Why do people like the Suburbs?

[Duke87 1,070]

Nope. Not even close.

 

I actually guessed the answer based on your description of the place, although I will admit I then did "cheat" to confirm that I was right.

[CapTon 592]

I read your original post, MrSaturn 64, and I believe I know why people like the suburbs. I'm sure someone has already posted these reasons, but I'll just re-post them for my sake

 

- Homes are cheaper

- Not as much crime

- Almost all suburban areas have good school districts opposed to the ones in cities

- People like living in "small towns" (per say) where you get to know more people and form small and close-knit communities

 

And that's really all I have but this is what I believe.

[Superbacon 380]

I'm not a very big fan of the suburbs out here, either. Especially the neighborhoods with winding, confusing streets that throw you off. 

 

In some cases, suburbs work out well as a hub for rural communities and a more quiet place to live. But the sprawl takes up too much land and resources here.

[Leofdæg 4]

Nope. Not even close.

 

I actually guessed the answer based on your description of the place, although I will admit I then did "cheat" to confirm that I was right.

So what's your answer? Why didn't you reveal it in that post?

[Duke87 1,070]

 

Nope. Not even close.

 

I actually guessed the answer based on your description of the place, although I will admit I then did "cheat" to confirm that I was right.

So what's your answer? Why didn't you reveal it in that post?

 

 

Because I have special powers that allow me to know I'm right so that wouldn't be fair. I want to see if someone else can guess it first.  

[Leofdæg 4]

 

 

Nope. Not even close.

I actually guessed the answer based on your description of the place, although I will admit I then did "cheat" to confirm that I was right.

So what's your answer? Why didn't you reveal it in that post?

Because I have special powers that allow me to know I'm right so that wouldn't be fair. I want to see if someone else can guess it first.

I no longer want people to guess. The members (i.e. excluding the mods and admins) would never succeed in getting the correct answer (not in my lifetime, anyway).

So was your first guess actually Sinkieland? (Code for an actual country)

[The Pennsylvania Turnpike 252]

I like the Lehigh valley for being both suburban and urban within a short travel distance. 1 minute i could be in the middle of Center city allentown and the next minute i'm in whitehall or in the mountains. It's just the feeling of being close to everything. But Philly just has something that the L.V. will never have. Allentown has the skyscrapers, cheesesteaks, and the ballparks, but philly, i don't know, something about it just want's me to move there.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

^ It's the cheese-steak sandwiches.

[Duke87 1,070]

So was your first guess actually Sinkieland? (Code for an actual country)

 

Yes, although this is the first I've heard it referred to as that.

 

 

I like the Lehigh valley for being both suburban and urban within a short travel distance. 1 minute i could be in the middle of Center city allentown and the next minute i'm in whitehall or in the mountains. It's just the feeling of being close to everything. But Philly just has something that the L.V. will never have. Allentown has the skyscrapers, cheesesteaks, and the ballparks, but philly, i don't know, something about it just want's me to move there.

 

I don't generally think of Allentown as falling within the Philly metro area since one has to pass through ruralness to go between the two. But then, it is only an hour away.

 

[Meg 368]

I've spent most of my life on the outer edge of suburban sprawl.   It is where I'm comfortable.

 

Why?   Partly because it seems "normal" to me.   Mostly because I literally can't stand the congestion of high density living.   Too many people, too little space.   Partly because I don't understand the idea of a small town where everyone knows everyone else's business.  How do people live in a fishbowl like that?

 

To me, one of the upsides of the outer edge of suburban is that it keeps moving.   Everyone is new, or hasn't been there all that long.   No one knows what my parents or grandparents did as kids so they can't hold it against me.  They didn't do anything wrong.  I just think it would be creepy to live around people who are that intrusive.

 

Most importantly, there is usually peace and quiet.   My one foray into high density living was not a pleasant experience, although I realize the circumstances were far from normal.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Small town/village living isn't much as Meg has described.  I've lived now in four small towns, and while you might be well acquainted with your immediate neighbours, these days you'll find that if one hasn't grown up in the community the idea of everyone knows everyone else is rather a fiction.  These days, people tend to be either very gregarious, often via the social media, or very private.  While we are on civil terms, I really have no idea about the people who live around me.  Maybe I'm a kind of hermit.

