Tag Archives: suburbs

McMansions are Republican homes?

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In a humor/satire column in the Huffington Post, McMansions are tied to Republicans:

A Pew survey finds President Obama is polling quite well against a “generic” Republican opponent, better than George W. Bush was against a “generic” Democrat in 2003. Forty-seven percent of respondents said they would like to see Obama reelected while 37 percent opted for a generic Republican candidate. HuffPost Hill couldn’t reach “generic” Republican, Pleated Q. Pants IV, at his McMansion in suburban Columbus for comment. We hear he was shopping at a big box store and thinking about national security.

This is an interesting mix of characteristics: the “generic” Republican candidate shops at a big box store (why not say Wal-Mart? Is Target too trendy?) in central Ohio and lives in a suburban McMansion. There may be some truth to some of this: Joel Kotkin argued after the 2010 election that Republicans won the suburban vote even as both parties for fighting for this demographic.

I have seen other cases where McMansions are tied to Republicans. What exactly about the McMansion is Republican: the size? The bad architecture? The sprawl? The suburban lifestyle? The three (or more) car garage? The big mortgage? The wealth that made the house purchase possible?

What would a Democratic characterization in the same vein look like? In terms of the housing unit, how about an urban loft or a refurbished rowhouse or brownstone, all in a gentrified, atmospheric, and trendy neighborhood?

Chicago suburbs consider more roundabouts

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The roundabout has had a sort of renaissance in American traffic and road design in recent years. While many Americans might consider roundabouts to be European, there are more being built in the Chicago suburbs:

At least 10 roundabouts have recently been considered or launched in the Chicago area. The intersections consist of a center island surrounded by a one-way lane of traffic where drivers yield to circling cars without the instruction of stop signs or traffic signals.

South Holland in 2008 was one of the first in the area to build a modern roundabout. Another was finished in Lincolnshire in November. Kane County is planning one west of Elgin. Another proposal was recently unveiled for Chicago’s West Lakeview neighborhood, and the Illinois Department of Transportation is looking to convert the despised Cumberland Circle in Des Plaines into a modern roundabout as well.

Because the design forces vehicles to slow down and eliminates left-hand turns, the possibility for multicar accidents is much lower than at a traditional intersection, safety experts say.

In addition to the safety improvements, I recall reading that roundabouts also accommodate more traffic. Instead of having cars stop (at either stop signs or traffic lights), there is more continuous flow.

It is also interesting to read how suburban residents seem afraid of these roundabouts: how does one drive through them? Perhaps suburban drivers all have seen how Clark Griswold (played by Chevy Chase) got stuck in a London roundabout for hours in European Vacation. At least at the beginning, this unfamiliarity may contribute to the reduction of accidents: people have to slow down in order to figure out their next course of action.

In the long run, this is a good reminder that driving habits and behavior are very much conditioned by what we are used to. This reminds of Hans Monderman, the Dutch traffic engineer, who went to great lengths to get drivers to readjust their behavior (and the American way of just adding traffic signs doesn’t help – read about it in Traffic).

(As a side note: speaking from experience with a roundabout in northern Indiana that I drove through for several years, it is pretty easy.)

Aurora now second largest city in Illinois

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The population growth in the Chicago suburbs has shifted from Naperville (in the 1980s and 1990s) to communities further west and south. In particular, Aurora grew during the 2000s and is now Illinois’ second largest city:

[T]he Alperins are among the nearly 55,000 new residents since 2000 who helped Aurora boost its population to 197,899 and officially eclipse Rockford as Illinois’ second-largest city, according to the recently released 2010 U.S. census figures.

Aurora’s 54,909 jump was the largest among Illinois cities. Its percentage increase of 38.4 percent was just behind top-ranked Joliet, which grew at a 38.8 percent pace to 147,433 and beat out Naperville as Illinois’ fourth-largest community.

The growth comes as Aurora makes strides resurrecting what had become a struggling downtown and boasts of statistics that show the city’s major crime rate is at its lowest in more than three decades. The physical size of the city also has grown to accommodate more people. Aurora has three times as many square miles as it had four decades ago.

There are several reasons that the community has grown including a growing Hispanic population and open land in a growing region of the Chicago suburbs. But the city has also dramatically expanded in size:

Aurora, meanwhile, now covers 46 square miles compared with 35 in 1990 and 15 in 1970. It sprawls through four counties, six school districts and seven townships. But like Naperville in the last decade, the city could eventually be boxed in by neighbors, Greene said. And there’s also no guarantee that brisk growth from the 1990s through part of the 2000s will repeat when the economy improves.

