I think the original idea behind the suburb is that you don't have to interact with anyone you don't want to interact with. A much nicer way of saying that is they are more efficient. Or at least that was the original intention. The layout of the subdivision is that maximizes the lawn space you get, for the amount of routing (e.g. traffic intersections) to whatever your destination was. And since driving is nominally the fastest way to get somewhere, the suburbs were how you were going to do it. It's like someone decided on the efficiency goal, and looked at what was the fastest means of transport, and derived from there.
Maybe you could say there might've been some redlining too – just put the folks you don't want to interact with in that subdivision over there –, but in all, the problem is that it ultimately becomes: only efficient at one thing, and that's getting to work and back home. And it got terrible even just for that because cars as a means of transport doesn't scale well with population. Then public transit becomes a hack to try to make it work. In the Bay Area and DC, you have highly efficient transit systems that are good for getting to downtown, and pretty much terrible at most other things. In both places, you still need cars for the last mile, when you're leaving "downtown." In the Bay Area, only the Mission District is truly walkable, of all the non-downtown neighborhoods it connects. So now there's car sharing at most of the BART stations. But at least we have them. Not sure if there are any for the Caltrain.
The first suburbs were built around the public transportation option of the time, streetcars. It's a shame that most cities threw that away when cars appeared.
Ignoring the implementation detail of the street car form, the fundamental idea of designing a suburb neighbourhood around major transit nodes, with some light commercial at the core stops makes tons of sense. Walk or bike 5-15 minutes to the transit node, get on transit, get to town. No car necessary.
A large part of it is crime and/or race. The modern subdivision - full of meandering streets and poor connectivity to nearby arterials - is deliberate. It creates the gated neighborhood effect without the need to put up any unsightly walls or gates, and in effect keeps its residents separated from the world outside.
The world outside presumably filled with undesirables.
The lack of connectivity discourages through traffic (i.e., undesirables), and meandering streets that run every which way helps artificially draw out the walking distance between any two points, further hobbling any desire or ability for people who walk/take transit to visit (i.e., undesirables).
Suburbs weren't always like this, we had walkable suburbs a long time ago, and in some places we have them again. But the most typical archetype of a suburban neighborhood is an exercise in extremely class-conscious design.
Despite the revitalization of urban cores across the US, the mentality that drove the construction of these suburbs still remains. The thing that jumps into my mind is the furor over Seattle's extension of light rail into Bellevue - a high-income suburb. All of the opposition boiled down to "but the undesirables!".
Until we shake the whole "urban = poor" thing, we'll continue to architect our suburbs in this way.
Suburbia is a postwar invention, enabled by and designed for the automobile. We have not lived in habitats made of subdivisions, cul-de-sacs, collector streets, and parking lots for "most of human existence."
You may be thinking of the traditional town, which is characterized by pedestrian scale, mixed uses, and continuous structures right up to the sidewalks of narrow streets, engaging pedestrians instead of boring them with "open space."
Walkability was not a novelty for the young and childless. It was how you got your kids to school and yourself to work or the grocery store. Mixed use wasn't about "exciting." If you prohibited commercial uses for miles around your house, you'd have a hell of a time buying milk.
About the only thing a traditional neighborhood shares with suburbia is single-family houses. In most other ways it's the polar opposite: its defining characteristics are what suburban zoning prohibits. It would be a huge win for urbanists to reform modern suburbia in the image of the traditional town. The Bay Area's housing capacity would skyrocket. Planning based on minimized travel needs and a redundant, load-balanced street grid would significantly soften the impact of growth on traffic.
Turning this [0] into more of this [1] would be immense progress. You don't have to build Manhattan.
Suburbia straight doesn't work. Requiring a car for transit means kids have to continually be chauffeured by adults to anywhere meaningful. Lack of local business means there's limited economic potential for the city - it's all in one tax district and redistributed around. Sprawl increases the cost of providing services like fire and police. You're taking on some significant burdens in exchange for not having your neighbors walk past your house.