[The Pennsylvania Turnpike 252]

 

 

 

 

I don't generally think of Allentown as falling within the Philly metro area since one has to pass through ruralness to go between the two. But then, it is only an hour away.

 

 

 

 

I measured on Google maps and found that the edge of the L.V. and Philadelphia City proper is only 29 miles. But upper bucks and Montgomery  counties feel like i'm up in Lancaster. But then again, Warren county NJ is very rural and up until Clinton as well. You don't really feel urban until maybe 40 miles into NJ. But hey, Allentown feels to be turning into it's own thing now. With a new hockey arena, 33 story skyscraper, and a bunch of new med to high rise offices, i feel it's gonna become it's own place soon and not just a umbrella city to Philly or NYC.

 

 

[Mr Saturn64 742]

Here's another thing i hate about the suburbs, other than the lack of culture and the sea of postwar boxes and McDonalds that it is.

This may be just the Philly area, but it seems everyone out here thinks that the city is Downtown (Center City), the Sports complex, and a giant ghetto to the west, north, and south of Center City. Come on! Everything in the south not called Point Breeze is nice, Cedar Park is improving, the River Wards (Fishtown, Kensington, Port Richmond...) are lovely, Manayunk is fabulous and cultured, and the Lower North (Northern Liberties, Poplar, and Fairmount) are gentrified and flourishing. Sure, there are bad areas. Fairhill ,West Kensington, Nicetown, Hunting Park, Allegheny West, North Central, Haddington... Really, all the city is is Center City, with an 85% good area of culture and architecture to the south. West Philly isn't as bad as you've heard. North Philly is a disaster, but then there's the River Wards and Lower North. The city isn't a massive crime zone, people!

[The Pennsylvania Turnpike 252]

Here's another thing i hate about the suburbs, other than the lack of culture and the sea of postwar boxes and McDonalds that it is.

This may be just the Philly area, but it seems everyone out here thinks that the city is Downtown (Center City), the Sports complex, and a giant ghetto to the west, north, and south of Center City. Come on! Everything in the south not called Point Breeze is nice, Cedar Park is improving, the River Wards (Fishtown, Kensington, Port Richmond...) are lovely, Manayunk is fabulous and cultured, and the Lower North (Northern Liberties, Poplar, and Fairmount) are gentrified and flourishing. Sure, there are bad areas. Fairhill ,West Kensington, Nicetown, Hunting Park, Allegheny West, North Central, Haddington... Really, all the city is is Center City, with an 85% good area of culture and architecture to the south. West Philly isn't as bad as you've heard. North Philly is a disaster, but then there's the River Wards and Lower North. The city isn't a massive crime zone, people!

Pardon my double post but this i can agree is 100% true. I've been to south philly and passyunk square is beautiful. Manyunk may look ghettoish from the expressway, but when you actually drive down Main street, it is beautiful. Northeast Philadelphia is suburban and there is a small part of Philadelphia north of manyunk that has some farmland. I'm not joking. Many people think that Allentown is the same way, a crime haven. Crime has went down since 1999 and the city is starting to get back on it's feet with the NIZ program. More jobs are coming, Neighborhoods are improving, and basically the only places in Allentown you would have to stay away from are the East end and The Northern Part of the city. 75% of Allentown is Safe. I cringe when people call Allentown names like "allenswamp" to name a few. These two cities are overlooked for their crime when in reality, the majority of these cities are really safe and safe enough where i don't feel scared of going down into one of these cities and leaving the tourist area. 

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

"Tiny boxes, on the hillside

"And they're all made out of ticky-tacky.

"There's a green one and a blue one

"And there's one just for you."

-- A 1970s singer (maybe Woody Guthrie).

[hamsterTK 93]

My views on this have changed somewhat. I am still a believer in building up not out but the cultural aspects of the great timeless city vs suburbia debate are changing.