The explanation for why Aurora is growing is very similar to what led to Naperville’s growth between 1960 and 2000: it is located near highways, it has a number of businesses, and there is plenty of room to expand and the city has annexed a lot of land. But as Naperville discovered, the growth only goes on for so long: eventually, the land runs out and then Aurora will become a different kind of place. As the end of the article notes, the long-term course of the city will likely include denser development near the center of the city.

At the same time, Naperville and Aurora’s growth are not quite the same: Naperville has long had a wealthier profile compared to Aurora’s status as an industrial satellite city (named as such in this 1915 work).  During the 1980s and 1990s, Naperville’s growth was quite unusual: Naperville was classified as the only boomburb outside of the South or West during the last two decades of the twentieth century. Naperville is quite well-off for a large community, has a history of high-tech companies dating back to the mid-1960s, has very low crime and poverty rates, and has a vibrant and popular downtown.

It will be interesting to watch in the coming years how Aurora, Joliet, Plainfield, and other suburbs in the southwest suburbs continue to grow.

From former suburban home to authentic home to be restored

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What happens to suburban homes that were once on the outskirts of the big city? One writer describes the 1927 rowhouse she and her husband bought in Jackson Heights (part of Queens, New York City) and their plans to restore it:

Friends warn me this will be a lifelong endeavor. But my husband and I have always preferred houses with some history in them (this is our fifth, and maybe last, transaction). I suspect it’s a rejection of my New Jersey McMansion rearing.

To get a better sense of this house’s past, I turned to Daniel Karatzas, an agent with Beaudoin Realty Group and the local historian. He wrote the book, “Jackson Heights – A Garden in the City,” which sits on our coffee table. Well, it used to. Now it’s in storage.

Our house, Karatzas told me, was designed by Robert Tappan, “one of those unsung architects” who helped develop the neighborhood into a slice of suburbia just a few miles from midtown Manhattan.

“It wasn’t like Frank Lloyd Wright,” says Karatzas. “They were building traditional styles that would appeal to upper middle-class families. They used vernacular architecture. … Tudor, French, Georgian. That made it seem the houses had been there longer than they had.”

The houses on my block first sold for between $24,000 and $28,000. If he had to liken it to a modern-day phenomenon, Karatzas said, our 1920s house might have once been considered like “those McMansions in New Jersey.”

A couple parts of this stick out to me:

1. This neighborhood was once a suburb of New York City. While the home is now 80+ years old, it is still more of a suburban setting. According to this brief history of Jackson Heights, the community was built primarily after World War I, which would have been during a large wave of suburbanization.

Suburban homes generally get a bad name, both today and historically for being relatively cheaply made and looking all the same. Perhaps this is epitomized by the 1962 song “Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds – here are the opening lines:

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.

There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And yet, with age, some suburban homes can become the sort of authentic homes that people desire. This house has history but it is suburban history. While the realtor suggests this home was probably like a McMansion of the 1920s, the writer is interested in restoring and rehabilitating this home, gold-metal cabinets in the kitchen and all.

2. The primary comparison made is between this new purchase and the McMansion the writer grew up in New Jersey. We don’t quite know why this writer disliked this New Jersey upbringing but it is clear that this new home has more character than that home did. She also suggests that her father is likely puzzled by her decision to move back to Jackson Heights: “Sometimes, I suspect my decision to settle in Jackson Heights puzzles him, since he worked so hard to get out and buy a house in the suburbs.” While one generation viewed a move to the suburbs as a good thing, some people in later generations see a move back to city life (though this is somewhere between city and suburban life) as desirable.

Does this mean that the sort of suburban homes that people now call McMansions may one day be authentic and the sorts of places that others will want to restore? This idea perhaps assumes that Americans will continue to move further and further out from the center of metropolitan regions and then the older suburban homes will age and no longer be on the fringes. What is the long-term fate of McMansions: will they fall apart? By co-opted for other uses (like perhaps being subdivided into multiple units)? Become desirable reminders of the past? Become teardowns themselves and the land put to other uses?

