Tag Archives: suburbs

Suburbs: a middle ground between cities and rural life?

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I was making the case in a recent conversation that the American suburbs could be seen as an adaptation between city and rural life. Illustrating this point, here is a testimonial from a mother describing the benefits of living in River Forest, Illinois:

We were house poor in New Jersey and miserable in an Ohio McMansion. In the Oak Park area, we found our ideal town: River Forest is close enough to the city to have some diversity and urban edge, yet distant enough to give us a tiny backyard…

They too logged many miles in the stroller, but they played at playgrounds and the library, meeting other babies with whom they will go to school. Finding playgroups for them was actually easier and less transient than in the city.

The steep price of private education drove us out to the suburbs, but attending public school has been an amazing experience. Our oldest two children have thrived in their public school. They have gym every day, as well as a rich music and art programs, and when they walk to school, the crossing guards greet them by name.

In the suburbs, we’ve been able to make our home the neighborhood hangout house. Our children’s friends are always around: in our house, on our teams, and at our local pool. Our house is noisy and busy, but it’s a happy chaos that lets me really get to know my children’s friends.

Great restaurants and culture are just a few exits away, but being so near Chicago keeps us aware of crime and poverty. Bikes are stolen, shopkeepers are held up at gunpoint and the food pantry has long lines. We enjoy the perks of small town life without losing touch with the urban reality of the Chicago skyline we see from our yard.

I wouldn’t want my children growing up any other way.

Here are the trade-offs:

-Cities provide exposure to culture, diversity, and “real life.”

-Rural areas or small towns provide close-knit communities where people know each other, safety, and more open space.

The suburbs provide a little of both worlds: close access to the gritty authenticity of big-city life but good schools and friendly neighbors. Notice I didn’t say “the best of both worlds” but rather access to some of the characteristics of rural and urban life. They may not be ideal places but a majority of Americans live in these communities.

I wonder how living in River Forest itself affects how one might view the suburban life. According to the Census, River Forest is 84.8% white, 76% of those 25 and older have bachelor’s degrees, the homeownership rate is 89.9%, and the median household income is $116,528. Overall, River Forest may have lost 4% of its population between 2000 and 2010 but this is still a mainly white and wealthy suburb. Sure, it is close to more diversity in Oak Park and Chicago but this is upper-middle class suburbia and this may just skew this rosy interpretation.

More Houston residents want to move from suburbs to city than vice versa

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Data from the most recent Houston Area Survey suggests that more Houston area residents would prefer to move from the suburbs to the city than vice versa:

Thirteen years ago, the Houston Area Survey started asking people who lived in urban areas if they’d prefer to live in the suburbs.  It also asked people in the suburbs if they’d like to move into the city one day. Survey founder Stephen Klineberg, a Rice University sociology professor, says the survey has revealed a clear shift in opinion.

“In 1999, twice as many people in the city said ‘I want to move to the suburbs,’ than people in the suburbs saying ‘I want to move to the city.’ Those lines have crossed now. And in this year’s survey, significantly more people in the suburbs said ‘I would be interested in, someday, moving to the city,’ than people in the city saying, ‘I want to move to the suburbs.'”

The most obvious reason is the rise in gasoline prices. But Klineberg says shifting demographics are also at play...

And that change in the makeup of households is also reflected in the type of houses people in Houston aspire to own.  The percentage of people who say they’d like a traditional house with a yard in the suburbs has dropped from 59% four years ago, to 47% today. While the proportion who would like a smaller home in a more walkable neighborhood has risen dramatically over the same period of time — from about a third, to more than half.

These findings mirror larger rumblings about where Americans would prefer to live: more people appear to be interested in moving to walkable, denser communities. Are these sentiments primarily coming from those of middle age and above plus young adults?

Two methodological questions:

1. Should we expect that the findings from Houston would be similar to what would be found in other metropolitan regions? Would the sentiments be the same for non-Sunbelt (i.e. Rust Belt) cities?

2. Additionally, how many of those who express an interest in moving from the suburbs to the city will actually follow through on this? Of course, these perceptions matter and could help shape future policy decisions such as building denser developments within the suburbs so that there are pockets of walkability. At the same time, does this indicate long-term behaviorial changes or simply attitudinal shifts at this point of time?

