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

My wife was at a meeting (after getting lost in numerous cul-de-sacs) at someone's house in the suburbs (for work, not PTA, nor Pampered Chef) and someone in the group said, "I was in this house last week." My wife was the only one who did not understand that the person meant the same model of a house in another subdivision, and not the exact same house.

Those metroplexes confuse me, especially around Arlington. The developers completely turn away from an existing city and build a planned shopping/living center with underground parking that exists in its own little orbit.

http://la.curbed.com/archives/2006/06/local_man_makes.php
http://la.curbed.com/archives/2006/06/northeast_la_go.php
http://la.curbed.com/archives/2006/06/beverly_grove_g.php

og i miss the greenery

the parks where like no one goes for some weird reason when you decide to go to the park

just empty

i miss the trails in the woods, the delis where the highschoolers would pull up in their cars and like get a soda

get a blog dude

Are you in NYC? I lived there for just 4 months once and I remember flying home to Texas and it was just so totally alien, looking out the window on approach seeing sky and green and open space between buildings and all those cars, none of them yellow!

This thread has some bad US/UK disconnect. Suburbs are for the rich!

i'm in NYC. everytime i visit Nashville i'm awed by all the oxygen.

Gardening while visiting my mom's house...birdsong everywhere, huge trees rustling in the breeze, big cornflower blue sky with big ol' white fluff clouds hanging around, green and sun, green and sun, green and sun. Serene backyards with late-afternoon shadows, rabbits, cardinals, honeybees, beetles, sun and green

Surmounter otm

I try to remind myself that most of the things I find great about suburbs -- the sun and lawns and sometimes idyllic coziness of them -- is totally based on them triggering the experience of suburbs as a child. And while those things remain good as an adult, they leave out all the stuff that would be tiresome about maintaining an upscale suburban lifestyle as an adult, even apart from making the money to do it: mostly the weird neighbor relationships of competitiveness and enforced lawn-care and the way your life is observed and scrutinized and needs to fit within certain parameters to have any kind of social clout.

But there are pockets lots of places of a less upscale but no less nice suburban-feeling lifestyle that doesn't have those weird regimented drawbacks, I think; I remember plenty of people I knew finding places in the nearest Chicago suburbs (or places like Skokie) where they could step into little-lawn pleasantness and avoid the strangeness of strict subdivision stuff. (Actually I think the single thing that makes this difference is still being on some kind of gridded street arrangement, rather than the cozy cul-de-sac subdivision thing where it's suddenly like you live in a 20-family village and are all responsible to one another for stuff like what color you paint your door.)

(I should note that I didn't live in a "suburb," as a child, but in a planned subdivision in a town of about 100,000 -- i.e., basically the same as a suburb except you don't hear about cool new stuff from people in a nearby city.)

This thread has some bad US/UK disconnect. Suburbs are for the rich!

Haha wow, not here (Aus) they aren't. The outer burbs are where all the lower middle class families go, because theres no way in hell they could afford even an apartment closer to the city. Inner suburbs here have students in rental, and extremely wealthy ppl in all the older homes/mansions/fancy condos. No one chooses to go live in the sticks, its just all most can afford if they actually want a house and a yard.

mostly the weird neighbor relationships of competitiveness and enforced lawn-care and the way your life is observed and scrutinized and needs to fit within certain parameters to have any kind of social clout.

Remind me to link this thread next time an American poster points and laughs at British class issues.

Back in the day, I would have agreed with the UK/US divide, and explained that British cities don't really map onto a straightforward urban/suburban plan, but since the outer boroughs of London elected Boris I don't feel remotely inclined to do so.

nabisco, as ever, otm

the suburb i grew up in was decent enough. it wasn't at all planned; our house was built in like 1940. there were no brown people (or non-catholics, really, except for me) but i think i largely emerged unscathed by the endemic racism.

cities are grebt and really the only place i wanna live. but there's certainly something to be said for having one's own green space as a child. even if you just turn it into a hockey rink/ballfield/football pitch in your mind.

thank god you emerged unscathed from that anti-catholic endemic racism, must have been terrible for you!

oh look, I found a dickwad on the internet.

dude in basketball huddles when everyone's like 'forgive us our tresspasses' and you're all 'forgive us our debts' it can get pretty hairy

xp

? at my CofE schools we said trespasses

sure, but do you say pop or soda?

pop

No-one says soda here unless they're talking about sodastreams or cream soda

"Forgive us our debts"? Wait, is this in the lords prayer or something else? "And forgive us our debts, as we forgive those who debt against us" doesnt seem like it works. Sorry, I'm very obviously not catholic (in fact I know sweet FA about catholicism tbh)

Well I assumed Mookie meant the catholics say "trespasses" and protestants say "debts" unless I read it wrong. This isn't the case here AFAIK everyone says "trespasses"!

http://www.spiritheart.org/chapel/lordpryr.htm#matthean

Religion: It's not all fighting with people over translation.