“Sustainability thinker” suggests sprawling suburbs can’t really be green

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A common target of those concerned with being green and sustainability are American suburbs. While some might suggest that suburbs can become more green (read here and  here), Alex Steffen, a sustainability thinker, suggests it really isn’t possible:

What’s a sustainability trend that you wish would go away?

Shallow redesigns of suburban life. You see a lot of proposals these days that seem to suggest that all that open space is perfect for farming, or that we can power our McMansions and cars with solar panels, so even the suburbs can “go green.” The brutal reality is that newer, more sprawling suburbs—and especially the cheap boom-years exburbs—aren’t just a bit unsustainable, they’re ruinously unsustainable in almost every way, and nothing we know of will likely stop their decline, much less fix them easily.

Unfortunately, it isn’t really clear what Steffen means by this. What constitutes a “shallow redesign” versus something more substantive? Would Steffen agree with New Urbanists that suburbs can be redesigned in ways to promote green behavior? This statement is also interesting: “nothing we know of will likely stop their decline.” They may be in decline now due to financial concerns (the budgets of local communities, the ability of homeowners to purchase large new homes) but does that mean that they will be on the decline forever? Could we have the same type of sprawl with just more green single-family homes (like LEED Platinum homes)? What sort of suburbs, if any, would he be in favor of?

As I read Steffen’s comments, I thought about the trade-offs those interested in being green and sustainability might have to make regarding American suburbs. Given the popularity of suburbs in American life, both as an ideology and an actual destination of a majority of Americans, can this movement really claim that suburbs as a whole are bad? Instead, most arguments seem to be incremental: suburbs can be modified in ways, such as having LEED homes or more mass-transit or more fuel efficient cars, that retain some of their key attributes without turning it into city life. But even with these sorts of incremental arguments, I wonder how many of the commentators really wish that suburbs would just disappear but can’t admit such things because the American public would react negatively.

What happens when even the schools in well-off sububs don’t meet the NCLB standards?

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With the increasing standards in the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the Department of Education recently suggested that the number of schools that are not meeting standards is likely to dramatically increase:

The Department of Education estimates the percentage of schools not meeting yearly targets for their students’ proficiency in in math and reading could jump from 37 to 82 percent as states raise standards in attempts to satisfy the law’s mandates.

According to this “Fact Check,” schools are not labeled as “failing.” Rather, there is a process such schools would go through if they do not meet the NCLB increasing standards:

Obama’s terminology wasn’t quite right, though. There is no “failing” label in the No Child Left Behind Act. And schools that do not meet growth targets — aimed at getting 100 percent of students proficient in math, reading and science by 2014 — for one year are not subject to any intervention.

Those unable to do so for two or more consecutive years are considered “in need of improvement.” The consequences then become stiffer each year, starting with offering students an opportunity to attend another school, and escalating if the targets remain unmet.

As more schools are unable to meet these standards, what happens when suburban school districts in fairly well-off suburbs don’t meet the standards? Many of these communities use their well-performing schools as a selling point. Suburban home buyers and businesses are influenced by school performance and perceptions about school districts.

Having schools labeled as “not meeting standards” (or in possible public jargon, “failing”) would be a blow to the idyllic image and high status of a number of suburban communities. Beyond schools, suburbs are supposed to be places where Americans can be safe and at least their children can get ahead. Suburbs could try to give a more technical explanation for the NCLB data but this could prove tedious or difficult to understand.

One possible outcome  of all of this (suggested to me by a colleague outside my department) might be that this is when NCLB will truly be done: when monied suburbs realize that the legislation says their good schools are not making adequate progress.

Victor Davis Hanson on the autonomy of the American suburbs

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In a column about how disasters can particularly affect complex centralized nations like Japan, classicist Victor Davis Hanson discusses how autonomy and decentralization is a primary feature of American suburbs:

I don’t know quite why many of our environmentalists and urban planners wish to emulate such patterns of settlement (OK, I do know), since for us in America it would be a matter of choice, rather than, as in a highly congested Japan, one of necessity. Putting us in apartments and high rises, reliant on buses and trains, and dependent on huge centralized power, water, and sewage grids are recipes not for ecological utopia, but for a level of dependence and vulnerability that could only lead to disaster. Again, I understand that in terms of efficiency of resource utilization, such densities make sense and I grant that culture sparks where people are, but in times of calamity these regimens prove enormously fragile and a fool’s bargain…