 

“Detroit Suburbs Harder”

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A store in the Detroit suburbs is now selling shirts with this phrase: “Detroit Suburbs Harder.”

Detroit Hustles Harder. Three words. A mantra that swaggers at you, bearing an unflinching gaze. A saying that suggests only one answer — just put your head down and work…

Now the Triple Threads t-shirt and printing company in Clawson want some of the myth-making. Thanks to a tip on Facebook, we saw a photo of a new top they’re hawking — “Detroit Suburbs Harder.”

There are some obvious questions here.

How exactly does one ‘suburb?’ Does this verb describe the act of enjoying a lunch in downtown Birmingham or raking leaves in Northville? Or is it a political philosophy eschewing mixed-use development and building re-use for more roads and far-flung McMansion developments?

Assuming “Detroit Suburbs Harder,” does that mean that our suburbs are more suburb-y than those of Atlanta? Are we out-suburbing Orange County and Chicagolandia? Was there a contest here I wasn’t aware of?

And if “Detroit Suburbs Harder,” is this shirt a companion wardrobe piece for people in Detroit who already hustle harder, or a philosophical distinction? Is ‘suburb-ing’ now supposed to be the opposite of ‘hustling?’

Perhaps this isn’t the meaning at all but here is a possible sociological/historical answer: Detroit may indeed be a poster city for suburban development in the United States, particularly for Northeastern and Midwestern cities (even as the prototypical region for suburbs is probably Los Angeles). While Detroit tends to garner attention for its Rust Belt demise in the last half century (see here and here), the suburbs have done decently well. In other words, while the core of the region has experienced difficulty, the suburbs go on. Detroit is known for “white flight” and segregation though recent data suggests more blacks are now moving to its suburbs. The fate of urban Detroit may still be bleak (particularly financially) but its suburbs might hold out for much longer.

The challenges of Going Solo in the suburbs

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Sociologist Eric Klinenberg argues that it is particularly difficult to live alone in the suburbs:

Q: What do cities and the housing industry need to be thinking about in terms of homes for this wave of single people?

A: One thing I worry about is that we have built suburban areas that won’t fit our future lifestyles. I interviewed many older people who live alone in suburban areas who discovered that they weren’t good places to be when their children moved away because they tended not to have good areas for walking and often were far from public transportation. The houses themselves were too big, making them expensive to heat and cool; more house than most people need. And the suburbs are reluctant to retrofit. They don’t want to change their zoning laws to deal with reality.

The thing I’m most concerned about is housing for poor people of any age who wind up living alone. We need to rethink this whole idea of the single-room-occupancy building. I write in my book about one very successful SRO experiment in New York that had a mix of incomes, not just the otherwise-homeless people who today are associated with SROs. It became sort of a vertical village and ended up being replicated in other places.

We need to design more housing like that. But it’s expensive, and cities are strapped for resources. And it’s not like the group that needs it the most has any political clout; they’re the most vulnerable people in our society.

Klinenberg brings up an issue that has been raised for decades: certain age groups don’t do well in the suburbs. If I remember correctly, Herbert Gans brings this up in the classic study The Levittowners and these issues are also raised in Suburban Nation by Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck. These observers suggest two groups are particularly disadvantaged: teenagers who can’t yet drive and who want freedom and the elderly who can no longer drive and are now more isolated in their single-family homes. Both of these groups are united by the necessity of driving in the suburbs and how driving is tied to completing daily subsistence tasks (such as getting food) as well as social interaction.

As Klinenberg suggests, building this kind of alternative housing in the suburbs (and cities) will be difficult. Not only is it expensive but I imagine many suburbanites would not desire such housing near their own houses. At the same time, this is a recognized problem in a number of communities: how can communities help the elderly live in the towns they have spent much of their lives in?

Two common uses of the word McMansion: to describe teardowns, tied to larger issues of consumption

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Earlier this week, I ran across two articles from two major newspapers that illustrate two of the definitions of McMansions.

