You seem to be confused. The article is saying that American suburbs are particularly poorly designed, not that suburbs as a general rule are terrible.
Here is Gröbenzell, a suburb just west of Munich that's surrounded by farmland: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Gr%C3%B6benzell,+Germany/@...
In the states, such a suburb would be super-low-density and car-dominated, with all the negative features the author describes. There in Germany, Gröbenzell actually has a population density 30% higher than Seattle, and the whole town is within easy walking or biking distance of an S-Bahn station that gets you to the center of Munich in 20 minutes.
It's possible to have suburban towns that are still walkable, that still allow kids some measure of independence, that do not kill any sense of place. In the US, we've just chosen not to create them.
His beautiful wooden house stands on ten times the area as mine, with a very nice garden and ample parking space. It looks very nice. But my concrete/brick house is bigger inside, and much better constructed. Parking space for visitors can be an issue with me.
Our kids go to school by bike. His kids can't. Although the school is not far, biking is too unsafe. They go by bus. The school even closes when there is snow, because that would make even the bus too unsafe!
Our kids play in the street with their friends, they walk up to each others houses spontaneously when they want to play. My friends' kids had fewer friends, had to set playdates, and played more online.
The conversation we had confirmed many more things from the article.
The article brings up many good points, but the suburb outlined in the article describes a very specific kind. Having lived in a metropolitan US area for 19 years, I relish the lack of noise, the extra space (1 acre) and suburban life in general.
PS It's a little disingenuous to mention the bus/snow situation. Snow days here (5 max) are rare and typically well-warranted. You really cannot compare a 5cm "snowstorm" in The Netherlands with the 1+ feet (40cm) that fell overnight last winter.
Still, if your house is on an acre of area, that must have consequences. It makes infrastructure more expensive and increases distances. Do the roads in your neighborhood have walkways? How many college/middle schools can your kids choose from? Is there community life / sports clubs / shopping / restaurants other than pizza and burgers reachable without car?
I mentioned the bus/snow situation because my friend told me the school had closed for something like 20 days last year and had to extend classes into summer to make up the time. And both of us have fond memories biking to school for 10km in -admittedly Dutch- snowstorms, having fun. The US attitude towards risk still feels silly to me.
Roads do have more potholes than I'd like, indeed expensive to fix/maintain. We do have walkways (this is not Atlanta/Midwest). One middle school, one high school, colleges are elsewhere (ie plenty). Loads of community/sports stuff (too much). Shopping nearby, but some requires a car (you get used to it). Note: it's actually a myth that the burbs have bad food (at least in relatively wealthy towns on the East Coast). Better than anything offered in my old home town in Holland (I do miss my 'patatje oorlog'). Obviously happy as a clam here. Don't think I could ever get used to living right next to my neighbors again ('rijtjeshuis')
Totally agree with you on the perception of risk. It's a shame. It wasn't always like that. I blame cell phones and helicopter parents.
PS I don't miss biking 10km in my rain suit (regenpak) Gezamenlijk afzien? ;-)
But if you relax the public transportation constraint, I agree: the list of Chicago suburbs that defy most of the characterizations in this post is pretty large.
We also have a lot of walkable, tree-lined suburbs without huge setbacks and, with the exception of blighted commercial drags like Butterfield and Roosevelt, few of the traffic setbacks and parking lot hells that this post talks about.
Population density doesn't always tell the whole story. Portland, OR has a lower population density than Beaverton (one of the surrounding cities that is basically a suburb).
As for safe streets and good schools, it's a product of segregationist urban planning, not any intrinsic qualities of cities versus suburbs. We don't build public housing out in the suburbs, we do it in the cities. Our lack of transit makes it impossible for poor people to drive around in the suburbs. So our city schools are 90% low-income and have the problems that come with concentrated poverty.
Note that in places like Paris, the situation is reversed. Rich people live in the city (or out in the country). The suburbs are where the poor are herded into ghettos.