While a disaster comparable to Tokyo is certainly possible here in California, Americans are by nature less prone to rely on centrally provided resources, and are still uneasy with high urban densities. We forget that the suburbanite — ranch house, three cars in the garage, and distance from the urban center — is not just an energy waster in comparison with his Euro apartment-dwelling, single Smart-car-driving, train-commuting counterpart, but a far more independent-minded, free, and self-reliant citizen as well. Again, I hope our technological future is not in grand mass transit projects thought up and operated by a huge federal government, but in cleaner, more fuel-efficient, private cars; not in massive power plants, but smaller, more dispersed local generators, be they powered by nuclear, solar, wind, or fossil fuels; and not in vast agricultural hydraulic regimes, but in family-operated, more intensively worked farms that are the anchors of rural communities — as idealistic and naive as that may sound.

In a wider sense, America’s strength has always been found in the self-reliant, highly individualist, even eccentric citizen.

An interesting argument that perhaps comes down to which is the higher value: avoiding the problems of suburbs including not wasting energy and the other commonly-cited ills of suburbia such as a lack of community, consumerism, a place primarily available to those with money, etc. vs. suburban (and more rural) citizens that are “independent-minded, free, and self-reliant.”

I can imagine some of the responses to Hanson’s claims about suburbanites:

1. Are they really free and self-reliant? Even with their single-family homes and relative autonomy, suburbanites are highly dependent on others for goods like roads and relatively cheap oil that make such suburban life possible. What about the need in the suburbs to “keep up with the Joneses” and perhaps slavishly pursue the newest update of the American Dream? Is the autonomy primarily due to the location and its lower population densities or because many suburbanites have the means or wealth to do what they wish (as do wealthier city dwellers)?

2. Are the problems of centralized systems in the face of major disasters enough to outweigh the benefits of more centralized systems in less troubled times? If a major disaster were to hit a major American metropolitan region and its suburbs, would the average citizen be better equipped to handle the situation?

Green nimbyism

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NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) attitudes are typically associated with suburban sprawl and McMansions. So what happens when NIMBY is associated with more eco-friendly projects?

Nimbyism is nothing new. It’s even logical sometimes, perhaps not always deserving of opprobrium. After all, it is one thing to be a passionate proponent of recycling, and another to welcome a particular recycling plant — with the attendant garbage-truck traffic — on your street. General environmental principles may be at odds with convenience or even local environmental consequences.

But policymakers in the United States have been repeatedly frustrated by constituents who profess to worry about the climate and count themselves as environmentalists, but prove unwilling to adjust their lifestyles or change their behavior in any significant way…

Robert B. Cialdini, an emeritus professor at Arizona State University who studies environmental behaviors, points to two phenomena:

Humans hew to the “normative” behaviors of their community. In places where bike lanes or wind turbines or B.R.T. systems are seen as an integral part of society, people tend not protest a new one; if they are not the norm, they will. Second, whatever feelings people have about abstract issues like the environment, in practice they react more passionately to immediate rewards and punishments (like a ready parking space) than distant consequences (like the threat of warming).

Based on Cialdini’s ideas, perhaps it will just take one or two of these neighborhoods or locations adopting these projects so that it becomes normative. But who will be willing to go first? And what is the critical mass when such developments become normal?

While some might take this as evidence that certain people aren’t willing to sacrifice for green projects, I think we can take a broader view: in general, Americans don’t like two things that could possibly occur with the construction of something nearby.

1. The state in which they purchased their home or housing unit is altered. The idyllic scene they once bought into may not last forever. Whether this is due to a nearby condo building blocking the view or a new subdivision taking away a once-open field, Americans do not these sorts of changes. They paid money for a particular setting and want to maintain that setting as long as possible.

2. Their property values might be reduced. Because of the amount of money invested in homes plus hopes that many have about making at least some money when selling their homes somewhere down the line plus the amenities that come in living in places with higher property values, property values drive a lot of development decisions.

Developments like these green projects can be difficult to push through, particularly when those in opposition have money or status. Research has shown that typical dirty types of development, like power plants or landfills or public housing projects, tend to get placed in poorer areas where the people are less-equipped to fight back. Could these green projects be headed for similar places?

