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

we've beat this idea to death itt 1xbln times, but there's a diff between "suburb" as someplace near but outside the formal borders of a named city and "suburb" as recently-built very low density freeway-centered development. "suburb" A is not really what pro-urban people are criticizing, a lot of those places are materially indistinguishable from the "real" city.

yeah laurel that hood is really surprisingly lacking in grocery stores, considering that its been pretty middle class for the last couple decades

right - Arlington is more of an urban area than anywhere in 'big city' Jacksonville Florida

xp

oh man Jacksonville.

That city is a 4000-acre parking lot, and the annoying kind with coin-operated meters.

Seriously, max, what IS the deal? There are no stores of any kind out there! No laundromats, no dry cleaning, no groceries, no restaurants, no drugstore, one little hardware store that closes at 6pm, until you get to Fulton (still not much there) or far enough west that it's Clinton Hill-ish.

I might as well live in the suburbs.

p much my conclusion from this thread & others is that everyone should live in college towns

yeah i dont really get it either. i guess its always been a really residential neighborhood but youd think thered at least be like a key foods on fulton or something? lewis is like the main commercial drag and there are what like five stores on it? and three restaurants? and the cafe went out of business

people should live where they want

I want to live on Mars

i think the lesson is, you moved out of the city to escape the assholes, but the assholes followed you, on the internet.

people should all live in new hampshire

I would settle for living in one of the underground cities in Cappadocia. If it's good enough for the Hittites, it's good enough for America!

in fact one of the great things about (middle-class*) city living is buying your groceries the day you want to use them! so that stuff doesnt have to go bad! and you can decide what you want to eat!

pretty sure this can be done in the burbs too?

oh, weird, never realized that *packs up stuff, moves back to suburbs*

hopefully not my suburb

town ain't big enough for the both of us, son

can we drop the grocery talk? it was a pretty lol attempt at a trump card.

*calls real estate agent frantically*

xp: iatee, don't take me seriously. I'm only hoping for lols, not trump cards. I actually believe in living in apartments mixed-use developments and was as recently as this morning fantasizing about developing a high-rise with all that lotto money I'm going to get this weekend. But until then, it's home ownership and making fun of stuck-up city folk.

But also, people should be allowed to like their suburban homes and lawns and nature and sunshine without being called "republicans".

Mars sounds really great until you calculate the posting lag. There would always be new answers on the active thread! You'd never get to actually post.

But also, people should be allowed to like their suburban homes and lawns and nature and sunshine without being called "republicans".

I am sure the Republicans who like their suburban homes and lawns and nature and sunshine would be very annoyed with this statement.

Funny how it gets turned into people having "incorrect" desires rather than cities being "incorrect" for not being able to address those desires.

brb, gotta go tell henry that he has to go to the glue factory because the mean people on the internet said we shouldnt have a lawn

You could just let him do his business right there on the floor like cityfolk do.

oh yay thread is reactionary again i.e. granny dainger is here

it's a pretty shitty thread anyway. happy 9/11 everyone

you must be from the suburbs

very sensitive

How about instead of reading "incorrect" desires we read this as "community features we feel are detrimental or undesirable." I've had conversations with people where they see nothing wrong with having no walkable resources, feel a row of big box stores next to the freeway makes a lot of sense, and so on. I'd say a lot of people here bring a lot of opinions and experiences to the table that make these seem detrimental, but it's condescending to assume others are idiots or have an entire swath of political ideas you dislike because they accept these things.

a lot of people have dogs in the city fyi

also can i just be clear, i dont think anyone is "correct" or "incorrect" for their "desires," i just think that the human race will die if we dont all move to new hampshire

xp: and they never pick up after them!

there are dogs that need lots of room and constant exercise fyi

http://s3-ak.buzzfed.com/static/imagebuzz/web02/2010/1/7/22/window-horse-20723-1262921599-62.jpg

like yeah you could have a siberian husky in the city, if you wanted to own a miserable dog i suppose

lock thread after PP's horse picture

if you wanna ride

Ugh yeah I had a neighbor at our apartment in Virginia who had TWO great big huskies in his apartment. It was like, "WTF is wrong dude buy a pug or bichon or some other toy breed."

i dunno i see a lot big dogs, they seem p happy, obv i am not a dog shrink or whatever, i probably wouldnt have a dog in the city, "we need to take care of dogs" is a pretty bad reason to allow the rapid extinction of the human race tho

maybe theres a way we could all share like a couple big lawns and some trees and nature shit that the dogs could also use

dunno just spitballin here

But also, people should be allowed to like their suburban homes and lawns and nature and sunshine without being called "republicans".
--kkvgz

again there's this idea that somewhere I said "everyone who lives in or moves to the burbs today is a white republican." that's pretty obviously false tho it's funny that your arguments against it are like 'Arlington va!' I think a fairly large % people move/live in the suburbs because there simply aren't affordable/viable alternatives. that's not due a law of nature, it's due to political decisions over generations and path dependency and, ultimately, a certain brand of American libertarianism.

also 'people in suburbs just love nature so much they can't live without it' is like 'animal lovers just love animals so much that they can't help eating them.' if you love nature, you care more about your effects on it than your proximity to it. lawns are not nature, they're a form of pseudo nature that has an incredibly destructive effect on the natural world.

due to*

Dude, I was talking about proximity to like state parks and shit.

I am not living in a suburb that is next to shit

Sorry we destroyed the natural world.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3130/2647700969_2c207ef0c8_z.jpg