I grew up in a very rural area where it was just our group of five or so houses and then nothing in either direction for at least a mile. To get into town was a twenty minute ride by car that involved crossing at least one 55MPH freeway, which of course as a child I was not allowed to do. Later when I moved to the suburbs as a teenager it felt like nothing had changed since I still needed a car to get anywhere.
I've since spent considerable amounts of time in cities and small towns with pre-Eisenhower centers and it's incredible how much you can get done. There were times where I would realize the path I'd taken to do various needed tasks and I'd think to myself that if I had grown up in such a place I would have turned out to be a much better person without as many unhealthy habits. Being able to walk from a bank to a performing arts theatre to a courthouse to a Lebanese restaurant and then to the hospital that overlooked the river so I could watch the boats pass as I waited for a family member ignited an appreciation of density and a hatred of suburbia in me.
Meanwhile it's fifteen minutes of walking to get to a gas station, or thirty minutes of driving to get fast food or groceries from where I live now. I feel bad for my neighbour's kids, honestly. They're trapped like I was at that age.
I grew up in suburbia and thought it was dull. Then I moved two two different “world cities” which was interesting, but the the constant presence of other people became tiring. I didn’t enjoy living in an overpriced shoebox, relying on public transportation, or competing with strangers for everything, every day.
I eventually returned to suburbia with a new appreciation for it. Moral of the story: people are different, and it’s good that different locales and lifestyles are available.
Yeah I grew up in a suburb and spent time in both suburbs and cities as an adult. I certainly prefer the big city but there are a lot of hobbies and lifestyles they do not promote. For example, any hobby that needs space (practicing an instrument without disturbing others, certain kinds of sports practice, hobbies like woodworking that require tools and a space, etc.) becomes a lot harder in a city. You either need to rent some kind of additional space to engage with that hobby, commute somewhere, or both.
I can certainly see the appeal to owning a house with a garage, basement, and yard for some people, even if I dislike the isolation of having that space more personally.
You can have that kind of detached house with a yard, but the thing is you have to be careful in where you place it. Look at towns built or expanded between 1910 and 1950 and you'll see that often times there were single streets of houses sandwiched between denser parts of the city laid out in a grid so those houses wouldn't be excluded or isolated. Those pre-suburban streets were connected to larger roads on either end that were lined with shops, schools, and industry. It's in stark contrast to the suburban hell of houses being packed into winding dead-end streets spread out across miles and miles like the plasmodium of a slime mould. Cul-de-sacs shouldn't exist in a good layout created from scratch because a cul-de-sac means you failed to utilize the space correctly and make the area human traversable.
I feel like the article misses the forest for the trees, yes kids like all those things, but they also enjoy having their own room, a backyard to play in and a street to play hockey in.
The suburbs are part of a set of tradeoffs people make and it seems like a strawman to frame it as some kind of inherent "mistake". The reality is if they were so undesirable, they wouldn't be growing.
Yeah a lot of these articles seem to be a lot of people who are very opinionated and don’t want to consider any other side. I guess that’s a lot of articles these days in general…and probably past days too but I wasn’t around then.
You should engage with the part of the article that talks about this.
> Now, I can hear some people saying, people like cars and houses and privacy. That’s all there is to it. Was air conditioning a “revolution”? Stop telling people how to live!
> But here’s the thing: when we permit people to do urbanism, even in America, they do it! The New Urbanists had to fight very hard with zoning boards and other skeptics to be permitted to build a few small housing developments that resembled pre-revolutionary places. Immigrants from countries with a stronger tradition of public space and small-scale commerce recreate that in America, even in deteriorating suburban landscapes. Our old towns and cities—remember that “historic district” is a euphemism for “not destroyed by urban renewal”—are some of the most desirable places to live in the country.
> All the evidence suggests that typical American car-dependent suburbia is not the affirmative preference of the majority of Americans. And yet we’re not allowed to fully test that claim, because we’re not allowed to build in a pre-revolutionary manner in most of the country. And even if we were, the decades during which traditional urbanism has been out of practice mean that the continuity of building and placemaking knowledge has also been broken.
Are these statements with any evidence? Especially those two bits:
> when we permit people to do urbanism, even in America, they do it!
> All the evidence suggests that typical American car-dependent suburbia is not the affirmative preference of the majority of Americans.
The latter is also compatible with my entire point. I don't doubt that if affordable large-living spaces were available with walkable cities with excellent public transit, that would be everyone's preference, but it's simple math, if you want a larger space that is "yours" then that is incompatible with density. It's a trade-off.