Two Italian film directors describe Roman suburbs

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Two Italian film directors discussed their new film Et In Terra Pax, which is set in a “Roman council estate” in the Roman suburbs.  Here is how they described these Italian suburbs:

?MB: I was thinking a lot about a story set in the Roman suburbs…

MB: We live in part of Rome both close to the centre and the suburbs, which was useful to observe without being involved. We like Roman suburbs, and we think that in suburbs you can breathe the real Rome. The centre is great but it’s for tourists, rich people or to spend Saturday nights. Real live [sic] is somewhere else…

Can you talk about the idea of the housing complex being like a prison?

DC: A lot of suburbs in Rome are characterized by this kind of view: big grey buildings, a kind of ghetto filled with people. A city can’t grow in this way because the risk is that people can be excluded from the rest of Rome. We consider the building we chose like another character, a metaphor for loneliness. It looks like a prison but it’s full of life and ready to explode (in a good or bad way) at whatever time.

Et In Terra Pax is not an international audience’s image of Italian life. Was it important to show this side of life?

DC: Sure, we think it’s very important to show the dark side our country, not only for international audiences but also for the Italians too.

Compared to the typical American portrayal of suburbs, the land of single-family homes, lawns, and kids running around, this is a different image: large apartment buildings built away from the vibrant city center and illustrating the “dark side” of Italian life.

This discussion hints at how some European suburbs differ from their American counterparts. While most Americans see suburbs as the refuge of the wealthy, some European suburbs are where the low-income apartment buildings are built. The center of the European city is the place to be, not the outskirts of a metropolitan region as in the American case.

I am also intrigued by the idea that the apartment building is treated “like a character.” Elsewhere, they say the building they filmed in was about 1 kilometer in length, housed about 14,000 people, and features “strange, fascinating and disturbing architecture.”

Psychology Today: we are more unhappy even as we have attained the American Dream in the suburbs

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The latest issue of Psychology Today (March/April 2011, not yet available online) features a story about unhappiness and the American Dream. One researcher of economics and happiness says, “The U.S.A. has, in aggregate, apparently become more miserable over the last quarter of a century.” The basic premise is this: we have gained what the American Dream promised, families, home ownership, levels of luxury, and yet we are more unhappy than ever. Why is this the case?

The article goes on to cite a number of problems: having more public activities moved inside the home and limited contact with the broader communities (with home churches, homeschooling, and working from home cited as examples); an overemphasis on children who end up dominating the lives of their parents; moving to the suburbs; and we unrealistically dream of fulfillment that is said to come with marriage, having children, and growing older.

I’ll quickly tackle the suburbs issue here. The bulk of this section cites the 2000 book Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, a classic New Urbanist text. In short, the New Urbanists argue that suburban neighborhoods emphasize individualism and simply bigger homes, not community, leading to an impoverished public realm. Through the redesign of neighborhoods, such as including porches on the front of houses, moving garages to back alleys, and having a coherent sense of architecture across buildings, community life can be encouraged. The author of this article suggests there is a “disconnect between ‘suburban expectation…and the blighted reality of sprawl.”

This is not a new argument about the suburbs: indeed, critics were saying similar things back in the 1920s and 1950s during the early waves of American suburbanization. This article also trades in typical arguments: “And those parents who live in a cul-de-sac just a highway exit or two from a strip mall might be the first to admit they’re experiencing an American dream that may be less Norman Rockwell than Revolutionary Road.” One question could be raised about this section on suburbs: is it the suburbs themselves that are causing the problem (the actual physical design and layout) or the expectations that come with them? Since the early 1900s, Americans have moved to the suburbs partly to avoid the city. While the suburban lifestyle certainly has faults, would Americans choose to leave the suburbs and move elsewhere? New Urbanists offer an interesting alternative: maintaining single-family home but having denser suburbs which would hopefully have richer community interaction. Interestingly, this article does not call for people to leave the suburbs but perhaps to adjust their expectations about what the suburbs can actually offer.

More broadly, the article sets this up as an issue of out-sized expectations. The American Dream offers much but also seems to leave people wanting more and more. How about a slightly different question: is the end goal of adult life happiness and/or satisfaction? One way to deal with the issue of the American Dream would be to scale back our expectations so we are more satisfied with what we have. Another way to deal with the issue is to wonder if pleasure (measured as happiness or satisfaction) is the ultimate goal in life.

(A note about Psychology Today: I am not a regular reader so my observation may be silly or obvious. But this article, and a few others I flipped through, were quite “pop” and short on academic analysis.)