You are correct. The average American city dweller now experiences a lower crime rate than in suburbia. (That is an average, obviously some cities are dangerous and some suburbs are very safe.)
> Rich people live in the city
Yes, this is the long-run, natural state of cities. It's why they exist in the first place. They are where economic activity is most concentrated.
American has had a weird 60 years where we inverted that situation, but it is already beginning to revert back to historically normal.
SUVs feel safer, and they're sold as a safe choice - even though in practice they're dangerous cars.
In the same way, suburbia has always been sold as a safe option, even though politically, culturally, socially, and ecologically, the effects are devastating.
Nothing about the south side of Chicago being "risky" is an inherent result of being in a city.
In America, any region with a population the order of 100k or less is basically a shopping area surrounded by suburbs. The same is not true in Europe.
In Europe, you can definitely find walkable, breathable, friendly cities while still living in an area that is safer than (and has a smaller population than) the typical Chicago suburban area.
A large proportion of the commuter belt of London, Paris, Marseilles, Lyon, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Brussels, Rome, etc. are places like that, some nicer and some more depressing, but definitely suburbs that exist mainly to house people who commute in to the city.
It's a density issue, at heart. Any US "city" (if it should be called that) of 100K-500K occupies 10x-20x the surface area that it would in most parts of the world, removing much of the cohesion that leads us to call places cities or towns in the first place.
In response, I started compiling a list, but then I realised I can't think of a counterexample. "Any" might be just about right. Do you know of one?
I'm thinking of places like Indianapolis, Fairfax, Macon (GA), almost all college towns I've been to...
Your argument is that mid-sized US cities with densities comparable to European cities are rare, and that this causes pathology. That sounds intuitively defensible, because America definitely has more space to play with for its cities than Europe. But let's try to be specific.
What's a model European city, so we can compare its density to some set of American cities?
However, as usual, 90% of the population doesn't live in that tiny core, but instead in the same kind of low-density layout one can find anywhere in America. While I haven't been to Ann Arbor since grade six or so, my recollection is that it's similar; wonderful UMich campus, nice downtown, but most of the Ann Arbor-Ypsilanti area? Same old automobile folk traditions. Am I misremembering?
Re: comparing density --
Density is certainly not the only variable. In my article, I made the point about how proximity/adjacency != walking accessibility. That seems relevant, too. It's probably quite possible to build a place with a decently high density where a car is still required to go anywhere, or a relatively low-density but profoundly pedestrian-friendly hamlet.
Saline and Ypsi are suburbs of Ann Arbor.
Ann Arbor itself is mostly walkable, tree-lined, mixed-use, and connected by public transportation.
More than 90% of the population of Ann Arbor lives in Ann Arbor and not Ypsi or Saline. :)
What are the rest of the variables? I'd like to drive to specificity. If there's a set of US midsized cities that defies your characterizations, maybe there's something interesting that ties them together.
I'm certainly not going to deny that there are crappy cities!
And, I just gave you a specific example that isn't "one mixed use sounding shopping strip with attached condos".
The train to Amsterdam is better than the train to Chicago too (cheaper, faster, more frequent).
It's a bigger city than Ann Arbor, with about twice the density.
I think there are probably enough differences in land use planning that you won't quite be able to have a model city for Europe.
The point of that was that it is connected to a rail network in a way that doesn't exist in Michigan.
Also, when I lived in Ann Arbor, we never cared about going to Detroit itself.
It's a little unfair to compare that particular run to the entire state of Michigan, which would be the 20th largest country in Europe if admitted to the EU, just behind Iceland and ahead of Hungary.
(we're both making some edits)
I think the higher density is part of why Europe seems to have more nice cities though. I actually kind of joked about that while I was there, that the publicly owned land in Michigan is roughly the size of the Netherlands (the national and state forests).
With high density, if you "need" cityscape you can just build a rail to where it makes sense to have the city.
I think there's a handful of American cities with good urbanism, where as Europe has presumably thousands.