I love big metros and prefer cities but hipsterized hoods in the gentrification era can be very anonymous. People with very individual goals come to work and consume. A neighborhood is just a good.

Likewise rural sprawl has merely the illusion of openness. You are trapped on a lame 5 acre wedge. Can't do anything fun and too far from civilization.

Looking back I took my upbringing in a couple different small nominally suburban cities. I could ride my bike in the neighborhood. I got to do all kinds if activities, soccer, swimming, marching band in high school , etc. We had huge block parties and things like that. But this was an economically and racially diverse community that was no bubble seperate from reality.

Also the culture changed. All my peers and future adult members of society are all liberal or moderate. And the internet has dispersed culture. All the interesting immigrant groups and their restaurants are in the suburbs now.

If I can't afford a nice cool urban hood I would like to live in a classic ranch house and modernize it. I like growing things in my parents garden now.

We should save and densify old burbs by tearing down old emptying retail for quality urban infill to form corridors that support transit. Also bikes FTW

As gentrification takes its toll this shall be the age of the revenge of the inner suburban donut that has been neglected far too long. I also appreciate mid century architecture.

[Duke87 1,070]

I love big metros and prefer cities but hipsterized hoods in the gentrification era can be very anonymous. People with very individual goals come to work and consume. A neighborhood is just a good.

 

That's kind of exactly what I like about living where I do: I live in the same building as a bunch of other people, but I know none of them personally and never talk to any of them. In my mind, if I am being a good neighbor, my neighbors should never have cause to acknowledge my existence, nor I theirs. I don't want to have any social connection with people I live right next door to, doing so robs me of privacy. My friends must live far enough away that there are never any unplanned encounters between us. Otherwise, the anonymity of being just another person in the crowd is positively glorious. Everyone ignores you unless you are in a situation that is explicitly for the purpose of socializing. Exactly as it should be.

 

Also bikes FTW

 

If we had robust bicycle infrastructure they would be a very useful way of getting around cities. But we don't, bikes are forced to mingle with cars, and that to me seems to just be a recipe for disaster. Bikes should have their own dedicated pathways which are not shared with cars or pedestrians, the same way pedestrians have sidewalks so they don't have to walk in the street. On routes with high bicycle traffic, these pathways should be grade separated from cars and pedestrians wherever possible.

[hamsterTK 93]

Bikes should have their own dedicated pathways which are not shared with cars or pedestrians, the same way pedestrians have sidewalks so they don't have to walk in the street. On routes with high bicycle traffic, these pathways should be grade separated from cars and pedestrians wherever possible.

That's why I think they are a good fit in inner suburbs.

There is room for bike lanes or cycle tracks along existing thoroughfares. Converting suburban arterials to more multimodal streets doesn't have to sacrifice auto capacity so it's more politically tenable.

I also think it stretches transit dollars better and gets people to bus and rail stops where they are sparse.

[Duke87 1,070]

I also think it stretches transit dollars better and gets people to bus and rail stops where they are sparse.

 

Perhaps, although driving to the train station is something people already do. It'll be tough to convince someone to take their bike instead of their car. I imagine this would be most popular among young people who might not have a car of their own to use.

 

Methinks it may be more effective to simply encourage dense development near the train station so that people can walk there. Population density will make or break transit.

 

Of course, the other key thing necessary for transit to be effective is for most people to have a common destination. This is why despite being fairly dense, Los Angeles struggles with transit: most jobs are not downtown, the metro area is very decentralized and people work all over the place. So the demand for a train which will take you downtown is anemic compared to other cities of similar size.

[Ocram's Razr 964]

Ironically, in the Seattle Metropolitan Area, it rains more days than it doesn't and not many people ride bicycles but government wants to lower automobile capacity, build in unsafe areas, and waste a ton of taxpayers' dollars in order to "promote cycling." I usually vote against them but that doesn't do much good.

--Ocram

[Meg 368]

We should save and densify old burbs by tearing down old emptying retail for quality urban infill to form corridors that support transit.

