Barren American Suburbs
erik-engheim.medium.com
erik-engheim.medium.com
The American suburbs are the Toyota Camry of housing. Kind of boring and somewhat ugly, but affordable, functional, and ultimately well-liked by the end-user.
Anecdotally, I met thousands of Americans in my life, and I'd say the vast majority of them never cease to praise the life and balance of small European cities.
So it seems to be more structural due to government. That's not necessarily a bad thing. I like having a big yard with dogs and a cul-de-sac for my kids to play in.
The affordability aspect is also subsidized by green house gas emissions, and cheap oil.
Don’t assume because other people choose something different than you that they must be ignorant to the other options. It just different. Not wrong.
Also, suburbs are only affordable because we continue to defer infrastructure maintenance. At some point, we will have to pay to maintain all the bridges, roads, etc.
I'm not anti-suburb necessarily. But, I do loathe the car-based culture we've created. And the rage that any mention of alternative transport seems to elicit among many suburb dwellers (who also love to bitch about traffic problems, but only want more tarmac as a solution).
Local example: I live in Reston VA. We've slowly been adding bike lanes to existing roads as other improvements are made. In some cases, this required cutting from 2 lanes to 1 lane. However, in all cases, traffic timings and accident analysis was undertaken and in all cases that I've seen, traffic flow either improved or if there was a decrease, it was on the order of 1-2 seconds per mile traveled. Additionally, in most cases, traffic accidents of all kinds were reduced.
But, you wouldn't know it from listening to the anti-bike crowd. They see the reduction in lane count and immediately jump to "nobody rides bikes!", "run them over" or worse. Seriously, it's that bad.
I'll also add that in some places, the bike lanes are rarely used, but that's as as direct result of poor designs created to silence the noisy motorists. Another local example - the main thoroughfare along my neighborhood has bike lanes. However, the lanes stop just prior to the two places you would want to ride your bike - the high school and the shopping center. So, of course fewer people use the lanes - they don't actually GO anywhere! It's infuriating.
Edit - the sidewalks along this same thoroughfare also start/stop or switch sides. This makes it less tenable to walk to the school or shopping (the road is about 2 miles end-to-end; shopping center at one end, high school near mid-point). Lots of people are within 1 mile of either destination, but running back and forth across a 45mph busy road is simply unsafe. A pedestrian was killed a year ago running from the sidewalk on one side to his home on the other. How the heck is this even to code? Argh.
City planners and bicycle activists need to work with human nature, not against it.
Even myself - I couldn't wait to be able to drive to high school, nevermind the bus, my bicycle, carpooling with neighbors, etc.
The urban planner who decided to drop a major employment center inside the triangle made by 3 massive highways (with little/no housing, no transit access, and ridiculous street layout) needs a kick in the crotch.
In my experience what "first we make car transport less and less appealing" translates to is "we should allocate some of this land dedicated to free parking for other uses."
Unfortunately you just can't have a walkable urban neighborhood and also a glut of free parking. But suburbanites insist that city-dwellers should shoulder the opportunity cost of making their wasteful transportation choices more convenient for them.
I live on the edge of a city. Most of my shopping is out in the suburbs as they crush the city core on convenience of time and transport (and often on price due to overhead).
With proper ventilation, subterranean roads and parking areas could enable this where geology is favorable, but it wouldn't be cheap.
Part of it is economics - proximity to the metro made the land more valuable. But part was the county BOD and planning commissions putting their foot down and making changes to zoning (changes to min parking requirements, changes to housing density, etc).
As somebody who lives across the street from the edge of one of these zones, it's a mixed bag. I get to walk to work. Next year, there will be a new grocer on my way. Pretty good. The downside is more traffic, especially on bridges across the airport access road (we really need 4-5 instead of the 3 that exist today). And, as land values have gone up, developers are trying their hardest to buy up parkland and convert it to condos/offices.
San Francisco is almost a credible example. Pre-Covid, it was quite common to want to go from point A near Market Street to point B, 1-2 miles away, also near Market street. This could easily take 45 minutes by car or 5-10 min by bike. If the BART or Muni went to the right place, you had a Clipper card so you didn’t need to navigate the atrocious payment system, and you didn’t need to use the elevator, it was reasonably fast. If the Market street improvements had gone quickly to every-five-minute bus service with a dedicated lane, the bus would have been a huge win over car/rideshare.
A lot of transit planners seem to fail to understand that good transit will be widely used even by affluent people as long as they trust that the transit is frequent (or runs on a real schedule and the schedule is accessible), has appropriate hours, and is clean and safe. Instead there are pilot programs with 1/4 the service, and they fail to attract 1/4 of the riders, because 1/4 of the service is simply not a good alternative to a car.