A small, late 1800's built, pedestrian friendly town in a rural county, and later after moving to another house, in the countryside in the same county. In both places, there was a lot of economic diversity. Kids who lived in trailers socialized and spent the nights out with kids who lived in old houses, and vice versa.
Something I've noticed about people like you whose entire childhood was spent in the typical suburbs of the USA: You associate these awful places and their awful traits with "safety".
"Safe" streets, "safe" parks, "decent" schools: As a person whose raised my kids in an urban environment, the idea that these weren't available (without driving) in our location is a myth that only burbs raised people buy into.
Two years ago I moved to a part of the country (for a job) that has no urban center nearby. I now live in a subdivision. Never again. The neighbors don't interact with, let alone socialize with each other. The streets are vacant, because nobody walks because why would you walk to nowhere. Vacant streets means kids by themselves have no eyeballs on them, so parents don't feel comfortable letting them explore.
The most evil part of it all is the economic segregation. My kids currently go to school with other upper middle class kids. Nobody lives in trailers in their school, or even apartments. No economic diversity translates to minimal racial diversity. It's terrible.
I'm moving away from here in a few months, and I'll never live in one of these shitholes ever again. You can find nice suburbs that aren't laid out in pedestrian hateful designs like the typical ones you see these days.
That's by design. The suburbs have many laws built to enforce 1950s racial segregation without mentioning race. E.g. your house must be large by law, meaning the poor are entirely excluded. Streets must be built for cars first, then people, because the poor can't afford cars.
We could easily solve this by removing the 1950s zoning laws as the poor would not move far, housing prices would be lower, and more walkable development would occur.
And because it's the only thing affordable. Which does not get mentioned enough.
I would love to put my family in a walkable urban environment. But I don't have a $500k+ housing budget, so anything even remotely urban is completely out of the question, unless it's in the heart of some gangland territory somewhere.
Amusingly, this is often cited as evidence of suburbia's unique capacity to provide "affordable housing". Scarce things are unaffordable. Who knew!
Yes, but people are making their decision based on out-of-date facts. Because in the United States in 2016, mortality risk goes down as population density goes up, and city kids are statistically safer.
The #1 killer of children in US is car accidents. Guess who gets in dramatically less car accidents? City kids who don't need to ride in cars so much.
The #2 killer of children in the US is guns, and child gun deaths are higher outside the cities, on average. People often don't believe this, but it should be obvious when you pause and consider where American gun culture is centered. It's not in the big cities.
Suicide and substance abuse rates are also lower in the cities. This may be caused by the many small towns with major meth and opioid epidemics pulling down the statistics.
(All of this depends on comparing apples-to-apples: being poor makes a bigger difference than the urban vs rural split, so you need to consider people at the same socioeconomic level.)
Here are the top 3 by age group: https://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/001915.htm
And as your link shows, "accidental death" is the #1 overall cause of death for children.
So it's the #2 category of the #1 category of risk.
"Safety in Numbers: Are Major Cities the Safest Places in the United States?" by Myers et al, Annals of Emergency Medicine
If a physical injury is to lead to death, having somebody else around to find you and provide aid / get you to a hospital is going to be less likely the more spread out people are.
Conversely, I feel grateful that my parents chose to raise me in a dense urban area, instead of moving out to some suburban hellhole in an attempt to give me a bubble-wrapped existence.
I mostly took care of my own transportation to and from public school from the age of 10 onward (walking or public transit), and was never robbed, assaulted, kidnapped, conscripted into a gang, or whatever it is that suburbanites imagine happens to children in urban environments. I'm not a drug addict, I don't have a criminal record, and I'm gainfully employed.
I would never, ever raise a child in a suburb unless I had to for financial reasons.
The one thing that dozens of nationalities could all agree on was their presumption that their ten year-olds can get home from school and fend for themselves for a few hours. Everybody knew everybody (quite literally), there were always adults out in the enclosed backyard, and there were periodic security patrols. I could think of few safer places to leave a child home alone. Until the harassment from the police started, it would have never occurred to any of us that this constitutes child neglect.