Suburbs are horribly designed, case in point Irvine CA. Worst place I have ever been too. Giant 8 lane surface streets but still endless traffic. No useful public transit so everyone is sitting in a car.
The future looks bleak for socal unless population normalizes.
My skepticism of suburbs has mostly been about how the long distance and personal car dependence they create tends to isolate people and households.
Build a suburban "gated community" for safety, give everyone a huge lawn that they're obligated to constantly maintain, don't allow any commercial buildings in because they're considered ugly, and you get an environment where it's pretty tough to get anywhere without a car. Add in the poor pedestrian infrastructure, intimidating high-speed traffic, and some irrational fear of how anybody under 18 out of eyesight of a parent for a second is about to be kidnapped, and you get a neighborhood where everyone seems actively discouraged from knowing anything about their neighbors. Seems to me that this is what creates the unsafe environment that everyone was trying so hard to get away from.
It's interesting to read that many suburbs may also be logistically unsustainable.
Suburbia is TERRIBLE from long-term efficiency and sustainability point of view. They create car-centric living style which is very hard to get rid off after it settles in.
I value freedom of movement - but not only through car accessibility. I value being able to walk / bike / take a bus safely and within a reasonable distance from my destination. The modern American suburb is terribly designed from this perspective.
The issue in CA is that everywhere is the suburbs. My grandma’s house is in a single family neighborhood 10 minutes away from a huge office building with Illumina on the outside. The fact that this company, which has revolutionized biological research is in an area without enough housing and requires its workers to drive 1-2 h through traffic is insane from a society development perspective.
Suburbs can still exist but you need to have density around transit and provide an alternative to sitting in traffic.
There are some advantages to suburbs but again, the model of development that literally bulldozed neighbourhoods was that any alternative was bad. It was quite literally seen as the way of the future to have low density suburbs connected by gigantic highways.
Either way car-centric suburbs are unnecessary, you could still have American suburbs with big houses that people could walk and cycle and use PT in. Again, I was responding to someone who literally had it out for walking.
It's interesting that for a country so obsessed with the freedom to live where and how you want that Americans are so car dependent...
Having lived & worked quite a long time in wildly different metro areas -- Santa Clara/Mountain View, Indianapolis, Austin -- this article raises more questions for me more than anything.
What is a suburb, by the author's definition? It seems like it's an area outside the urban core of a city, I guess. But here in Austin, I'm buying a house away from the urban core of downtown, in a subdivision, but it's in a largely undeveloped area 2-3 minutes by car (and 10-15 by bike, at most, thanks to the bike lanes that connect the subdivision) of a mixed-use development area with a lake, park, museum, shops etc. Is this suburban? I consider it suburban but I have trouble connecting what the author is talking about to this spot.
Now in Indianapolis, there were some suburbs. I lived in one growing up. It was indeed far from anything with absolutely no public transpo. Nowadays (I left in 2014) it's slightly better, in terms of availability, as there is a metro bus service. But the accommodation for the bus routes is awful. It's perpetually underfunded, the bus stops are often -- I am not joking -- in ditches, no shelters at the stops, etc., etc. It's almost like the city has gone out of its way to make it clear the bus is for "the poors." But what's the fix? Decades upon decades of urban planning have reinforced this notion. So... what is to be done about it?
In South Bay, I rented a tiny apartment (~650sqft) for, at the time, the outrageous price of $1200/mo. This was ca. 2008. I'm told such units are much higher now. In areas of such inflated housing prices, isn't suburbia supposed to be a pressure valve? People move farther away from where they work and play in exchange for lower housing costs? I am out of touch with the housing scene in the Bay Area nowadays aside from the same articles everyone else gets on HN, so my question is an honest one. But the author's disdain for suburbia -- supported by concrete reasons though it may be -- seems like it might not be so strident if he were living elsewhere.
In the suburb where I live, we have private backyards, and a couple of well-maintained parks within walking distance. There are also multiple grocery stores and restaurants within walking distance. I can be in two different downtown areas after a short drive, and I can get to San Francisco in under an hour.
