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

serious question for iatee - if New Richmond, WI (small town picked at random btw) fits what Granny just described up there, is that still a problem, and if so, why?

no

GD, my guess is that even some of the people who used the epithet "Boringbrook" w/r/t our hometown eventually realized that it was a decent place to raise a family or whatever.

yep! my best friend who has a kid on the way just bought a house a stone's throw from the old BHS! kinda bizarre really.

xpost to iatee: ok cool! this is kinda why i think were arguing for the same outcome but from different angles (ie my reasoning for living where i do) - i just see the behavior of peeps as the thing that needs fixing (shopping locally, diminished driving, sustainable living, etc) and think that their location doesnt preclude that happening wherever.

well, sometimes the location does preclude it! a city needs to be a certain size and be willing to attempt a certain density for that future to be possible. but again, I haven't been using 'suburbia' to mean "those houses outside of a major city" or whatever, I've been using it to mean "suburban" as an urban environment and style of development - and like I said, this describes areas inside the political boundaries of major US cities.

(and doesn't always describe areas outside of a major city)

i just see the behavior of peeps as the thing that needs fixing (shopping locally, diminished driving, sustainable living, etc) and think that their location doesnt preclude that happening wherever.

Location precludes those things happening in a lot of places without significant changes to zoning etc that have already been detailed here. Even if everyone in Suburb XYZ woke up tomorrow willing to walk 10 blocks for their groceries, they wouldn't be ABLE to, and they won't be able to for years to come unless something is changed on a city government level...?

and people are also reading things into my POV - I don't think suburbia is necessarily a bad place to live or grow up or raise a family! I don't think that people there are any more uncultured than your average person in brooklyn! I don't think that it's only white people!

I just think that it's a very economically and environmentally inefficient style of life, and it's unfortunate that we have policies in place (from fed to local level) that make it cheap and omnipresent. and as much as people talk about changing those policies, it's something that requires (what would appear to be) radical steps and real sacrifices from suburbanites.

Hell, I lived in Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey at one point, and even though it was only a 10-min walk from our house to the "center" of "town" (ie the post office, a church, and a wine store), NO ONE WALKED. Everyone in town got into their leased luxury cars and drove to the coffee shop for their newspaper and joe. And this is in a place that DOES have sidewalks and one or two streets of small interesting stores and eateries and where people have enormous financial advantages over most of the rest of the country.

Shit, I intended to delete that as being not-really-on-topic but I posted it by mistake. I'm listening to classical piano on one earphone and got distracted. :(

very easy for you to say as an urbanite
xp

right but the change in behavior leads to the political changes necessary (which can occur faster than we might assume). and yeah theres shitty laws out there that make these sorts of changes difficult, but they are hardly the province of the suburbs alone (case in point, many cities have strict regulations about stuff like houses not being allowed to have a chicken in your yard - thats stupid.) suburban areas do have one advantage over cities that i think is getting ignored, which is the availability of plantable space. single family dwellings are a great step toward vegetable gardens and other green space options, and dense apartment living (which is the predominate case in most major cities) fails in that. all the community gardens in the world simply arent going to be enough.

it doesn't matter if it's "easy for me to say", a good transportation system in your suburb does not affect my life as much as it affects yours.

well i don't view a good transportation system as a sacrifice tho

well, convince your neighbors?

Despite the best intentions of ILXors and the "Gardening 2010" thread, which fills me with envy, almost 100% of that plantable space in the suburbs is planted with grass that requires heavy doses of chemicals and more water than the flood plains of Egypt in order to look properly golf-course-like.

And, in North Jersey, at least, whatever isn't planted with grass is planed with impatiens. I hate impatiens.

my parents have converted about half of our backyard into a vegetable garden. it's pretty great. we still have a front lawn though which yeah, uses a lot of water :(

gardening is pretty hard work though

my neighbors prob don't either, seeing as I live 200 yds from a train station

sounds like you're set

almost 100% of that plantable space in the suburbs is planted with grass that requires heavy doses of chemicals and more water than the flood plains of Egypt in order to look properly golf-course-like.

this is changing though! again i can only speak from personal experience, but i think trends towards gardening and non-invasive landscaping are significantly rising.

would be if my job were either in chicago or one of the downtowns along the metra rail. like i said, as much as i'm not down w/the "cars are evil!" mentality, structuring areas to be dependent on needing a car to do the basics of life (earn a living, buy food, get drunk communally) is the real problem as i see it.

xpost That's good to hear. I hate grass lawns on both an aesthetic and ecological level.

as much as i'm not down w/the "cars are evil!" mentality, structuring areas to be dependent on needing a car to do the basics of life (earn a living, buy food, get drunk communally) is the real problem as i see it.

yeah but once you've fixed that problem, a car is basically superfluous

When shopping for groceries for a family of 6, a car is never superfluous. It would be nice, though, if you didn't need it for EVERYTHING.

zipcar etc.

lots of things are superfluous, chairman!

i've always been curious about the amount of gas used by persons (whether for commuting or for recreational/leisure activities) vs amount used for commercial activities (transport of goods, work crews and equipment, etc.) anyone got any stats?

http://www.nrdc.org/air/energy/fensec.asp

'Passenger cars use more than 40 percent of the oil consumed in America'

Hmmm. That doesn't necessarily mean the other 60% is all used for commercial transportation, though. Inconclusive.

right, but the 40% isn't inconclusive

ok now give me the %'s in other countries!

