Tag Archives: character

Celebration, Florida, built by Disney, has first murder

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Many suburbs rarely experience a murder. In fact, many suburban residents might give this as a reason for moving into these communities: the crime, particularly serious crimes, is limited. So when a murder is committed in a model community, particularly one built by Disney, it will receive attention.

Here is a quick summary of what happened in Celebration, Florida:

Residents of the town five miles south of Walt Disney World woke up Tuesday to the sight of yellow crime-scene tape wrapped around a condo near the Christmas-decorated downtown, where Bing Crosby croons from speakers hidden in the foliage. A 58-year-old neighbor who lived alone with his Chihuahua had been slain over the long Thanksgiving weekend, Osceola County sheriff’s deputies said.

What is interesting to note is how the rest of the story describes Celebration. Some of the commentary is what you would expect from any wealthy suburb: this was an isolated incident, this sort of stuff doesn’t happen in the community, and the residents shouldn’t worry. But here a few pieces of the description about the uniqueness of Celebration:

The killing sullies the type of perfection envisioned in 1989 when Peter Rummell, then-president of the Disney Development Corp., wrote to then-Disney CEO Michael Eisner about building a new town on vacant, Disney-owned land in Osceola County.

The community would be a “wonderful residential town east of I-4 that has a human scale with sidewalks and bicycles and parks and the kind of architecture that is sophisticated and timeless. It will have fiber optics and smart houses, but the feel will in many cases be closer to Main Street than to Future World,” Rummell wrote in the letter.

Houses incorporated “New Urbanism” ideas such as placing the garage out of sight in the back and a front porch close to the sidewalk to encourage neighbor interaction. Restrictions on home color and architectural details also were in the community’s rulebook. Colonial, Victorian, and Arts and Crafts-style homes grace the streets; the downtown is a mix of postmodern buildings and stucco condos.

Residents arrived in 1996. Critics viewed it as something out of “The Truman Show,” or “The Stepford Wives.”

Fans saw other things. A return to small-town values. A walkable community. Safety.

So this is the media story: the murder that took place in the “perfect Disney town” (as the link on the Chicago Tribune’s front page suggests). A few thoughts of mine about this:

1. Celebration receives a lot of attention due to who created it and how it was created. Is there a point where this will become just another community?

2. No community is “perfect,” even one created by a company like Disney which sells its products based on this idea of joy and magic. The same AP story lists some of the problems from recent years including graffiti and a recent day when the local school was on lockdown.

3. Suburbs or small towns are not immune to crime, even of this magnitude.

4. It will be interesting to see how this story affects the marketing of the community.

5. This seems like an illustration for all suburbia: crimes like this can upset people’s feelings and attitudes toward places that they once considered perfect and safe.

Defining what makes America exceptional (or not)

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The Washington Post writes about a public debates between liberals and conservatives over the idea of “American exceptionalism.” It appears that some conservatives have attacked President Obama for allegedly not believing strongly enough in this idea.

But critical to this discussion is actually delineating exactly what might make America exceptional. Here are the possibilities suggested by this article:

“The nation’s ideology can be described in five words: liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism, and laissez faire,” wrote the late political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, one of the leading scholars of the subject…

The proposition of American exceptionalism, which goes at least as far back as the writing of French aristocrat and historian Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s, asserts that this country has a unique character.

It is also rooted in religious belief. A recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution found that 58 percent of Americans agreed with the statement: “God has granted America a special role in human history.”

These are the sorts of traits that one can commonly hear expressed: American is about liberty and freedom, a high level of religious belief and religiously motivated action (as least compared to other industrialized nations), individualism, a laissez faire approach to markets (and life), and reliance on the ideas of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

A couple of thoughts:

1. These discussions often seem rooted in historical qualities which still have some influence today. But how would people add to this list from a more modern era? Some possible character traits to include: pragmatic, middle-class, consumeristic, materialistic, patriotic, etc.

2. What would others around the world think about this list of traits? Is America really seen as exceptional because of the Constitution? Are the five traits listed by Lipset ones that other countries would desire for themselves? Do other nations like the talk of “American exceptionalism”? Do most nations have their own versions of “national exceptionalism” or is this sort of thinking frowned upon?

Trying to explain American differences in 12 easy categories

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I recently flipped through Our Patchwork Nation, a recent book that tries to explain differences in America by splitting counties into twelve types: “boom towns, evangelical epicenters, military bastions, service worker centers, campus and careers, immigration nation, minority central, tractor community, Mormon outposts, emptying nests, industrial metropolises and monied burbs.” A review in the Washington Post offers a quick overview of this genre of book:

And every few years there’s another book promising to chart the country’s divisions by splitting it into categories more telling than the 50 states. Former Washington Post writer Joel Garreau offered his “Nine Nations of North America” in 1981; two decades later came Richard Florida with “The Rise of the Creative Class,” followed by Bill Bishop’s “The Big Sort,” which sought to explain why so many of us are clustering in enclaves of the like-minded.

The latest aspiring taxonomists are Dante Chinni, a journalist, and James Gimpel, a University of Maryland government professor, who use socioeconomic data to break the country’s 3,141 counties into 12 categories.

This sort of analysis is now fairly common: there is a lot of publicly available data from the Census Bureau and many more people are now interested in looking at the United States as a whole.

