People Who Live In Suburbs: Classy, Icky, or Dudes?

i might be wrong here but i am kind of thinking that you live in one of the gargantua cities in the us and are taking that experience and extrapolating it to the rest of the country, which is just not accurate. xpost

DUDE, I just said that URBAN residents I know predominately commute TO the suburbs. are you even reading anything I write?

yes and I wasn't disagreeing with that either?

A lot of people in cities drive cars, too.

yes and I am even more so opposed to those people!

In other words according to your model in my circle of peeps, people in the city should be penalized for the externalities of commuting to the suburbs because they could choose to live there thus cutting their transportation costs.

yes

why not

i mean if you want to fix this obv dealing with ways to increase the cost of car ownership is the answer, not some bizarre suburb sin tax.

In other words according to your model in my circle of peeps, people in the city should be penalized for the externalities of commuting to the suburbs because they could choose to live there thus cutting their transportation costs.

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― Adolf Hipster (jjjusten), Wednesday, June 9, 2010 9:33 AM Bookmark

...but people who do live in suburbs should be penalized for their externalities whether they work near where they live or not.

anyone i've known who lived in the suburbs but worked in the city took the train to work. you'd be insane to drive. (haha as a kid I basically never saw my dad during the week, cause he chose to drive his 25ish mile commute to the city, but couldn't handle rush hours so worked the 3pm-11pm shift. crazy!)

DUDE, I just said that URBAN residents I know predominately commute TO the suburbs.

well, this still falls under the "problem with suburbs" tbh. living in one, working in the other, driving one way or the other doesn't really matter

people who live near where they work create fewer externalities...what is complicated about this idea?

increasing density in areas with access to nearby amenities

This is interesting because...it seems like another way of saying, "Make areas with access to Stuff be more like cities." Which is fine, it's great! but you're basically admitting that the high-pop-den urban model is more desirable on a human scale.

Also, a lot a lot-lot-lot of residential areas have ZERO access to amenities. You'd have to CREATE the amenities where they didn't exist before. Do you...use govt money, tax concessions, whatever, to promote developing these businesses?

^

people who live near where they work create fewer externalities...what is complicated about this idea?

― iatee, Wednesday, June 9, 2010 9:36 AM Bookmark

Nothing at all. You only seem to grasp it though when it applies to city dwellers.

Adding sidewalks to areas that have none, bike lanes, creating mass transit, increasing density in areas with access to nearby amenities, I'm sure other stuff I'm not thinking of.

^yes. Plus, mixed-use areas rather than ginormous tract of houses, then ginormous office park, then ginormous shopping complex.

And jj, although your house and your nabe and your life sound perfectly charming and I pretty much want them all, you are taking the perfection of YOUR suburban-by-some-definition life and using it to defend things just as generalized as any of the champions of cities may be doing on this thread.

Nothing at all. You only seem to grasp it though when it applies to city dwellers.

no, it's just much more likely to be the case with them because they live in an environment suited for it, or near public transit.

ok so at this point i think iatee is arguing that people who commute to their suburban job out of the city are in fact living in a one person suburb that orbits around them.

waht

as much as i apreesh the "hey ppl in suburbs aren't JUST commuting to cities" sentiment the fact that fucktons of people do just this remains.

have there been any studies/proposals/etc. for creating environmentally sustainable models of living in outer-ring suburbs as they are understood in the u.s.? because i would like to read those.

This is interesting because...it seems like another way of saying, "Make areas with access to Stuff be more like cities." Which is fine, it's great! but you're basically admitting that the high-pop-den urban model is more desirable on a human scale.

Did I ever say otherwise?

Also, a lot a lot-lot-lot of residential areas have ZERO access to amenities. You'd have to CREATE the amenities where they didn't exist before. Do you...use govt money, tax concessions, whatever, to promote developing these businesses?

― the soul of the avocado escapes as soon as you open it (Laurel), Wednesday, June 9, 2010 Suggest Ban Permalink
9:37 AM Bookmark

It wouldn't be perfect, but a lot of this could be handled with simple zoning changes. One of the problems with suburban planning is the hard seperation of land use into seperate commercial and residential areas. Allowing some commercial or (preferably) mixed-use development into areas where only residential use exists could incrementally make those spaces more livable.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/48/107880025_1a2b75d75a.jpg

reposting this because i think its an impt piece of data, it's generalizble to say that suburban space is more energy-inefficient and i think that's all iatee has been getting at

Or what Granny said.

xp yeah exactly--is there any model that refutes or mitigates this?

bison, I think you are saying the opposite of what you mean?

and nah laurel, im not generalizing at all about what other suburbs are like, and i wouldnt be caught dead living in some that are around here. i just think that it bears mentioning that the preconceptions about "suburbs" getting tossed around on this thread are a little bizarre. some suburbs suck. so do some cities. some rural areas are awesome. some are not.

Re redding-up the suburbs: Sidewalks and bike lanes are USELESS in parts of the country where the temperature is below freezing for half of the year, there could be several feet of snow on the ground, and everything you might want to buy or do is 5-50 miles from home. I gotta figure this is most of the northern US, from east to west?