 

 

 

"densify old burbs".     "quality urban infill".   First time I've heard it put that way.

 

I understand the need to do this.   I just don't like it.

 

My initial reaction is that there is no such thing as "quality urban infill" but I know that is wrong.   They are building some (or what is supposed to be some) everywhere they can around here.   Odd buildings.  They feel spacious when I'm inside them but congested when I'm outside. 

 

Mathematically, there are twice as many people living in the US as there were when I was born.   That kind of population growth results in some quality of life changes.   While I appreciate many of them, they are not all good.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

After the great depression, it became not only "A chicken in every pot" as part of the new deal, but when the war ended American industry quickly shifted gears to consumer goods, notably automotive products.  The new prosperity also gave rise to the idea that a nice piece of land in suburbia was a good thing, with a two car garage with two cars, two kids, pop with a good job, and mom staying home to run the plant.

 

Unfortunately, other movements have blurred this scene starting in the 1960s when the American dream was priced out of reach of the core family and mom had to go to work.  A lot of this was due to the baby boom caused by all those "sex-starved" servicemen returning from overseas. 

 

The great inertia in the education systems couldn't handle this, and now that the baby boomers are starting to retire thing are becoming even more dire because the quo lost its status long ago, but has been maintained by a couple of generations of bureaucrabs.  These snivel serpents and their political cronies haven't had a new idea since Adolf the Aryan was in diapers.  As a result, several cities are going bankrupt, mostly due to head-in-the-sand non-thinking and poor planning believing that things are in a steady state.

[Meg 368]

I suspect it isn't belief in a steady state.  It's more that they are convinced that, if they continue doing what they did 60 years ago, life would return to the "good old days" of the 1950s.

 

What they are missing is that only a small percentage of the population considered the 1950s to be the "good old days". 

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

I was around in the 1950s and things were not so wonderful.

[Duke87 1,070]

This is a pattern we seem to be good at repeating: with each new generation comes new ideas about how to best do things, which correct mistakes the previous generation made but at the same time introduce new mistakes which the next generation will look to fix. And so on. We realized that cramming everyone in cities limited people's mobility and spatial freedom, so we built suburbs and left cities to rot. Now we've realized that suburbs are inefficient and cause emotional distress for young people and are rebuilding cities. But in the process we are making cities too expensive for some people to afford, and while people realize this, we keep doing it anyway and make no effort to stop it. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few decades people are talking about how to fix gentrification the way people are now talking about how to fix suburbs.

 

And then you have the whole cars versus transit mess. 50 years ago we thought passenger trains were obsolete and made the huge mistake of destroying a lot of our rail infrastructure. Now people are complaining about cars being bad and we're starting to destroy road infrastructure in cities... and somehow no one notices that we've been through this process of junking infrastructure before and that the last time we did it we later lived to regret it. Learning from history is overrated, eh?

 

This is part of the problem I have with urban planning as a field: it's very fad-based, what people think is "cool" changes over time. And there is so much fuss over aesthetics, often at the expense of function.

[hamsterTK 93]

On the other hand, the real practical implementation of such fads are exaggerated IMO

 

A few large cities went full throttle with freeways and urban renewal. But a lot didn't, and were rotting away anyways. Likewise except for in a few progressive "role model" cities, most urban growth outside of the core is still suburban. The boom in apartments is caused by macroeconomic forces as much as interest in urbanism. Housing market kerploded but the institutional real estate lending environment was more intact, all at a time of shrinking household sizes, weak incomes and consumer spending, etc. And now in healthy cities like Houston there's a bit of a shortage caused by nothing except raw demand due to growth.

 

Also an argument could be made that architectural and social modernism in the 20th century was a weird historical aberration. 

 

My initial reaction is that there is no such thing as "quality urban infill" but I know that is wrong.   They are building some (or what is supposed to be some) everywhere they can around here.   Odd buildings.  They feel spacious when I'm inside them but congested when I'm outside. 

 

 

And there is so much fuss over aesthetics, often at the expense of function.