It’s like the Caltrain wondering why the tech employee ridership isn’t great when the express service stops before all the programmers go to work. Or Sonic.net deciding to put fiber in the neighborhoods that already have a lot of customers of their DSL service.
1. You have a yard for you and your kids to play in. I know a number of people who love this. You can send the kids out to the yard without having to be there with them. When the weather is nice you can do this most days. And, the kids can have a blast doing it.
2. You can grow a garden. Flower garden or vegetable garden... I know a number of people who do this. This brings them pleasure in multiple forms.
3. It's a place that's yours rather than someone else's. When you rent there is someone else that owns it and you live there. Some people like to own and have more control over their space. It's about agency.
Like I said, I'm not anti-suburb. I am anti-car-dependent development planning.
Which in turn means someone of median (or even 75th percentile) income who wants to buy a house with a yard big enough for kids to meaningfully play in isn't going to do so in Cambridge, but can readily do it in a number of suburbs within an hour's commuting distance of Cambridge/Boston.
* - or rather the bank owns more of it than we do and we’re slowly buying it from them...
I see no reason why. Cambridge was, once upon a time, a streetcar suburb of Boston. There's no reason you can't just build more dense suburbs and outlying cities. You just don't need them to be car-dependent. There are tons of suburbs outside of major European cities that are just less dense and more family oriented while still being well served by transit and being walkable for all peoples' daily needs.
There's also no reason all the land has to be personal and private. Condo buildings can have yards and gardens. Kids also do fine playing in public parks, rec centers, and playgrounds. There's a variety of built environments that serve families' needs that we simply do not build because of zoning restrictions. Singapore manages to build extremely densely, keep housing costs accessible to median income families, and still have their kids grow up happy and well adjusted. It's a policy choice America makes to be this wasteful and it's mostly done by making it illegal to build any other way.
Some of the benefits: During COVID, we put up a trampoline for the kids to play on and get some exercise. Private yard meant we didn’t have to ask or fight anyone about it and there’s no additional COVID risk because everyone already lives together.
We put up a vegetable garden as well; no one is bothered by it.
Plenty of people want to (or are okay with) live in high-density housing in an urban environment. Not everyone does; as you say, there’s no reason everything has to be one or the other.
Unless you have building codes that encourages the same type of domiciles as 'the city'. The Roncesvalles neighbourhood of Toronto used to be a suburb of "the city", but now it is in the city, and the houses have big lots, lanes/garages, and plenty of square footage:
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/200+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+...
They're expensive now because urban living is cool again, but up until the late-1990s/early-2000s, land was not that expensive "in the city": urban living was generally considered only for immigrants, and the WASPs lived out in the 'burbs.
For some stuff that's a little less palatial, just go up the street for some good examples:
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/50+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+O...
There's no technical reason why areas/neighbourhoods couldn't be built like that again.
At what multiple of price?
Many Americans do have real-life experience of living in dense cities but still prefer suburbs because of their stage in life. A copy & paste of another comment outlining common multi-decade life timeline:
- early 20s (single no kids) : going to college in a city or working at a downtown firm so they enjoy the dense city living like Manhattan, Chicago, etc... walking to restaurants and bars, museums, cultural things
- mid-life with kids: they enjoyed cities in their younger years but they want to raise a family so they move out to the suburbs. They want the better schools, yard, garage to putz around in etc. Yes this means the proverbial "soccer mom" with a SUV to drive the kids to sports practice, ballet lessons, etc
- retired and kids are grown and gone leaving an "empty nest": some senior citizens might sell the suburb house and move back to a city condo and enjoy walking to museums again
So the suburbs are attracting the knowledgeable former city dwellers. Yes, lower land cost (and hence cheaper sq ft) is definitely part of it but not the only advantage. Some do like the quieter streets, a garage to pursue hobbies, a yard for barbeques, less crime, etc.
Nothing wrong with saying that, but it's a loose characterization based strictly on opinion.
There's real and tangible problems with urban/sub-urban planning in the USA that go far deeper than whether someone "likes" something. It deserves exploration and critique. It's not merely a consumer choice.
You're surrounded by people, but miss out on a lot of the small interactions that come from being close together. You're dependent on a car, so regularly stuck in traffic and can't go anywhere on your own. The boring/ugly aspects might be uninspiring. All fo this is "normal" so you don't notice it in your day to day life, but it adds up.
