The beautiful suburbs
Trump did another publicly funded campaign speech in the Rose Garden yesterday. He promised to Keep America Racist.
The Democrats in D.C. have been and want to, at a much higher level, abolish our beautiful and successful suburbs by placing far-left Washington bureaucrats in charge of local zoning decisions. They are absolutely determined to eliminate single-family zoning, destroy the value of houses and communities already built, just as they have in Minneapolis and other locations that you read about today. Your home will go down in value and crime rates will rapidly rise.
Oh, gee, I wonder what he’s talking about there. Why would zoning make crime rates go up?
Joe Biden and his bosses from the radical left want to significantly multiply what they’re doing now. And what will be the end result is you will totally destroy the beautiful suburbs. Suburbia will be no longer as we know it. So they wanted to defund and abolish your police and law enforcement while at the same time destroying our great suburbs.
The beautiful suburbs? The “radical left” and their stooge Biden want to destroy our great and beautiful suburbs? What suburbs? Why?
It’s called white flight. It’s real. Trump thinks we need to cling to it.
We’re well past dog whistles at this point. This is holding out a steak and yelling “HERE, DOGGY DOGGY!”
This looks like a trial balloon. Will Americans support this blatantly unconstitutional and illegal action, ignore it, or vigorously resist it? Today it’s Portland. Tomorrow?
My money’s on “this won’t poll well”… vigorous resistance it ain’t, but it’s not gonna help his re-election chances any.
How does one “abolish” a suburb? And what makes a suburb “successful”? (I know, I know, he just throws some words together.)
Catwhisperer, what makes a suburb “successful” is a good ratio of property value to number of children. Property value is maintained by zoning. With high property value, you get rich people living there, and public schools funded by rich people’s property taxes, and a lower rate of public school attendance because rich people don’t have as many kids as poor people and so many rich people send their kids to private schools anyway.
What “abolishes” a suburb is revising the zoning to allow smaller lots, or (god forbid!) apartment buildings, increasing population density and reducing per-unit prices. Cheaper, smaller housing brings a lower ratio of property tax to children. People who are poor or who live in smaller apartments have more children per capita and rarely send them to private school. Also, though this is obviously irrelevant, there are some correlations of poverty to race. Not that making a suburb more “urban” means anything at all besides increasing population density.
The phenomenon as we see it near where I live in an American city is that the near suburbs are full of people who like to talk a lot about fair housing and fair this and that and black lives matter, but if you try to build an apartment building near them they will determine that it just wouldn’t be safe because of, you know, traffic reasons or where are we going to build a new elementary school or something. Black lives matter as long as they stay over across the interstate.
[…] a comment by Papito on The beautiful […]
As an Ecologist, I would have no problem seeing the suburbs disappear. They are an eyesore, and they eat up land.
I grew up in one of those richer, whiter areas Papito describes, though it wasn’t technically a suburb. It sort of became one, though, by growing so rapidly it smashed into the nearby city, and the wealthy of Oklahoma City abandoned the city for the outlying cities during desegregation. The parents in my town almost all sent their kids to public school, because it was an extremely good public school, as good as any of the private schools, because of the high property values and the demographics of the city. It has sprawled almost beyond its limits to grow, bumping into other communities on each side, and eating up agricultural land like a giant blob covering the area.
And being a poor kid in one of those areas? I don’t wish it on anybody, but I will say, I was able to withstand the awfulness enough to get a good education and lift me out of squalor and filth. But I want nothing to do with living in the suburbs, or protecting the suburbs.
This is exactly the argument that was used in the first half of the 20th Century in Toronto. We had an explicitly white supremacist mayor who thought apartment buildings would bring immigrants into the city, so he abolished them. As a result all of our older residential architecture is single-family dwellings that cost millions to buy now. All those lovely old pre-war low- and mid-rise buildings you see in cities like New York and Boston and Chicago don’t exist in Toronto. It’s old Victorian and Edwardian townhouses with front and back lawns sitting right next to shiny new 60-storey condo towers.
Artymorty:
The old concept of the city was of a central business district into which people commuted to do business, and separate industrial areas which were not very attractive places to live and where any housing was cheap to buy or rent and in which only proletarians tended to live.