Just to be closer to some nice restaurants? No thanks. my suburban life is quite and close to starbucks, Im satisfied.
Yes, you noticed that I was addressing something in your comment rather than the OP, good job on noticing the obvious.
> which detests the option of people living in suburbs.
He does not, in fact, detest the option of people living in suburbs. He detests American suburban design. I'm sure he would love to live in a more European-style suburb, but in most of America (and especially somewhere like Atlanta) they don't even exist.
> But you can't also then turn around and argue for cities that have massively subsidized transit systems that themselves, despite the massive subsidies, are breaking down and crappy.
Wow, way to completely misunderstand both transit and sprawly American suburbs. Here, let me explain it to you:
Transit is subsidized, yes. So are roads built for cars, so are sidewalks and bike lanes. Every form of transport is paid for by taxes.
Property taxes are ostensibly designed to support the extra services and infrastructure that more people and businesses require. If the replacement cost of infrastructure for a new suburban development is greater than the amount of tax revenue those suburbs bring in, when it comes time to replace that stuff, the city will go into the red. Meaning, either it draws the revenue from somewhere else, likely the more economically productive urban core (or even more development, furthering the problem), or it goes bankrupt. That's not good!
Actually it appears I can't edit my comment anymore.
Unless you're citing studies that explicitly show suburbia results in better outcomes for children than being raised in urban environments ceteris paribus, it seems like the only argument you're producing here is your own lack of perspective and being unable to venture outside of personal anecdotal experience.
Suburbs are extremely exclusionary (to the point of being outright xenophobic), inefficient, and in most cases outright ugly, populated by cheap, run of the mill outdated construction from the pre 1977 era, when people burned tons of oil to heat the cardboard boxes that are most of the American 'burbs.
Which countries are these?
Does Russia not have them or something?
Yes, it is part of parental responsibility to provide an environment stimulating enough that vandalism, arson, or drugs aren't an attractive option.
This all used to be easily achievable in urban neighborhoods. The elephant in the room people don't want to acknowledge is that suburbia has mostly been a way to flee from and exclude social decay. This is why people freak out about public transit to a lot of neighborhoods. The requirement of multiple car ownership in an area is a deliberately constructed mechanism for excluding lower socio-economic people.
If you shut down the public school systems and made all schools private with total freedom to deny any student entry, and you empowered a very aggressive police force (lots of stop and frisk, aggressively enforced vagrancy laws), then you'd see far more urban gentrification.
This is why I bought in a socially conservative neighborhood: people implicitly police one another into basic civic decency, and I'd much rather suffer an occasional scolding from a few overzealous busybodies than bear the burden of intergenerational poverty and crime. Sure, I may need to drive a bit to find interesting shopping and entertainment options, but at the end of the day if I'm going to make a commitment into an asset as big and un-diversified as a 30 year mortgage, I'd want just about every "negative" the author brings up. And if I'm going to get the fury from HN for saying it, so be it. I'm happy to give up grime, drug trafficking, and violence for an internet tongue lashing.
New York city in recent years has had about 350 homicides and 250 traffic deaths (600 total). The state of Virginia, which has the same population (8m people), has 700 traffic deaths and 300-350 homicides. In other words, you're almost twice as likely to die in Virginia (a mostly suburban and rural state), than in the densest city in the country.
When was the last time you heard about a middle class white kid getting shot in the inner city? How often do you hear about teenagers dying in car accidents in your "safe" suburb?
This statement assumes that if you did not make the choice that you have you would be assured to have these things happening right outside your door.
It does not necessarily mean that these are "good" things just because someone thinks that they are good things either though.
Well, yes. And you, too, can have a blog!
Well, sure! Anyone would be happy to give up those things; me too! I don't know a person who would say, "I would like to live amidst grime, drug trafficking and violence, please."
... but it's a bizarre non sequitur, unless you're just grossly misinformed about how urban life works.
It's far from any one thing.
PS: And if you want to go far afield reduced threat of nuclear war making city's a viable place for your population.
