Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Chicagoland In defense of suburbs
Posted by Steve Bogira on 07.26.11 at 02:39 PM
- Brendan Riley
In 1986, when Lemann moved from Austin, Texas, to New York, “the prevailing idea was that the suburbs were for the privileged few and the cities for the poor, the bohemian, and the principled,” he wrote in a recent New Yorker essay—"Get Out Of Town: Has the celebration of cities gone too far?" (The essay is behind a paywall; the link is to the abstract.) The suburbs were seen as “conformist, anti-intellectual, homogeneous, antifeminist, alcoholic, and shot through with anomie.” Almost all of Lemann’s friends who grew up in New York suburbs vowed in adolescence to leave as soon as they could, and never return.
That view of cities and suburbs persisted, Lemann wrote. But lately, “Cities and suburbs have started to seem less like fundamental opposites, and more like points on a continuum.”
Lemann is a New Yorker staff writer, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and author of several acclaimed nonfiction books. He and his family lived in the New York City suburb of Pelham for 21 years before moving a few years ago to an apartment in NYC. “We’re all intermittently homesick, especially at this time of year, when suburbia feels like the land of fecundity, as green as a jungle.” Most people moved to Pelham because they couldn’t afford to live “decently” in the city with their kids, Lemann wrote. But “As time passed, our collective secret became clear. It wasn’t just good public schools and one bedroom per child that kept us in Pelham. We actually liked it—liked the houses, the slower pace, the regular unplanned access to each other.”
Lemann went on, “Is there really a huge pent-up demand to move from the suburbs to the city, just waiting to be released by wiser government politics?” Around the world, most people who have a chance to leave dense inner cities do so, he noted, though they remain in metro areas. In the first half of the twentieth century, Americans flooded cities; in the second half, they flooded suburbs. By 2000, the majority lived in suburbs. Lemann asked: “Can this great tide really be reversed just by raising gas taxes and easing urban building codes, or should we figure that sprawl is here to stay, and focus on managing it better?”
“Masters of the new economy, social visionaries, and tongue-studded app developers figure large in the imagination of urban theorists these days,” he concluded, “but most people are looking for something pretty mundane: a neighborhood, a patch of ground, a measure of peace and security, a family, status, dignity. In twentieth-century America, some people found those things in tightly packed neighborhoods. Far more found them in the suburbs.”
Comments (4)
Showing 1-4 of 4
For the benefit of any latecomers, something from my friend Jeff Smith:
Downsizing Sprawlopolis
http://www.truth-out.org/downsizing-sprawlopolis-flabby-city-fit-city/1312488994
like
dislike
Steve, good seeing your byline back in the Reader these last several months. Good item about the suburbs.
I'll take the oportunity to vent. I'm a suburbanite -- raised out here, returned to the burbs, maybe to stay -- and I really feel no need to defend it, as if it were a crime.
Cities are part substance, and also in part, hype. The quintessential example, of course, is NYC. I rolled through last summer with a friend, hanging out in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Several young single folks I met (one a former Winnetka-ite) implicitly or explicitly expressed that part of the virtue of living there is the feeling of being strengthened and purified by the struggle. It's that old "make it here/make it anywhere" thing. My thought is, the world is full of opportunities to fight for something. Who said you should have to spend all your energy just fighting to pay rent, and maybe have a couple bucks left over for beer? There is definitely something of the masochist in this thinking. The myth becomes self-fulfilling prophecy. At some point you're just going to NYC because "They" (i.e., media and tastemakers, many of whom, coincidentally, reside in New York) say it's the place to be.
I like James Kunstler and much of his critique of suburbia as far as the poor planning (and the land speculation and tax policies that actually drive the logic of it all); I even agree somewhat with the perception of cultural impoverishment. Yet he and his fellow “urban archipelago” champions also go to the opposite extreme. They get all urbo-snob on us, daintily sipping their proverbial lattes while sneering at everybody not living on their little urban islands of enlightenment. Broad-brushing like that makes them as narrow and bigoted as they like to accuse suburban and rural folks of being.