Rev: Good, this is what I was thinking/getting at. However, the next hurdle seems like the fact that people who live in the burbs are unlikely to vote for or allow those zoning changes because none of them want to live near business or places/services that will gather groups of (possibly undesirable, possibly noisy, etc) people together. Should the municipality make the changes over their heads? Go on a campaign to show people the benefits and hope they're open to changing their minds?

xxpost for clarity i shouldve have said less energy efficient than more inefficient?

oh never mind, I misread your post

think of something like the mortgage income tax deduction or 1st time home buyer credit -- there's a lot of research indicating that it doesn't really encourage more home ownership; it encourages people who already would have bought a house to buy a bigger one, and therefore encourages builders to build bigger houses.

it's a government expenditure that super-sizes houses, along with (maybe even instead of) its intended effect: easing home-ownership and allowing more people to enter the middle class.

it doesn't seem like much, but you multiply it over a whole nation and it adds up: larger houses, more heating and cooling, more upkeep roads between them, more driving between them. it's a classic case of the government paying for the "wrong" thing

i don't get a break from the gov't on my rent, so what gives? (i might from the state i live in, but my income is too high)

It's a very old debate.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51lVkm%2B0uPL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

Alas, the problem was tackled much earlier:

http://www.allingtonbooks.com/allington/images/items/000028.jpg

the fact that people who live in the burbs are unlikely to vote for or allow those zoning changes because none of them want to live near business or places/services that will gather groups of (possibly undesirable, possibly noisy, etc) people together.

why exactly is this an assumption? this seems like strawmanning of the highest degree

and nah laurel, im not generalizing at all about what other suburbs are like, and i wouldnt be caught dead living in some that are around here. i just think that it bears mentioning that the preconceptions about "suburbs" getting tossed around on this thread are a little bizarre. some suburbs suck. so do some cities. some rural areas are awesome. some are not.

I mean I think you guys are just failing to see how I'm using the word suburb, (in the suburban vs. urban sense, and not in any sense related to the size, political border or location of a city) - your examples of 'suburbs that are actually nice!' are actually just suburbs that are not very suburban by this definition, and well...are almost by definition the opposite of the things I dislike about 'suburbs'.

Re redding-up the suburbs: Sidewalks and bike lanes are USELESS in parts of the country where the temperature is below freezing for half of the year, there could be several feet of snow on the ground, and everything you might want to buy or do is 5-50 miles from home. I gotta figure this is most of the northern US, from east to west?

Uh, not exactly. It snows about 2 days a year in the PNW. I hadn't taken the less temparate climates of other parts of the country into account tho.

"The fact that" usually signals the unfurling of an opinion.

brian setzer has a condo by where i work in mpls. i bet that shit cost a fortune

I admit I only read like one-third of A Pattern Language before I gave it to my little brother for Christmas while he was in arch school. So I don't know shit about shit, obviously.

as it pertains to externalities, if you've got newly developed residential communities that explodes to such an extent that the freeway that feeds it can no longer manage the flow of traffic, the denizens of that suburb do not internalize the full cost of constructing expansion of that freeway.

xpost to add to goole's pts

Re redding-up the suburbs: Sidewalks and bike lanes are USELESS in parts of the country where the temperature is below freezing for half of the year, there could be several feet of snow on the ground, and everything you might want to buy or do is 5-50 miles from home. I gotta figure this is most of the northern US, from east to west?

that totally fucking false! minneapolis has lots of bike lanes and its a big reason why there's great numbers of bikers here.

i've been biking to work about 3 times a week and bike lanes make that possible.

This whole discussion reminds me of a running (friendly) argument we've been having with friends. A couple years ago my wife and I turned into (apparently, according to this thread) worthless, boring fucks when we had the chance to buy a house in the suburbs. Now, this is where our argument comes in. Our house is literally four blocks from the Chicago city line and we live in a suburb that is pretty much at times an extension of the city - shared public transportation, all of that. So friends of ours started calling us "fucking suburbanites" all the time, but we found that kind of hilarious since they live in the city - but only a total of twelve blocks south of us, in a neighborhood that really isn't much different from ours (same tightly packed houses, garages on alleys, etc.). Its just kind of funny to see how hard and fast people draw these lines.

Do you...use govt money, tax concessions, whatever, to promote developing these businesses?

Start w/zoning. Suburbs were very often founded w/restrictions on commercial lots and minimum size to insure single family middle-class homes.

Hey, back off, all of you alligators. You only have to read through yesterday's discussion itt to see plenty of evidence of people not wanting the outside world to intrude on their residential idyll and the American dream of perfect privacy, perfect quiet, perfect kingship of your own domain. And also plenty of people commenting that the dislikeable things about cities are their noise and congestion -- and at the same time, there's general agreement that one way to fix up and possibly save suburbia is to increase population density AND the number of places for people to gather for activities and/or services...which is going to lead to exactly what made people with a certain mindset MOVE to the suburbs in the first place.

I might not have pretty graphs or studies to quote to back it up, but I hardly manufactured it out of whole straw.

your friends sound kinda dickish tbh

xpost

much of political nyc and la are absolutely 'suburban' - so yeah, city borders lines are generally meaningless from this POV

xp

sorry for using the correct definition of "suburb" and not your personal, negative-connatation-already-included definition

yeah the govt home owner subsidies are some bullshit

that totally fucking false! minneapolis has lots of bike lanes and its a big reason why there's great numbers of bikers here.

Oh yeah, I forgot you fuckers got voted #1 biking city ahead of use when we have way more bicyclists than you. Grrrr! Anger!

ahead of us*

sorry for using the correct definition of "suburb" and not your personal, negative-connatation-already-included definition

there is no 'correct definition of suburb' ffs