But as the separate human populations grew, and the typical city expanded and merged with others to form conurbations, commuting by car became arduous. So the inner proletarian areas rapidly became rather trendy and up-market places to live. Meanwhile automation was gobbling up the less-skilled jobs, and the move to international free-trade, non-tariff zones like the EU finished up exporting much of the rest of the jobs to China and India.
The combination of Covid-19 and the internet have planted the idea in a whole lot of minds that the routine urban-suburban commuting is in large part unnecessary: increasing choice enormously. Those who like going frequently to city clubs, bars and live theatre shows can do so easily, as can those who are into specialised sporting activities and such. Those who like to say, grow their own vegetables and keep a few chickens can do so in suburbia. Those who like to live further out and have a pony for their kids can also do so. And modern hi-tech TV sets are making private movie theatres available to the mass of the population by the trainload. (Which is regrettable in a way, because I have fond memories of going to the Saturday matinee and cheering on my favourite heroes in the westerns, as they gave the baddies what-for. Who ever believed that the mediaeval morality play was dead?)
So IMHO it is a matter of maximising choice, not one-size-fits-all. Peoples’ preferences change with time.
Omar, the “old concept of the city?” Really? That concept you refer to is barely a century old, and then only if you count “streetcar suburbs.” The first “automobile suburbs” weren’t until after WWII. I wonder about your perspective, both temporally and spatially. On one hand, it makes me feel terribly old, as I’ve lived through notable social shifts in population and redefinitions of desirable vs. undesirable areas, and on the other, I’ve never lived in a suburb, so I lack your sense of their inevitability.
Before the advent of easy rail travel, the wealthy may have had country estates, but they also had townhouses, where they lived while doing business. Some of the older cities (even some in America!) retain these wealthy urban neighborhoods; in some cases, they’ve gone through a cycle of abandonment, with white flight to the suburbs in the mid twentieth century, and re-gentrification in the late twentieth century.
In this day and age, well to do city-oriented people make very different lifestyle choices: some live in the beautiful townhouses of centuries past, or in tall glassy luxury towers; some live in larger houses in the former “streetcar suburbs,” which have now mostly been incorporated; and some live farther out, in the grassy suburbs, where one has to use a car, but gets a bigger lot in exchange. These choices predate COVID.
One of the changes I’ve seen locally because of COVID is a movement of people with means towards larger houses. It’s one thing to live in a small apartment with your spouse and kids when you’re all at work or school all day, and the city can be your living room; when all of you have nowhere to go, and are home together all day, that apartment looks very different. Some families I know have responded to this by moving out to their vacation homes in the country, and others by buying larger houses.
I do wonder about the permanent effects of COVID on our society. The transition of some office environments to online has seemed remarkably smooth, and I expect some will never go fully back. I wonder whether that will have an effect on residential patterns. I know that for many people the choice of residence isn’t just about internal space and proximity to desirous attractions, but about neighbors and peer groups. I expect that job opportunities will expand for those who live in out-of-the-way areas, but also that people will continue to choose to group themselves residentially by affinity. That may take some gentrification pressure off urban neighborhoods, but increase it on small towns.
Omar @ 9 – this business of “maximising choice” – it sounds nice, but those choices have impacts on the environment and other people and so on. Making the whole thing a matter of maximising choice oversimplifies, for one thing, and treats self-interest as a principle, for another. See also: masks.
Let’s also consider that maximizing choice inevitably leads to the segregation of those with choices from those without choices.
Quite. That’s what I meant by “and other people.” I’ve posted quite a bit over the years about how that works out here in the US – see especially The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein. Those “choices” worked out to black people having zero choice in buying or renting housing, with the result that for generations white people could build up equity by buying a house while black people could not. Some people’s choice becomes other people’s zero choice.
OB:
With all due respect, I did not say “so IMHO it is a matter of maximising choice, except for people other than us WASPs; not one-size-fits-all. Peoples’ preferences change with time, except for non-WASPs, and anyway who gives a damn what they want, one way or the other?” Let me repeat: I did not say that.