1. The term McMansion can often refer to teardowns. In the Chicago Tribune, an interesting overview of teardowns in several North Shore communities in the Chicago suburbs uses the term this way:

Critics often pair “tear-down” with the pejorative term “McMansion,” coined more than 15 years ago to describe quickly built, super-sized structures that replace more modest homes. Some neighbors complain that once a home is torn down, there is seldom an effort to blend its replacement with the surroundings…

But now tear-downs seem to be rebounding. Last year, the village [of Winnetka] issued 28 demolition permits. Through March of this year, the village received 10 applications for permits, according to Ann Klaassen, a village planning assistant…

The factors behind the new upswing have changed from a decade ago, when developers and speculators were driven by easy profits. Tear-downs now seem to be the result of the foreclosures that left homes deteriorating.

Whatever the cause, Follett says tear-downs threaten the North Shore’s historic housing stock.

But builders call it a positive sign of an economy finally getting back on its feet, and argue that many buyers just prefer new homes over renovation jobs.

The key here is that teardown = McMansion plus the term McMansion is used as an effective piece of negative rhetoric. This is quite a different idea than a McMansion being built on a cul-de-sac in an exurb. These North Shore communities have a long history and an aging housing stock. The battle over teardowns is taking place in many communities across the United States and one tool at the disposal of preservationists and those who wish to avoid this architecturally incongruent new homes is to label them McMansions.

2. In contrast, an op-ed column in the New York Times about obesity and eating habits in the United States ties McMansions to other objects of excessive consumption:

I lived in Western Europe—in Rome—for two years. And I happen to be in Western Europe—in Lisbon—as I write. And in this part of this continent there’s a different attitude and set of signals about the appropriate amount of food a person should eat than there are in America.

In restaurants and at dinner parties here, portions are much, much smaller. And, seeing them, no one cries foul about insufficient value or inadequate hospitality. We Americans somehow imprinted our nation’s historical and famous “bigger-is-better” mentality onto the way we eat. Our Costco purchases and our supersized meals mirror our S.U.V.s and McMansions: they’re assertions of wealth and expressions of comfort through sheer size.

This matters. Because if, indeed, our evolutionary nature is to grab and gorge on food when it’s there, then we’re best served in the current era of abundance by cultural cues that try to condition us in the opposite direction.

This is a common argument: American culture promotes the idea “bigger is better” and this applies even to our food. But particularly interesting to me is the link between McMansions, Costco, supersized fast food meals, and SUVs. When this argument is made, these objects often are placed together, perhaps to show how pervasive this American mentality is: it covers where we live, what we eat, what we drive, and where we shop. In other words, McMansions are an easy to spot symbol of a larger American issue of excessive consumption.

Overall, I would argue that these are just two of the meanings of the word McMansion. These two articles do illustrate the idea that when people use the term McMansion they don’t necessarily mean the same thing.

There goes the neighborhood, vacant suburban lot full of dandelions edition

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As I was walking near campus, I spotted a yard that may just be in many suburbanites’ nightmares: a vacant corner lot full of dandelions.

DandelionLawn

Granted, these dandelions might be temporarily in bloom but this is a potential disaster for many neighboring yards. Even worse, this yard sits at a corner on full display. Interestingly, the lot also contains a “for sale” sign. Does the sight of dandelions discourage anyone from purchasing it? Would it better to have a barren yard than this spectacle?

It can be hard and laborious to fight off the dandelion scourge if others around you don’t keep up. The picture isn’t quite wide enough to show it but there is a very clear line where the yard to the right begins because of the absence of dandelions. How long can that pristine yard to the right hold out? My neighborhood has some similar issues; when dandelions are in full bloom, on windy days the air can be full of white seeds blowing around. I’ve had to act as a dandelion vigilante, digging out the root at first sight of the yellow bloom. Until this point, I’ve been able to keep things under control without herbicide but that would be much more difficult if I lived next to this lot. Is there a proper etiquette or protocol to follow in order to get a nearby homeowner to tackle the dandelions in their own lawn?

And thus continues the battle between suburbanite and nature, man versus weed. When homeowners are not vigilant, all lawns can suffer.

(I think this issue is related to one I raised a few weeks ago: it may not be a pretty sight if everyone lets their dog use the common areas in a neighborhood for a restroom.)

Urban Decay cosmetics

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As an urban sociologist, I am always interested to examine popular depictions of cities and suburbs. So I was intrigued when I found this advertisement for Urban Decay in the Sunday newspaper:

According to the ad, this line of cosmetics includes products like “Sin Eyeshadow Primer Potion” and “All Nighter Makeup Setting Spray.”