Can you expand on that statement?
Do you imply bullets (as in higher prices and gun control) when you refer to Lead or literally the reduction of the metal Lead in paint, etc.
And how is it linked to violence?
One quick example, claiming cities in the 1920s that switched to lead pipes saw ~25% increase in homicides vs those that didn't. http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/jfeigenbaum/files/feigenbau...
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure...
It's not actually a remotely mainstream view among any sort of scientist. However, it has a lot of currency among left-of-center people uncomfortable with the legacy of urban renewal (aka "bulldoze functional poor neighborhoods and stuff everyone in a housing project, then be surprised that things go badly") and the race-baiting nature of "tough on crime" measures that both parties adopted.
IMO, scale is not that important as the preverbial straw that broke the camels back is important, but so are all the others that get to that point. A leaning disability on it's own might not lead to violence, but it does reduce people's options even further.
PS: Mercury was also known to have neuron toxic effects. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_hatter_disease. However, lead is more of an issue at developmental stages. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_poisoning
I accept it's not my specialty, but when you have a well known and reasonable method of action and supporting research it's a little harder to just dismiss.
Unless you mean that in the most narrow terms, as in literally just popularity.
That's not to say it's going to win as the only explanation, just that it needs to be disproven not ignored.
Clearly, violence in communities are multi-faceted topic that cannot be easily explained by something so simple as Lead. However, it might be a possible contributor.
That being said, I do agree with you that the tactics of destroying communities and creating housing projects was clearly a novel idea with terrible implementations and less then desirable outcomes. I work with a lot of folk from housing projects and I've met some really smart people who, without a life line[0], will never get out of poverty. It's a shame really - just by law of averages, politicians should realize that some of the housing projects are harboring brilliant individuals that will never be able to contribute to society within their full potential.
My network tech is from Gun Hill Road in The Bronx, which has an incredibly high crime rate but he can take an engine apart, then back together, within some impressive amount of time judge by Local246[1] (Mechanics Union in NYC). In reality, he really shouldn't be working in our company but in some swanky car modifications shop but they won't hire him based on many different factors. Really, a shame.
[0] - I'm implying that someone would have to hire them to let an individual prove themselves.
[1] - http://nyclocal246.org/
Yes, lead might be a contributing factor in the Boomer crime wave - it might be proven, one day. But the laymen pushing the hypothesis start out with this is THE explanation! and then retreat to you can't PROVE it doesn't have an effect!. This is classic behavior by supporters of psuedo-science.
However I did also flag that they hadn't considered video gaming as an alternative possibility (but that's just a private hypothesis of mine). Certainly not fringe science though.
No, that's not why modern sprawling suburbia exists. For most of American history, cities have been home to the middle class and wealthy. Not having to travel far for work or entertainment is a luxury, and middle class and wealthy Americans took advantage of it just like their world counterparts. The Bronx, for instance, was full of middle class families.
However, unlike many parts of the world, America had a terrible race problem. What do you do if you're a racist white American who holds that blacks are inferior, criminals, and going to rape your daughters after smoking the devil's weed? You enact legal prohibitions against them, of course. Squeeze them into one part of the city full of concentrated poverty.
But then courts started overturning legal prohibitions against minorities as attitudes against them improved. Schools were integrated. You even might have to work along side them. That's scary to racists who believed they were all criminals.
It's clear that racist covenants were on their way out, so directly mentioning race wasn't a good enough solution. But you still want race-based results. What do we do? Incomes amongst whites are higher today, and that was true back in the day. We can exploit that to keep blacks out, and as a bonus we can keep out the poor in general.
But we can't just slap up a 'no poors allowed' sign; that would be bad PR. What can we do?
Wait, I know! We can make it illegal to build housing that would be affordable for the poor. Since the poor are less likely to drive, we can also legally force all houses and businesses to cater to cars. If we couple that with laws that make it so our yards are big, and that houses, businesses, schools, etc. are all not near each other, then we can make it so that the poor can never afford these areas.
