious, honestly! :lol:
It wouldn’t take Mr. Fusion. If we needed that to save us, a little bit of despair might be warranted.
I think all it’s going to take is slightly better battery technology, however. Laptop battery cells are decreasing in price by about 8% per year, ceteris paribus, which means that fully electric cars (which might run off fossil-fuel power plants, but there’s no law saying they have to–especially if fossil fuels get really expensive and the image of nuclear power recovers enough that the public is comfortable giving it another shot) are likely less than a decade away. In fact, at the high end, they’re already here and has even been getting attention from the New York Times, but the sticker price of $98,000 (plus options that generally push most buyers to $110,000) and small list of dealerships (just the five biggest markets in the country) mean it’s not ready for primetime. 20% of the Tesla Roadster’s pricetag is its battery pack–meaning almost $20,000, the price of some cars.
Within a few years, however, that price will get smaller, however, and the cruising range (right now topping out at just under 250 miles, meaning it won’t work for road trips) will get larger.
In addition, the sprawlers might well turn out to have the more sustainable lifestyle in the long run, if it turns out that solar panels really are ultimately going to get as inexpensive to produce and potent as some recent research (recent enough that it hasn’t gotten mainstream attention out of the tech-geek blogosphere–note the dates on those articles) suggests is possible. A one-floor house with a lot of available surface area relative to the surface area underneath is more optimized for solar than a 40-story skyscraper.
If we’re still powering most of our transportation sector with oil in 25 years, you’re right, we’ll have problems. I’m fairly optimistic that even ordinary, go-with-the-flow people will have found all kinds of good reasons to switch away voluntarily before then. They haven’t yet because the technology to make it efficient to do so isn’t there yet. It’s coming, however. There is serious money for whoever manages to come up with the real successor to the gasoline-powered car, because it will enable people to get rid of the gas guzzlers but keep the lifestyle that they got the gas guzzler as part of (i.e., commuting, homeowners’ association, familiar chains on main commercial strips, etc.). People will be much more comfortable making that switch than a switch to getting around by rail (or biking or walking), or shelling out big bucks to move back into urban neighborhoods that would just subject them to more of what they moved out into the exurbs to avoid.
I believe that London was the world’s largest city during the majority of the 19th c. The population of London was a significant portion of the total population of the country. So I wouldn’t doubt that a study would support such numbers.
Suburbs are an evolution, a hybrid between city and country. The first incarnation of modern suburbs were known as “Garden Cities” That’s a beautiful thing… a city in the garden. They were planned so that people could live, work, and play (hmmm… sound familiar?) in a healthful enviroment, and yet still be within reach of all the intellectual stimulation of the city. The idea was to combine the best characteristics of both places.
My point was really supposed to be that the suburbs aren’t evil. Neither is the city. They have positive aspects, they have negative. If the suburbs have their Patio Man stereotypes, then we should also ensure the Urban Snob is mentioned.
I love cities. They fascinate me. I love public transit. I love being free from my vehicle. I love walking to get a cup of coffee. But that doesn’t mean that it is right for everyone. My family love their suburban houses, their SUVs, their granite countertops and their view of the golf course while grilling their steaks. I don’t feel like I should be asked to justify my choice of living in the city, so I don’t think people should need to do that for the suburbs.
It wouldn’t take Mr. Fusion. If we needed that to save us, a little bit of despair might be warranted.
I think all it’s going to take is slightly better battery technology…
This is the perspective that Kunstler addresses in articles such as this:
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7/
I believe that London was the world’s largest city during the majority of the 19th c. The population of London was a significant portion of the total population of the country. So I wouldn’t doubt that a study would support such numbers.
Here is the article:
In Dusty Archives, a Theory of Affluence
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7/
“Repent and abase yourselves, sinners, the end is nigh and your heathen ways shall bring it about. Forswear your material possessions, for they shall avail thee not in the coming darkness.”
I’ve heard arguments like this before, and the only thing wrong with them is a near-0% accuracy record. People have been predicting The End for as long as there has been Western civilization. They’ve never been right yet, save for whatever idiot happened to get lucky in the latter years of the Roman Empire. The peak oil date keeps moving farther into the future. Y2K was supposed to wipe out half the banking infrastructure of the world.
The bottom line is that it’s not “sleepwalking” when people reject arguments like Kunstler’s. I’ve read them on an at-least-monthly basis for years now and I still see no reason to believe them. We are not going to go back to the localism of the pioneer days, which is basically what he’s talking about when he says that we’ll have to grow food and manufacture locally, live locally, and rely on essential rail alone for intercity transit.