Here is the story of Urban Decay:

Our story opens 15 years ago, when pink, red, and beige enslaved the prestige beauty market. Heaven forbid you wanted purple or green nails, because you’d either have to whip out a marker, or risk life and limb with that back alley drugstore junk. Flying in the face of this monopoly, Sandy Lerner (cofounder of Cisco Systems) made a bold decision: if the cosmetic industry’s “big boys” couldn’t satisfy her alternative makeup tastes, she’d satisfy them herself.

Fatefully, Sandy’s business manager, David Soward, introduced her to fellow visionary Wende Zomnir. A creative businesswoman (and makeup addict almost since birth), Wende also recognized the color void and determined a shake-up was in order. Over high tea, the two forged a pact that led to renegade nail polish mixing sessions in Wende’s Laguna Beach bungalow. Sandy, David and Wende unleashed Urban Decay in January of 1996 with a line of 10 lipsticks and 12 nail enamels. Inspired by seedier facets of the urban landscape, they bore groundbreaking names like Roach, Smog, Rust, Oil Slick and Acid Rain. The first magazine ad queried “Does Pink Make You Puke?,” fueling the revolution as cosmetics industry executives scrambled to keep up…

Our ever-expanding global presence proves what Wende and Sandy always knew – makeup wearers everywhere crave alternatives, hence our longevity well past the death of 90s grunge. In the US, hundreds of UD products now fill purple shelves at Sephora, Ulta and Macy’s, as well as the virtual pages of Beauty.com. Growing numbers of retailers in Canada, the UK, France, Italy, Spain, Singapore and the Middle East stock our line, too. And although UD fans around the world might approach our products in wildly different ways, we’ve noticed they share an independent spirit that unites them…

We’ve now become the largest independently owned color cosmetic company in the United States. Our moms are proud. “Urban Decay” is no longer such a crazy name for a makeup company. And young women today have never known a world where they couldn’t get purple nail polish over the counter. Mission accomplished.

What is interesting to me is the commodification of a particular location and style. The name brings back images from the mid-twentieth century as many Americans fled large cities for the cleaner, greener, and safer suburbs. Governments responded by clearing urban blight and instituting programs of urban renewal. Today, urban decay is more fashionable. It seems gritty and authentic – see the passages above about the banality of pink and how darker colors subvert these ideas. It brings to mind ideas of adventure, being a renegade, standing out from the crowd. Perhaps it is tied to ideas of gentrification and finding the exciting yet improving parts of cities. Think of places like Times Square that just a few decades ago were seedy locations and even with the glitz and glamor of today still retain some of this urban excitement that simply can’t be replicated in the shopping mall or on Facebook. And, of course, you can have all of these ideas if you are simply willing to spend a little money on a line of cosmetics.

Is there a suburban alternative to this, something like Suburban Passion or Desperate Suburbs?

Ruminating on the American parking lot

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Here is part of a review of a new book that discusses better ways to design large-scale parking lots:

Mr. Ben-Joseph does offer some parking-lot success stories, few that there are. He introduces us to the Herman Miller factory in Cherokee County, Ga., whose segmented, 550-car lot is sympathetically integrated into the surrounding woodscape. He also approvingly notes the canopied car plaza in front of the Dia:Beacon Museum in Beacon, N.Y. (a collaboration between American artist Robert Irwin and the architecture firm OpenOffice), where the angled planters separating the parking spaces point the way to the museum entrance. Renzo Piano, redesigning the old Fiat Lingotto factory in Turin, Italy, took a similar approach, creating dense and splendid colonnades of trees…

Mr. Ben-Joseph is also guilty of sociological overreach. “Parking lots are a central part of our social and cultural life,” he writes, calling them “a modern-day common.” Wait, what? They are? Yes, teenagers gather in parking lots for one rite of adolescence or another: fighting, racing, dancing. True, community farmers markets spring up over the weekend in business and municipal parking lots; tailgating is a ritualized feasting before sporting events; RV drivers form impromptu villages in Wal-Mart parking lots, a practice known as “boondocking.”

But these interactions happen despite the forbidding nature of open parking lots, not because of them. I find parking lots to be intensely anti-social. I do not engage with strangers on my way to or from the car, and because these tracts are typically shelterless, there is no architectural cue as to where to congregate even if you wanted to. One can’t let go of a child’s hand in a parking lot for even a second. If you’re in a car, a parking lot is an obstacle course to negotiate. If you’re on foot, it’s a place to escape unscathed.