The beauty of this strategy is it allows co-opting non-racists. You're building the city of the future, as utopian 1950s urban planners thought. A world where no one has to walk because magical cars will save us from all social ills. Good schools, magically no traffic on the way to work, more space, who would be against that?
All we have to do is demolish large portions of urban neighborhoods, enact very restrictive zoning laws that exclude the poor and minorities, and then spend trillions (in current dollars) to build the interstates to make it all work.
Yeah, we'll wreck the environment, kill off passenger rail and public transit, cause urban blight, reduce economic growth, and drastically increase the price of housing (although that would take a generation or two to make it so the young couldn't afford housing, by which time we'll own housing anyways so that we can profit from that explosive housing price growth), but we'll finally never have to see a person with more melanin than us. It'll be great!
And that's how sprawling suburbs in America came about. There are harsh laws that enforce it, as otherwise it is not economical. Even just the laws that require free parking to be provided greatly increase the cost of construction and make many areas impossible to build in.
Yes, even Houston, the magical land without zoning (but many laws that are part of other cities' zoning codes, like minimum lot sizes, setbacks, parking requirements, etc.) has this. Even big cities like NYC, SF, Chicago, and DC got in on the utopian 50s vision.
You name your American city or town, and I will find the laws the force sprawling if they are online (not all towns have their zoning codes online). I can discuss at length the various enforcement mechanisms.
People from other cities tend to complain about the local of zoning. Zoned cities usually seem very organized and lack the funky house-business-house layout that Houston has. I prefer the lack of zoning, but it isn't for everyone.
Houston will never be Manhattan, but it could be way better.
German urban areas tend to barely have any road traffic for the density since almost nobody owns a car, a quiet train that passes by once in a while and most things closing at 8pm latest. Need some medicine? The pharmacy is a 5 minute walk away. Board the metro in another 5 minute walk, get to work in 20m. There are barely any homeless or poop on the streets for the most part because they are actually put in social housing and programs (or jail) if the police find them doing that.
You tend to have about 10 square miles of urban area, with 7 story buildings as far as the eye can see and then a sudden drop off into small villages that are everywhere. You can rent or buy large 5 room 2000sqft apartments in these places and actually raise the typical 2.5 kid household in them. In the center of the block there are little common parks with a playground for small kids to play.
If you want your car and SFH lifestyle, the entire city is then surrounded by wooded areas with small villages that are everywhere. You can live in a small village and drive into work into the city about 30m away for fairly cheap. The villages themselves have small urban centers you can then walk into. And some of them have trains, so you can just take the train into the city if you want.
My experience is only with Germany, but I'm guessing there are many other places such as Barcelona, Italy or the UK that is designed like this.
Everything closes at 8pm? Jesus, I thought that silicon valley was bad, just 'cause it is hard to get a decent meal after 10pm.
Experience: Living in a place that was right above a bar, a 7-11 and in front of a train.
Also the sidewalks are huge, they are as big as a lane of traffic. As a result cafes and such can easily have comfortable outdoor seating. And because everything is first floor businesses, there are a ton of cafes in a 10 minute radius. You could probably visit a new one every day. Compared to my current place in the usa where I have to walk a few blocks to get to the 'business road', where there is no apartments above the businesses. Not all places are as business dense, but there isn't as much stopping it than the USA lets say.
But yes, things close earlier in europe in general.
It's not a fancy building, either; the construction is typical of the late '80s, early '90s, I think, aside from the third pane of glass, which I think was a retrofit.
I wonder where I was living then, since I've lived in several urbanized parts of the U.S., where I walked or took public transportation everywhere, but have never lived in either of those two cities. :-)
Fast forward to now, and I'm right back in the 'burbs, in a house where my kids have access to safe streets, parks, and decent schools. I realize now that it was never my parents' responsibility to raise me in a place I would find interesting, but to give me the best possible start in life they could. If I can give my kids a similar start, I hope they can safely reach the age where they can go off and experience the adventure of the big cities and abroad when they're ready, just like I did.