Most specifically, I note that he doesn’t even talk for a single line about electric cars; mentions the concept in his parade of impossible power-source ideas in the first paragraph: “biodiesel, on synthesized coal liquids, on hydrogen, on methane gas, on electricity, on used French-fry oil . . .,” but the whole rest of his piece is about oil and hydrocarbons generally. He doesn’t say anything about why I should believe electric cars won’t get it done (particularly since companies are starting to put them into production). He didn’t even really say anything about coal, despite it being a fossil fuel and the plurality of our electrical generation coming from coal. He also said nothing about the steps we’re making on solar power, which are getting beyond baby steps to at least toddler steps by now, though I concede it will be sometime before we’re walking, much less running.
I think all it’s going to take is slightly better battery technology, however. Laptop battery cells are decreasing in price by about 8% per year, ceteris paribus, which means that fully electric cars (which might run off fossil-fuel power plants, but there’s no law saying they have to–especially if fossil fuels get really expensive and the image of nuclear power recovers enough that the public is comfortable giving it another shot) are likely less than a decade away. In fact, at the high end, they’re already here and has even been getting attention from the New York Times, but the sticker price of $98,000 (plus options that generally push most buyers to $110,000) and small list of dealerships (just the five biggest markets in the country) mean it’s not ready for primetime. 20% of the Tesla Roadster’s pricetag is its battery pack–meaning almost $20,000, the price of some cars.
Regarding nuclear power, whether the public changes their opinion or not, their are real constraints on how much nuclear development will happen in the next decade. 100% loan guarrantees are barely starting to revive the industry, but if you read any of the recent writing on the current state of the industry in this country, the outlook is definitely not positive. First, there is only one steel plant in the world that can produce the nuclear pressure vessel (in Japan) which means everyone in the world (since many countries have active nuclear programs) gets their steel fabricated there so even putting plans together for plants now and placing the orders (and remember you’re getting in line behind every other country already ordering vessels) doesn’t even ensure they’ll get the fabricated parts for years. Second, most of the existing plants in the US are going to need to be replaced in fairly short order, and that doesn’t bode well for new construction of more plants either. Third, you actually have to bring plants online at a faster pace than your energry needs are growing just for nuclear to keep supplying a steady percentage of our always growing energy requirements. And lastly, there just isn’t any spare expertise lying around either in construction, or in operation, of nuclear facilities. So, regardless of how much we might support the idea of expanding nuclear power, if as a nation we are missing expertise and physical materials, plus an ever-growing maintenance list from existing plants, wish as hard as we might it still isn’t going to conjure them out of thin air.
If solar arrays become cheap, how exactly would coating the outside of a 40-story building be a more inefficient use of space than coating the top of a 1-story house? Irrespective of how many solar arrays you have, it’s isn’t going to bring the Wal-Mart/Target any closer to your front door. Whether a sprawler is in a better long term position because of their “ownership” of more linear square footage of land has to be viewed with their weakness in terms of their gross political and physical strength in comparison to a densely populated city. Whether a “sprawler” has the will and resources to fight for their ever more consuming lifestyle in the face of downward trend in resource availabilty coupled with a massive upwards increase in energy consumers around the globe has yet to be seen. Generally speaking, the political leadership on energy issues has been just short of criminal and in the face of authoritarian political leadership in other countries pushing their own massive development of energy resources, it might be just a touch naive to place too much faith in corporate America.
The problem with the conceptual underpinnings of the suburb, or exurb, is that if there turns out to be no equal replacement to the modern automobile then the entire system starts to fall like a house of cards. That isn’t to say that scientifically speaking it’s not possible, but much more than science has driven the use of a car to the root of what it means to be an American. If an individual’s entire lifestyle is predicated on the ease and accessibility to a certain form of individualistic transportation with certain defining properties and that is being threatened, where do they go from there?
You can already see tensions between dense population centers (i.e major states) vs. more dispered populations (i.e. minor states) playing out in the leapfrog game of political primary scheduling in trying to solidify their influence on the county’s power structure. Its not much of a stretch to consider a city vs. suburb conflict over resources in the not too far off future. Given that most suburbs have neither deep infrastructure nor deep organization, I’m not convinced they’re holding the better hand. History suggests many empires fall because they stretch themselves beyond their means to sustain themselves and if suburbs, and now exburbs, simply turn out to be a metaphorical extension of empire from a city’s core, then the same history would suggest they’d be the first to fall.