All cities have different histories; goes without saying. I grew up in Sydney, in the days.when nobody lived amongst the office blocks of the CBD, which then could rise to the stratospheric height of 6 storeys. But about a mile or so from the very centre of the CBD and you were in the old and working-class part, populated by wharf labourers (stevedores) and their pubs, some of which opened for business at 6 AM to cater for the night shift coming off duty. Another mile or so and eastwards up a hill brought you to the bohemian quarter of King’s Cross, famous for its bars, bordellos and blocks of flats (apartment buildings.) Another mile or so eastwards down the hill brought you to Rushcutter Bay with marinas for the wealthy and their pleasure craft, and its distinctively up-market housing contrasting markedly with a huge jerry-built tin shed known as the Rushcutter Bay Stadium, venue for prize-fights and international rock stars.
Harbourside and more elevated land was sought after by the wealthy, but as the city grew post-WW2 old harbourside fishers’ cottages contrasted starkly with new and trendy steel-and-concrete apartment towers.
On Sundays, thanks to the influence of the churches, all CBDs in Australia became ghost towns. They filmed Neville Shute’s novel On the Beach in Melbourne, shooting crucial scenes in its empty CBD, and one of the stars of that film, Ava Gardner, was quoted in the press as having said “Melbourne is the ideal city, if you are making a film about the end of the world.” Which they were.
Cities in their design and construction follow changes in technology. I once had occasion to visit one of Australia’s literary giants, Dame Mary Gilmore, who died at the age of 97 in 1962, and we stood together on the balcony of her flat in Kings Cross looking down at the busy traffic in Bayswater Road, and she said “you know, I can remember when this was a bullock track.”` She had lived most of her life around King’s Cross, never owning a car, commuting by electric tram, along roads made of wooden blocks (eucalypt hardwood being preferable to cobble stones before macadamisation took over to make cities car-friendly [joke].)
The next big urban transition will be global, and will happen when the fossil carbon runs out, or when Greenland and Antarctica become trendy up-market real estate, the sea having risen by 90 metres or so, flooding every port city in the world. The two are linked, most likely..
Might be a good time to invest in a Venetian gondola. But hurry, while stocks last!
Omar, even if I hadn’t already known you were an Aussie from previous comments, your description of how you think cities grow would have given the game away – it is such a uniquely Australian perspective. I lived in Oz for over eight years, spending the first three years in Adelaide and the rest in Canberra; I also visited Brisbane and Sydney. I know exactly what you mean about ghost towns – Adelaide in particular was deserted after six in the evening and on Sundays. It was weird; I’d never before lived in or visited cities where whole swathes were dedicated to offices and shops, and otherwise uninhabited. The closest analogue is the out-of-town shopping centre, which, like Australian cities are modern and planned constructs. Cities in most of the rest of the world, many of which started as small human settlements which grew into villages, then towns, until, eventually, they merged, or started as small fishing or trading ports which spread out to engulf surrounding settlements, generally consist of homes between and above shops and offices. I have not been in a single city outside Australia which was planned around a central business district – which, by the way, is what CBD stands for in Australia (I’ve not encountered the contraction anywhere else, either, because there appears to be no such thing anywhere else).
Clearly, tigger, there’s a PhD or two in that.
I would say at a guess it has a lot to do with the 1850s gold rushes, when the population of Australia trebled in ten years. It helped businesses I guess if their offices were in walking distance of one another before the advent of urban public transport, and that would have been the fait accompli once it arrived.
A lot of shopkeepers liked to live above their shops, a fact that still applies to some country towns today, and provides a bit of a market for night life. But not like the long tradition of Europe and North America.
Also, streets of mud in wet weather would not have helped in Australian CBDs lacking American-style boardwalks. And horse stables, hitching rails etc would have also been in short supply.
But my impression is that all cities of the world now have clumps of office towers somewhere from pre-internet days.
CBD is common parlance in New Zealand. I’m guessing this was essentially possible and considered desirable because towns and cities were being planned at a time when the very concept of town planning was both new and ‘the thing to do’. The design of our cities is at core very much a function of Victorian English Bureaucracy – both operating remotely and in transplanted form.