I'm probably completely wrong here, but when I see the massive mental health and drug issues from otherwise rich, stable, suburban families I wonder if there's a connection.
I have lived in suburbs, dense city and rural countryside. The density has no say on the quality of your neighbors or the extent to which you will interact with them.
In fact, if my anecdotal experience were made a rule, it would be "the more densely you pack people together the less they function as a community". Of course it isnt true as a rule, but it has been my personal experience.
if I had to make a general rule, I'd say there are more people who could potentially be your friend in a city, but the barrier to becoming friends with each one is higher. you bump in to more people, but less frequently.
It doesn't matter how walkable your neighborhood is, how broad the restaurant selection, how ethnically diverse the community, or how many different forms of public transportation there are, if the perception is that housing is expensive and schools are bad, many people are not going to move in, even if they would otherwise enjoy those amenities.
Until urban areas can meaningfully compete on those two metrics for the average person in the U.S., the suburbs are here to stay.
It's a stereotype, which is no less true for that, that young college-educated people have been tending to move into cities especially over the last 25 years and then move out to a suburb when they get married and have kids. And really it's been going on longer than that. A bunch of people I went to grad school with went to work in Manhattan in finance and lived there. Maybe one or two of them still do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYYdQB0mkEU
The suburbs are hell if you are young and don't have a car, don't have friends, etc. If you are a bit older you might like the square footage and relative quiet of the suburbs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_from_Las_Vegas
are
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_and_Life_of_Great_Am...
are good reflections on American Vernacular architecture; that first book in particular has a collection of comments from clients such as "if I wanted this I wouldn't have hired an architect".
Jane Jacobs liked the idea of cities developing organically according to what people want and the suburbs provide that in the form of a market, but the market is set very much by government standards for what kind of house is mortagable, zoning laws, etc.
In the US "suburb" can mean different things. On one hand I think of the area in Santa Monica around the Mormon temple which is all beautiful small single family homes on spectacularly landscaped tiny lots. On the other I think of the diabolical geometry of Southern New Hampshire (where I grew up) where low-density subdivisions were organized around the highways like the way your lungs are organized but when your car reaches the highway it is like a demolition derby without a clear hierarchy because those subdivisions put induced demand on the highway (simply because it is efficient for motorists to live close to the highway;) no wonder people in NH just legalized flying cars!
I like a lot of Jacobs' ideas. I'm also somewhat amused when a lot of people (not saying you) praise her because she fought back against NYC highway plans. But the fact that she liked cities to develop along the lines of what the community wants sounds a lot like NIMBYism which many of the same people oppose as well.
Is income taken into account?
> Like published happiness research, the State of the City survey shows that reported satisfaction is highly correlated with income. Some 88 percent of those with incomes over $75,000 said their community was excellent or good; only 66 percent of those with incomes of less than $30,000 said the same. It’s worth noting here that the impact of income is larger than the impact of location in influencing satisfaction (a 9 percent difference between city and suburb as opposed to a 22 percent difference between high and low-income groups. These data suggest that the real headline finding of this survey should be “higher income people are more satisfied with the places they live.”
* https://cityobservatory.org/are-suburbs-really-happier/
Survey in question:
* http://www.citylab.com/politics/2014/08/overall-americans-in...
But with southern hot cities like Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix, etc, walking anywhere outside for more than 10 minutes will leave you a dripping sweaty mess. I think this is why the USA doesn't see a tidal wave of walkable neighborhoods. Thus, suburbs requiring cars (with air conditioning) still rule. Even in Florida retirement communities where there's a "planned" walkable neighborhood with a nearby fitness center and small grocery store, most use motorized golf carts instead of walking. Unlike coastal cities with ocean breezes like San Francisco, walking is very uncomfortable in many places.
Another issue with grid street neighborhoods is that many don't like thru traffic and noise. Thus the dead-end cul-de-sacs that many academics hate are loved by residents who prefer the reduced car noise and extra privacy.
American suburbs is one of those topics where mainstream media misleads their readers. If you only read from New York Times, New Yorker, or even the topmost upvoted threads on HN, you'd miss out on the "dark matter" of residents who genuinely prefer American style suburbs.
[EDIT] : I want to add some more comments for those think many Americans are unaware of the advantages of dense living and their choice of suburbia is from ignorance. The counterpoint to that is many Americans follow this life timeline:
- early 20s (single no kids) : going to college in a city or working at a downtown firm so they enjoy the dense city living like Manhattan, Chicago, etc... walking to restaurants and bars, museums, cultural things
- mid-life with kids: they enjoyed cities in their younger years but they want to raise a family so they move out to the suburbs. They want the better schools, yard, garage to putz around in etc.