 

 

 

Something visually cloying is when the pastiche facades on the face of some neo-traditional infill block all line up evenly and have bloated proportions. Individual buildings would have varying floor heights. Whatever economic conditions dictated this form of development are a thing of the past. Even moving away from strict land use regulation and parking minimums I have read that the shape of what's built today works well for developers.

 

Indeed maybe being preoccupied by architectural bits is the whole problem. A traditional city is an organic thing that got sick and died because of external forces. To revive it you would enable some of more desirable forces at work, not create some Disney master plan.

 

Then what you get is super creepy and Truman Show-esque. They filmed that movie in an actual master-planned development.

 

I was around in the 1950s and things were not so wonderful.

 

 

 

It seems some of our politicians seem to want to go back in time, when people were poorer and there was pollution and discrimination and other social ills. Ironic because wasn't that a comparatively optimistic era if nothing else?

 

Trying to revive the past by ignoring it's lessons and values to create some kind of frankenstein could be a theme here

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

<snip>

 

I was around in the 1950s and things were not so wonderful.

 

 

It seems some of our politicians seem to want to go back in time, when people were poorer and there was pollution and discrimination and other social ills. Ironic because wasn't that a comparatively optimistic era if nothing else?

 

Trying to revive the past by ignoring it's lessons and values to create some kind of Frankenstein could be a theme here

 

Most politicians are time-serving poltroons who follow the party line.  I rate them just after litigious lawyers.  That's somewhere considerably below slime-molds.

[The Pennsylvania Turnpike 252]

 

So was your first guess actually Sinkieland? (Code for an actual country)

 

Yes, although this is the first I've heard it referred to as that.

 

 

I like the Lehigh valley for being both suburban and urban within a short travel distance. 1 minute i could be in the middle of Center city allentown and the next minute i'm in whitehall or in the mountains. It's just the feeling of being close to everything. But Philly just has something that the L.V. will never have. Allentown has the skyscrapers, cheesesteaks, and the ballparks, but philly, i don't know, something about it just want's me to move there.

 

I don't generally think of Allentown as falling within the Philly metro area since one has to pass through ruralness to go between the two. But then, it is only an hour away.

 

 

Allentown is technically a satellite city of NYC but it isn't for Philadelphia despite being 40 miles closer to Philly. It only took me 45 minutes to get from Allentown to Philadelphia once taking I-476 and some back streets. 

[AkemiAzula 280]

I have lived in suburban areas for most of my existence. I live in a village now but its more like a suburb on the fringe of countryside now. For some years i lived in a caravan park surrounded by suburbs. Ive never been able to afford a car so trains have been my way since the red hens and jumbos and the glenelg tram etc i have lived in refuges slept in the bush and lived in a city that was quite suburban... Despite the obvious problems my favourite place to live was the bush and less so the refuges. Normal suburban life scares me. Cities... Are strange places. But then again i was homeschooled so... Normality is something i envy but despise. Suburbs seem wrong to me and i cant stand them but they r normal... All i know is i appreciate being within a mile of the countryside

[flatron 83]

I grew up in a small town with 2600 inhabitants that is classified as a "small centre" by the state authorities. (Christaller's Central Places Theory is used here)

This means that there's a primary school and all you need on a daily basis(doctors, bakeries, butcher, grocery store, pharmacy). Lucky as we are, there's a rail connection to the next "middle centre" every two hours, with plans to upgrade to hourly trains. One might call this suburban, technically, it isn't. Everything is within walking distance of course(walking distance meaning 1-2km)

I live 187 km away from the state capital(1.4Millions in the city, 2.6 in the planning region), this means 2h20  by train, 2h by car if you use the autobahn and there's no traffic in the city(+you have to find a parking spot). 

 

I don't understand why anybody would want to drive 4 hours a day just to get to work and back. Most long distance commuters in my area just rent an apartment in the city as well or just move there completely. This way they might only see their family on weekends, but that's usually not that much of a problem, especially as kids will move out anyway as soon as they go to University.