Suburbia isn't any one place. There's historic architecture, and there are subdivisions of ticky-tacky just put up yesterday. Some burbs live under the shade of century-old trees; others were recently planted on former cornfields. Some were long ago landlocked and built fairly dense; others, located on the edges, gobble up land like there's no tomorrow (or at least, were doing so until interrupted by the real estate crash).
Some are pre-automobile trainburbs and thus walkable downtowns, mixed-use buildings, and garages behind houses; others were founded later are all about cars, their most striking feature being malls, big boxes, and parking lots.
Some burbs were built as golf getaways for Chicago's wealthy. Others are home to freight yards, industry (still) and biker clubs, and others are merely bedroom communities for professionals and U of C professors. You have suburbs that are very white, heavily Arabic, heavily Hispanic, heavily black, while others are a diverse mix. And sandwiched in between the municipalities, you still have some semirural unincorporated areas with no snob zoning, where you can live pretty much how you like. I can walk a few blocks from home and see folks who raise horses, chickens and turkeys, live in RVs, collect yard cars, etc. (Live in Pilsen and collect junk, and you're a conceptual artist; live in the boonies and collect junk, and you're "trash"!)
My hardcore urbanist friend, an artist and former bike messenger who has not owned a car for probably a couple of decades, only recently overcame her suburbophobia and began visiting the south suburbs for the occasional art show. Yes! Art. In the suburbs! To stereotype the burbs as some uniformly bland, sterile cultural wasteland is just as foolish as suburbanites saying "I don't go into Chicago, it's full of crime."
I've run into artists out here who are fleeing the trendy artsy hoods in the city, perhaps for lower rent, perhaps because they inherited their parents' home, whatever. Various trends forecasters have seen a growing exodus of "creative class" people to the edge cities. I suspect the recession has accelerated this. The railburbs and the standalone edge cities and villages built long ago, around rivers and rails (Lemont, Joliet, Aurora, Elgin, etc.) are hospitable to singles and creatives because of their urban downtowns, mixed housing, transit, and bike-friendliness.
In sum, there are all sorts of people out here.
I could go on and on, but I'll stop here before folks start assuming I'm with the suburban chamber of commerce.
I think it's a time-of-middle-class-life story mistaken for a name-your-guilt-obsession story:you're kid, suburbs are grand, you can ride your bike, the city's a little scary anyway. You're in your teens & 20s, burbs feel like death and why shouldn't they? There's nothing there for you, and you need to grow up, so there's virtue in hating on the suburbs. 30s, 40s, city bullshit isn't romantic anymore, isn't a joke, so sure, go back to an easier place. Kids are grown, you're 50ish, it's enough having your life revolve around the school system, you'd like to go to a reasonable restaurant, a symphony, without planning it like it's Normandy; you look at going back to the city. And if you've got money, you do it, because now you know how to do it like a civilized human being, and most likely you maintain one place in the burbs or country and a little pad in the city. In the end you'll probably stay there because that's where your doctors and your kid who works in the city are.
The other option is to start out in the city and recognize that you undergo molecular decomposition if you try to leave. Eventually you might get a summer place somewhere, but you feel silly and selfconscious about it.
Lehman, incidentally, was moving from a hippie college town where they get themselves twisted up about privilege, and apparently he didn't know suburbs around New York and the general megalopolis encrustation. Yes, some towns are wealthy. Some aren't. The opening credits to the Sopranos did a pretty nice job of showing the range, and the prevailing attitude, rich and poor, was and is that if you're wealthy enough to live in a big house in a nice town, you're nuts to live in some crime-ridden aluminum-storm-door pit. The city itself is for kids, inveterates, recent immigrants, bums, and the wealthy.
I think the suburbs would be a spectacular place to live if designed properly, ie, not being so freakin' car-centric. Most suburbs you have to drive to do anything - including just getting some bread, or heading to the park, or finding a good restaurant. If I'm going to have to drive to get everywhere, I'm going to live out in the middle of nowhere, or at least where I can't see my neighbors. The suburbs appear to embody some of the worst aspects of country living (have to drive everywhere, not close to anything) and city living (traffic, neighbors relatively close). There are pros and cons to where you live on the continuum from farm to city, but the burbs have seemed the worst for a while now.