- retired and kids are grown leaving an "empty nest": some senior citizens might sell the suburb house and move to a city condo and walk to museums again.
My point is that many people who live in suburbs are quite informed by real life experience to the advantages of "walkable cities" but the still prefer suburbs for its advantages as well. This aspect is underreported by the mainstream media.
At the same time my suburban street is pretty isolated and quiet, and I can just send my kids outside to do whatever unsupervised without a second thought ... there's a bunch of fairly wild reserved area bordering and near my house....
I see it as a tradeoff and I'm not sure I'd make that trade for the city right now.
It's fine to walk in a nice tree-lined neighborhood, even in the peak of summer. Walking out in the sun, where there's concrete and asphalt everywhere, that's a big difference.
> genuinely prefer American style suburbs
From among the options they're aware of. That's a confounder that's hard to control for.
Right now my "American style" suburban house is perfect. When I'm an empty-nester I might go somewhere else, but I'm not here because I'm unaware of other options.
Only about a third of Americans older than 25 have finished college. Not long ago, that figure was more like 1 in 4.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...
> Right now my "American style" suburban house is perfect.
In the time of Covid-19? I agree. Before February 2020? Hell, no. I moved to the 'burbs to a 4-bedroom house from my 2-bedroom city apartment. I'll move back when I can dine at bars and restaurants safely again.
I can tell you my preference is not London. It's loud, even when it's not. It's dirty. And wow is it busy.
I think Berlin does a nice job blending big city, with accessibility and quality of life.
Ultimately without a European visa though I'm back in the American suburbs which I enjoy. I like the fact that it's quiet, private, and I have yard and the space to entertain friends and family.
Its homes and at most some amenities that are clearly for the community and not commercial. There is actually a good number of people who don't want the pools, tennis courts, and such, that some larger subdivisions have.
Fortunately in my state its been law for decades all streets have to have a side walk on one side and this makes getting around really simple.
Really comes down to that divide, between home, shopping, and work. A person's home is their castle and their subdivision their country. The barbarians are at the gate
In many countries in Central and South American it's common for men to wear pants and even suits in 80+ weather and nobody's complaining--because they've grown accustomed to the heat after being outside all day. Go to Hong Kong or Singapore or Japan in the summer where it's stifling outdoors and men are wearing full suits as they walk about their day. I'm not saying we have to wear full suits in Florida--I'm just saying that one grows accustomed to one's environment.
Americans feel they deserve to wear in Florida whatever they were wearing in Chicago; and then since most of their day is spent transitioning from one from freezing-cold refrigerated space to another to freezing-cold refrigerated space, with only brief flashes outdoors as they walk from their car to their shopping mall, they never get the chance to accustom themselves to their environment. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Those cul-de-sacs funnel all the traffic onto feeder streets, and of course all of the services are on the feeder streets. So while the dead ends and crescents are quiet, I don't walk there, I walk to the services and have to put up with much more traffic and noise than I would in a grid setup.
First, you don't just need mixed-use, but density of mixed-use. This is why London, where I now live, is walkable. There's a good cafe within 2 minutes of my doorstep. A doctor's office and a grocery store and a bakery within 3 minutes. A park and a pub and several more shops within 4 minutes. A hardware store within 5 minutes. I very rarely am required to walk for as long as 10 minutes. Even in an environment like Phoenix, these distances would be perfectly walkable. I've also spent time in Reykjavik in January, and found it quite walkable for exactly the same reason. This has nothing at all to do with climate.
Second, what does have to do with climate is shade. Currently, cities like Phoenix are actually much hotter than the surrounding desert, due to the "urban heat island" effect. This is primarily driven by the abundance of asphalt and other high-thermal-mass, low-albedo surfaces. But cities don't need to be designed this way. If you look at traditional Middle eastern urban design, you can find cities that actually create "urban cool islands", and are (relatively) livable without air conditioning. Key components of these techniques are:
- Very narrow roads / alleys, such that buildings are continuously shading each other and sunlight doesn't reach the ground
- roofs painted white to reflect the sunlight & heat back into space
- "cold sinks" to capture cool night air
- Wind catchers and various other devices to funnel prevailing winds into the alleyways, and to convert thermal updrafts into air movement even when there aren't winds, creating siphons to circulate air out of the cold sinks
- courtyards with pools and vegetation to create evaporative cooling from the moving air.
These techniques and others have been well-understood for several thousand years. They're detailed in a lovely book by Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy, called "Natural Energy and Vernacular Architecture". Highly recommended.