Surface parking lots don’t have to be the minimalist slabs of nowhere-ness we’ve grown accustomed to, Mr. Ben-Joseph suggests. Maybe. And yet there are few signs that this aspect of our infrastructure will get much better anytime soon. For now, I was glad to reach my car and drive away.

I think you could make a case that parking lots really do matter beyond what kind of social activity takes place in them. Thinking more broadly, parking lots represent the American love affair with the car and development based around driving. The zoning laws about the required number of parking spots suggest that one of the worst things we can imagine in everyday life is the lack of an easily available parking space. Shopping malls and big box stores and fast food restaurants are dependent on these giant lots. In cities, parking lots are often profitable holding operations until the land is profitable enough to justify a large development. Overall, the big parking lot is emblematic of a whole lifestyle built around cars and trucks that took over America starting in the 1920s.

The Internet is not an information superhighway or global village; rather, a “drab cul-de-sac”

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In an interesting article titled “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?”, author Stephen Marche makes his point by comparing the Internet to suburbs:

In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are. We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information.

Marche is discussing the disillusion associated with the Internet: a good number of people thought it would provide unprecedented access to information, more global connections, and stronger democracies and civil societies. Instead, Marche argues that it is like the suburbs. They both provide the illusion of a “good life” but with little depth behind the happy facade of McMansions or Facebook. Marche should finish the metaphor: perhaps we need an online way of connecting that is more equivalent to an urban neighborhood, perhaps the kind idealized by Jane Jacobs.

I wonder if Marche would be willing to work with the idea that the Internet may not be the best or all it could be but it is a necessary adaptation for the modern world. This is similar to an argument I’ve made before about suburbs: I think many Americans know that they aren’t all they are said (or sold) to be (see a recent survey where a majority of Americans say they would move right now if they could). However, the suburbs beat the alternatives of small town life (too confining, not enough independence, not enough amenities or jobs) or city living (perceived as being too dangerous and anonymous). Similarly, it would be truly hard to live these days without using the Internet or even not be a member of Facebook as these are becoming (and have become for many) the basic ways of finding out information, buying goods, and yes, “connecting” with others.

Economist argues best restaurants often in “dumpier locales”

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Over at the Atlantic, George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen explains why excellent restaurants consistently appear in the “cultural wasteland” of suburbs:

Low-rent restaurants can experiment at relatively low risk. If a food idea does not work out, the proprietor is not left with an expensive lease. As a result, a strip-mall restaurant is more likely to try daring ideas than is a restaurant in, say, a large shopping mall. The people with the best, most creative, most innovative cooking ideas are not always the people with the most money. Many of them end up in dumpier locales, where they gradually improve real-estate values…..

I love exploring the suburbs for first-rate ethnic food. Many people consider suburbs a cultural wasteland, but I am very happy searching for food in Orange County, California; the area near San Jose; Northern Virginia, near D.C.; Somerville, Massachusetts; and so on….It is especially common to see good ethnic restaurants grouped with mid-level or junky retail outlets. When it comes to a restaurant run by immigrants, look around at the street scene. Do you see something ugly? Poor construction? Broken plastic signage? A five-and-dime store? Maybe an abandoned car? If so, crack a quiet smile, walk through the door, and order. Welcome to the glamorous world of good food.

Cowen’s argument about restaurants reminds me of another Atlantic piece celebrating “low road” buildings which Brian previously discussed.  It’s not surprising that great work–and great food–often happens in low rent locales like “junky” suburban strip malls and office parks given their lower (financial) barriers to entry and lower operating expenses that free up more cash to flow each month into improving their tenants’ business.

Still, it strikes me that the financial health of restaurants is more location-dependent than for many of the business populating “low road” office parks.  Whereas many office-based business are not dependent on high volumes of foot traffic for survival, restaurants almost invariably are.  (Unless, of course, that particular restaurant focuses primarily on a delivery and/or catering business model.)  A less prestigious restaurant location is a good value for the owner (and likely to survive long term) only if the drop-off in foot traffic/customers due to the “bad” location is more than outweighed by lower rent.