I don't know where people get the idea that suburbs are nothing but houses for miles and miles. We really do have it all here. And the people who want dense housing don't want to live in my neighborhood -- they gravitate to the parts of the area with high rises.
At least American suburbs are ultra car-dependent meaning you're not walking anywhere (literally physically degrading to both you and the environment) and you do not have chance social encounters at nearly the frequency of any walking city (socially degrading).
This is not to say there aren't real benefits to life in the burbs and serious disadvantages to city life, but it's fairly evident by now that American suburbia is not the utopian dream it was sold as.
No, it's terrible and I hate living in the suburbs. We are a family of 4 with 4, 4-door cars. It's ludicrous.
But good luck convincing tens of millions of suburbanites to, idk, sell their home at a loss and move to a city? Public transit makes no sense. The geography is too hilly for biking and there is no infrastructure for it anyway. Everything is spread too far away. I wish we had never built suburbs in the first place but it's far too late for that.
Classic suburbia was desirable because it promised living in a newer house with a private yard and a garage, on a low-traffic street, in an ethnically and socioeconomically homogenous neighborhood zoned to a well-performing school. Automobile dependence was a feature to empower the car-owning suburbanite and to restrict the casual exfiltration of people from the city into the suburbs. (These fears, that good-for-nothings will take public transit to cause trouble in the suburbs crop up to this day.)
As suburbs age, their advantages decline. The houses are no longer new, traffic (on all but the leaf-node cul-de-sacs) has increased. When one suburb is built out, the urban area spreads outward, and newer suburbs and exurbs are created. Those that can afford to move do so, slowly decreasing the average income of the neighborhood, which correlates strongly with school performance. Desirability keeps declining in turn.
Some suburbs can avoid this fate by becoming large employment centers, and then we call them edge cities instead (e.g. Irvine, Tysons, Bloomington).
The aesthetic of suburbia is exclusion. That's what makes it less valid. It's reaping the benefits of access to the city while minimizing the number of others who can do the same. There's nothing wrong with liking solitude, but there's everything wrong with insisting that we preserve your solitude on the most central/best connected land, no matter the cost to everyone else.
SF's unoccupied blocks are pretty much built out by now. Everywhere with preexisting residents is the same: I came here because I liked the neighborhood as it is, it can never be allowed to change.
Cities aren't plopped down out of the sky fully formed. They're living organisms, built by expanding iteratively and incrementally. The city that's already been built is full. For more people to live in city, we need to make more of it. Aside from a fire or earthquake providing a clean slate, intensifying the suburbs with the best access is essentially the only way that happens.
This would be fine, except that economic growth is increasingly accruing to a handful of cities whose zoning is a big Keep Out sign.
Suburbs don't have to be structured around cars! You can have lots of trees, lots of grass, be removed from bustle, and still be able to get around by car. The problem is that zoning rules have essentially regulated these sorts of suburbs out of existence. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0
Precisely. My general theory is that you could significantly improve most suburbs by knocking down a block (or even just half a block) near the center of the suburb and building a mini "downtown" - a commercial area interspersed with a few modestly-sized apartment buildings.
That's far from the optimal design if you're starting from scratch, but it solves a lot of problems without massive changes.
I grew up in American suburbia and hated it. It wasn't even one of the worst examples, but you still literally could not walk to the local LIRR station or to the park, which were just 1-2 miles away. Absurd. Build commercial areas and some more sidewalks, and it would've been much less terrible.
Maybe you could say there might've been some redlining too – just put the folks you don't want to interact with in that subdivision over there –, but in all, the problem is that it ultimately becomes: only efficient at one thing, and that's getting to work and back home. And it got terrible even just for that because cars as a means of transport doesn't scale well with population. Then public transit becomes a hack to try to make it work. In the Bay Area and DC, you have highly efficient transit systems that are good for getting to downtown, and pretty much terrible at most other things. In both places, you still need cars for the last mile, when you're leaving "downtown." In the Bay Area, only the Mission District is truly walkable, of all the non-downtown neighborhoods it connects. So now there's car sharing at most of the BART stations. But at least we have them. Not sure if there are any for the Caltrain.
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