However, all of the above is incompatible with low-density development and streets that can carry large amounts of vehicles. The former precludes the necessary density of services, and the latter precludes any of the environmental adaptations that are necessary to make the desert livable. But these are man-made planning choices, not dictates of the environment. Those choices can be un-made.
I grew up in Atlanta and lived there for 40 years. You're full of shit.
People love going outside and there are outdoor events year round. The beltline has been expanding around the city since the Olympics in the late 90s. Old neighborhoods like the Lindbergh, Edgewood, Inman Park, Kirkwood, and Avondale are all perfectly walkable with their overgrowth of trees. Even Atlantic Station, which is completely devoid of trees and lacking any soul, is tolerable due to the long shadows cast by the buildings.
Yes the heat and humidity can be unrelenting when you're going from your cozy AC'd house to the mailbox across a stark white heat mirror of a driveway flanking a treeless yard, but that's a product of suburban design esthetic.
Older communities in the city are downright pleasant, it's only the newer suburban neighborhoods with expansive treeless yards where being outdoors is intolerable.
I think this hits the nail on the head, many people don't acclimatize because they live in their own artificial climate where they leave an air conditioned home, get in an air conditioned car to go to an air conditioned workplace. I grew up in areas comparable to the one's GP listed long before air conditioning was common and walking places was normal.
There is an innuendo that this is fundamentally bad, but surely this is true of many urban environments.
Think of london for example - streets are generally rows of identical looking houses repeated, and this is true whether we’re talking about the suburbs or the fanciest parts of central london.
Now, some of the commuter towns of London are a different story.
Edit: Making it clear I'm not using the train which I realise could be misconstrued from my previous wording. The train station was just a reference to how busy my local area can be.
Again there is an innuendo that this is fundamental bad.
In my experience (having lived in London for decades), for most people who live within 5 minutes of a major train station, which is not most Londoners, it’s not even practical to have a car at all, and even if you do, just getting out of the city can take an hour.
London is great if you like urban environments and don’t like cars. But I don’t see why that should be a universally held preference.
Streets in London typically aren't the same for literal miles, whereas they can be in the case of some American suburbs where you need a vehicle like a car to escape it.
To be clear, my reference to the train station was to indicate how busy my local area can be. But despite that, you don't have to walk very far to find somewhere a bit more tranquil.
Is this meaningfully true? South london for example has enormous areas with architecture that is just as ‘the same’ as American suburbs.
It’s definitely true that American suburbs are lower density and the houses are typically larger, but again that seems like just a preference.
It was assumed by the GP that houses looking similar was bad, and now it is assumed by you that said similarity extending beyond a five-minute walk + five-minute train ride is bad.
To both your point and the GP's, similarity may often be in the eye of the beholder. I live in a suburb and feel like I see quite a lot of variety on my block, and even more variety if I walk a block to the west, or two blocks to the north, where there is an apartment complex and some retail buildings. It could be that you would look at my block, or my neighborhood, and say they all look the same to you. I don't know! I've spent enough time in dense cities around the world to form the opinion that most dense city centers lack much variety on a block-by-block basis, but again, others might see it differently.
In any case, whether there is or is not visual variety is a separate issue from commutability, I think,
---
Maybe he should have used a map that indicates parks.
Weird.
> Norway is approximately 323,802 sq km, while United States is approximately 9,833,517 sq km, making United States 2,937% larger than Norway.
There is, of course no doubt that the automobile enabled lifestyle is predominant here. And I also don't have any expectation of anyone emigrating from Norway to move to a boring American suburb! But if they wanted scenes like those photos from Oslo, there are places in America that look like that.
Of course, the author and I probably share some of the same feelings - we do not think our country is perfect, but we do hope to see the good things our country has, and perhaps feel some draw to defend what people think of our country when the merits are questioned!
I share this sentiment a lot. Especially given my 30+ years growing up and living in Italy, and 8+ years in the San Francisco Bay Area.
I liked how this article provided clear examples of what's different, and what's important, about a city.
A great book I'd recommend is Happy City, by Charles Montgomery. [0] It will most likely change your perspective on how a city should be, but often isn't.
We have half the land we used to, and our neighborhood probably looks more like the American suburb satellite view in the parent article, but having bike/pedestrian infrastructure, and proximity to the things that we want to do makes a big difference.
However, in general, living near the center of a walkable small city or town is probably going to cost you more than a cookie-cutter suburb a bit more off the beaten track. (And once you get ex-urban or rural, there's usually a town center but probably not much in the way of commerce there.) The suburbs like this around Boston that pop to mind are relatively expensive.