I have two concerns about this data. My main complaint about this effort is how the types are developed at the county level. This may be a good level for obtaining data (easy to do from the Census Bureau) but it is debatable about whether this is a practical level for the lives of Americans. When asked where they live, most people would name a community/city first and then next a state or region before getting to a county. County rules and ordinances have limited effect in many places as municipal regulations take precedence.

A second concern is that this type of sorting or clustering tells us where places are now but doesn’t say as much about how they arrived at this point or how they might change in the future. This is a cross-sectional analysis: it tells us what American counties look like right now. This may be useful for looking at recent and upcoming trends but most of these places have deeper histories and characters than just a moniker like “monied burbs.” This would explain some of the Post’s confusion about lumping together “emptying nests” communities in the Midwest and Florida.

Battle over outdoor lighting in Barrington Hills really about the character of the community

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On one hand, it seems like a silly fight: people in Barrington Hills, Illinois, a wealthy community known for its large lots and wealthy residents, are battling over a proposed ordinance that would limit outdoor lighting. On the other hand, this debate appears to be about much more than just outdoor lights: it is a discussion about whether Barrington Hills can retain its character or whether it will slowly just become another suburb.

A little background about the community:

Barrington Hills has kept a worried eye on the encroaching masses from the time of its incorporation in 1957. A local history says the village was conceived of in the locker room of the Barrington Hills Country Club by men who vowed to prevent their estates and gentlemen’s farms from being sliced into tract housing.

The village set its zoning code so that properties must be a minimum of 5 acres, a trait it has kept despite booming development in the surrounding communities of Algonquin, Barrington and Carpentersville. Even South Barrington, a town with traditionally large lot sizes, had to allow a subdivision in order to settle a lawsuit.

But Barrington Hills got a glimpse of an unhappy future a decade ago when a developer sought permission to build hundreds of homes in the village’s northwest corner. Turned down by the trustees, he sued and won the right to de-annex the land (to date, though, nothing has been built).

The defeat has lingered in the minds of some village leaders, and some say it plays a role in the lighting feud.

Two years ago, Barrington Hills updated its comprehensive plan — a blueprint meant to guide a town’s future development — and among its recommendations was the adoption of “light control standards to preserve dark skies and rural atmosphere.”

That had been a longstanding concern in the community, Knoop said, and the Village Board approved the plan without controversy. The trouble started when some trustees tried turning light control into law.

So this debate places two values in opposition: the ability of suburban homeowners to light their home as they wish versus the ability of the community to control its own destiny. Both of these are powerful forces: many people move to suburbs, and particularly exclusive suburbs like Barrington Hills, so that they don’t have people telling them what to do. But at the same time, people move to places like Barrington Hills because it doesn’t have sprawling subdivisions and busy roads.

In my mind, there is little surprise that some small issue could become such a big debate: it is not about the lights but rather about whether Barrington Hills can retain its character against the pressures that threaten to turn it into just another suburb. Such debates are relatively common in many suburbs as both political officials and residents consider how proposed changes to laws, zoning, and development patterns might alter the feel of the community. In this particular community, we could ask: why did this discussion develop around outdoor lights instead of another issue or is this a long-running (yet punctuated) debate that the community has been having for decades?

Fighting over suburban character: Show-Me’s in Naperville

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One long-lasting idea about suburbs is that they are family-friendly places. So when a business comes to town that may not fit that image, some residents can become angered. Such is the case with a new restaurant that wants to move into Naperville:

Naperville residents will get a chance this week to formally voice their opinions about a controversial plan to open a restaurant called Show-Me’s, which opponents say will feature scantily clad waitresses who do not fit the city’s “family-friendly” image.

An open forum will be held during a Naperville Liquor Commission meeting Thursday.

But a group of about 30 people let their feelings be known during a demonstration Friday. Standing in front of the proposed site, they loudly chanted “Stop the show!” to passing cars.

The protesters have suggested this restaurant does not fit with the character of the community. The community’s mayor is on the record suggesting that he “thought it was a regular restaurant as far as I was concerned” and the clothing of the waitresses was “tastefully done.”

While this seems like just a small group of protesters, the question they raise is an interesting one: what exactly is a suburban community supposed to look like? What businesses and residents fit its image? As the mayor suggested, the proposed restaurant is not breaking any laws or rules so it would hard to reject their liquor license proposal. But necessarily following the rules or laws is not the concern of many suburbanites who have ideas about their ideal community. Local politicians have to account for (or at least acknowledge) these feelings and images even if the proposed business breaks no rules and brings in tax dollars.

(Additionally, it always interesting to read comments on stories about Naperville – it tends to bring out people who both intensely dislike and like the city.)

Listing the “coolest suburbs worth a visit”

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Critiques of suburbs have often included the charge that they are boring. But perhaps this stereotype is cracking: Travel+Leisure provides a list of the “coolest suburbs worth a visit.” A few things seem to unite these communities: they have “cool” cultural attractions (and some have drawn the attention of celebrities) and have a uniqueness or character that sets them apart from the “typical” suburb.

While I don’t suspect that suburban tourism will soon explode, this is a reminder that there is a lot of interesting things to see and do in suburbs. And if more and more visitors and tourists do head to the suburbs, I’m sure the communities will be happy to see them.