Does "passenger cars" include taxicabs, airport shuttles, etc.? Or are they referring to privately-owned vehicles only?

could be higher than 40% - that particular stat depends on whether the rest of their economy is fueled by oil or not. per capita #s would be a better comparison, no? here's overall:

http://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2008/1/7/wsj_oil_chart.jpg

looking for passenger car numbers

right, but the 40% isn't inconclusive

― iatee, Thursday, June 10, 2010 10:27 AM Bookmark

Right, but that wasn't the question.

it was half of the question, and so I answered half of the question, because that's all I found

I don't get the right side of the most recent graph. Obviously it's showing change from 1996-2000 levels to 2001-2006 levels, but I don't understand the various baseline points, which don't seem to be correlated to anything.

they're correlated to rate of change from -2 to 10. in 1996-2000 america's rate of change of consumption per capita was ~1%, in 2001-2006 it fell to 0%. that doesn't mean that the use itself fell, it meant that the rate at which our per capita use was growing fell.

I get that, by why are the 1996-2000 baseline points all over the place, rather than being a 0 baseline or correlated to the amount of use you see on the left?

by = but

1996-2000 and 2001-2006 were + in some places and - in some places, so they have to be all over the place. there isn't a zero baseline because they're using two different periods of change and putting them on the same graph.

okay, here's "Transport sector gasoline fuel consumption per capita (liters)

Gasoline is light hydrocarbon oil use in internal combustion engine such as motor vehicles, excluding aircraft. Source: International Road Federation, World Road Statistics and electronic files, except where noted, and International Energy Agency.

Country name 2005 2006 2007
United States 1.25 1.24 1.22
Canada 0.92 0.91 0.91
Luxembourg 1.04 0.95 0.90
Kuwait 0.83 0.85 0.86
United Arab Emirates 0.79 0.80 0.82
Bahrain 0.66 0.68 0.70
Australia 0.71 0.67 0.66
Qatar 0.81 0.79 0.63
Saudi Arabia 0.55 0.57 0.61
New Zealand 0.56 0.56 0.56
Brunei 0.53 0.54 0.56
Netherlands Antilles 0.54 0.54 0.55
Iceland 0.50 0.53 0.51
Oman 0.40 0.44 0.49
Switzerland 0.48 0.47 0.46
Ireland 0.41 0.44 0.42
Venezuela, R.B. de 0.40 0.42 0.42
Cyprus 0.36 0.38 0.41
Sweden 0.43 0.41 0.39
Greece 0.35 0.35 0.37
Finland 0.35 0.34 0.34
Japan 0.35 0.34 0.34
Denmark 0.34 0.33 0.33
Trinidad and Tobago 0.32 0.30 0.32
Israel 0.30 0.30 0.31

(http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IS.ROD.SGAS.PC)

we're basically unique in being a rich industrialized country that's also physically huge in area. our gasoline use is probably always going to top the charts, but it doesn't have to be that bad.

of all my posts to quote. canada, incidently, fares pretty well by my standards - half their population lives in 3 urban areas.
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Would that still be the case if their population was 300 million instead of 33 million? Could it be the case? Does climate have anything to do with it? Those three urban areas are about as far south as it's possible to be in Canada.

I think it's more around 1/3 of the population.
Not sure about climate. Except for Vancouver, pretty much all major cities in Canada are susceptible to the sort of unpleasant cold that you'd think would drive people away. But Alberta and I think to a lesser extent Saskatchewan have both recently had big explosions in population and development, and they both have dreadful climates.

Sorry for the many xposts.

distance to american border is also a factor and it doesn't hurt that 'geographic closeness to closest trading partner' is positively correlated w/ warmer climate

Haha, I just realized, Laurel probably has me killfiled.

Certainly a lot of people who are able to do so will drive into the US to buy cars, TVs, other consumer goods etc (because they're cheaper and/or released earlier), but I don't think it's a dealbreaker for the average person to not be within driving distance of the border. The proximity is probably more beneficial to companies and governments and cities as a whole (for example, Toronto being able to ship its garbage to Michigan). Not sure it's a huge draw for individual people such as the suburb-dwellers who are the topic of this thread, though.

right but where people end up living is related to companies and governments and cities as a whole...

like I think you think that I was suggesting that people are like "hmmm I could live 70 miles from the US or 20 miles from the US - I'mna go w/ 20 - gotta get my walmart/nfl/etc. fix" - I'm sure nobody operates like this. rather, they're choosing between places are 70 miles and 20 miles from the US because those regions are developed for reasons that *are* related to the US.