I lived in the suburbs (VERY BRIEFLY) but I'm black and they were like 99% white so those days were more amusing than some of the experiences I'm reading here.

xpost so according to that site we were using the catholic version? Weird. Especially considering my secondary school was so protestant we had smashed up statues from the reformation in the school hall!

I guess technically I grew up in a suburb as it was on the edge of town but it was a council estate so not really.

^^Hahahaha.

My experiences were similar but different because I do live in England? Does that make sense? It wasn't wildly different it was typical classist bullshit and freaky neighbours that you can bet your sweet indie record collection were swingers and bible bashers at the same time, one of mine was this alcoholic typical absent father and he used to show up wasted and yell at his ex on the front lawn late at night.
I got both 'trespasses' and 'debts'.Parents are protestants, school was catholic. FUN.

xpost

My non-denominational, probably CoE leaning schools used "trespasses". When I hear the Lord's Prayer in a Catholic church I'm pretty sure they don't say it. Can't remember what they use instead tho.

where i grew up the FUCKING MICKS said trespassing whilst the FUCKING APOSTATES or whomever said debts. although i think the methodists might have said trespassing as well? maybe it was just the presbyterians. jesus christ.

as to why any of this came up in the huddle of a public-school basketball team is a whole other thing

Yeah I skipped over that whole basketball huddle thing

I do have a pretty sweet indie record collection though.

actually, my childhood catholic pplz were polish or otherwise eastern european, not irish. indeed there was a big hubbub when someone made a statue called 'hunky steelworker' cause so many people could remember when 'hunky' was a slur.

when i was in grade two everyone else went to ccd for two weeks and i got to just sit there reading. awesome

(I should note that I didn't live in a "suburb," as a child, but in a planned subdivision in a town of about 100,000 -- i.e., basically the same as a suburb except you don't hear about cool new stuff from people in a nearby city.)

er, yeah. that was my experience, as well. but i lazily think of it as "suburban"

but it was really more of a small subdivision outside of a small-ish town

i got lots of love for the suburbs

but i guess princeton doesnt really count as a 'suburb'

actually, my childhood catholic pplz were polish or otherwise eastern european, not irish. indeed there was a big hubbub when someone made a statue called 'hunky steelworker' cause so many people could remember when 'hunky' was a slur.

when i was in grade two everyone else went to ccd for two weeks and i got to just sit there reading. awesome

-- mookieproof, Saturday, 12 July 2008 01:20 (2 days ago) Link

you from picksburgh?? a couple of years ago, my brother was in the hospital and some relatives from western pa. came out to visit him. during a visit, my cousin turned to me and said, 'he'll be all right -- he's a stubborn bohunk!!" truer words were never spoken.

I think what people are largely glossing over here is that, at least in a lot of places, the suburbs aren't economically homogenous. There are upscale suburbs and downscale suburbs.

For real – there's a big diff between McMansion Playland and Levittown.

I think my favorite thing about the former incarnation of suburbs IS: archaeologists determined Mesopotamia was a well-formed society bcz of their logical, grid-based roads. What will THE FUTURE think of all the random twists & turns peppered with cul-de-sacs?

sure, but do you say pop or soda?

-- mookieproof, Friday, July 11, 2008 7:50 PM (Friday, July 11, 2008 7:50 PM) Bookmark Link

tonic.

and tresspasses which, in northern mass speak came out as "tresspuhsez".

my mom's neighborhood consists of all these four-digit house numbers which bear no logical relation to one another-- like, 6837 is next to 2339...

Poor pizza delivery people.

club soda innit

council estate represent, it doesn't get realer than the Scott

someone got their bike stolen, like, last month

xposts

not that we care about xposts, on the estate

Do people really feel less spied-on when they have neighbors who they share walls with rather than neighbors 20 feet away?

It's not a matter of spying or privacy, it's that ... when you're in a dense rental area, people mostly just expect you to be non-annoying and otherwise treat you like a near-stranger in a dense area, doing whatever it is that you do. In an upscale ownership-based subdivision where real estate values and people's sense of the American dream is at stake and people's kids all play together, you are policed and confronted with a lot of expectations about how you're fitting into things -- socially, professionally, etc. It's fundamentally a fake scale recreation of a "village," and you're known to all and carry all the responsibility of a good villager, only more so.

The suburbs of major cities are getting the opposite these days, though -- people pushed out of gentrifying city centers, winding up very isolated and shut off and non-villagey in the kinds of strip-mally suburban spaces that don't jump to mind when we talk about "suburbs" in the leafy-subdivision middle-class sense.