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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   29148 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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What we talk about when we talk about suburbs

Let's get the BS out of the way first.

First, the obvious one: In the last few decades, suburban growth hasn't been caused by racism. As a matter of fact, blacks and immigrants are moving to the suburbs at a faster rate than whites. Meanwhile, whites have moved into the cities.

Now let's talk about the supposed conspiracy to force people into the suburbs. The largest American cities of 1920 were all built before the car. Many of them have a ring of streetcar suburbs. Most of them have lost population. There is a plentiful supply of dense urban cores in America with lower population than they had a century ago, and yet all the demand is for building more suburbs. The population has spoken, and they don't want to live in cities, they want to live in suburbs, New York City, and nothing in between.

What about "fifteen minute cities?". I live in one, it's called a suburb. I can get to everything we need on a regular basis (groceries, parks, schools, kid's activities, a decent restaurant) in fifteen minutes. This is only possible with point-to-point, immediate-availability transportation. Mass transit simply doesn't work for this, as at-grade transit (busses, streetcars) are slower than bikes due to the number of stops, and grade-separated transit stations are so large and sparse that it's usually fifteen minutes just to get from the front door to the platform, plus half a headway.

If you want to drop one kid off at one activity, the other kid off at a different one, get a week's worth of Costco, and then pick them both up, while changing at least one of the activities every six months, you simply can't beat the car.

We have community in the suburbs. The great American self-organizing spirit is a live here. No matter what you're into (or your kids are into), there's some knitting club, drum club, or bike club. Even better, our city parks and rec centers are actually usable, and the staff and patrons are clean and pleasant.

Real problems with the suburbs

This doesn't mean we don't have real problems with the suburbs. We do, especially from a few decades ago. In a uniquely American fashion, the Garden City Movement mutated into ever-larger lawns, ever larger medians, and ever larger streets. This, plus Euclidean zoning, does mean that the only way you can get around is the car. While it's great to have the car as the primary method of family transportation, having it as the only means of transportation does constrain older kids.

There is a pointless bigness to much of our environment. The standard American family combination of a big truck for dad and big crossover for mom would probably be improved by exchanging them for a HiLux and a Golf. We insist on building houses with formal living and dining rooms that we never use, paired with the "breakfast nook" and "family room" that we actually use. And of course yards, but I repeat myself.

Suburbs in the 80s were also less pleasant. There weren't many good restaurants, and if you didn't want something from a chain store or an understocked, overpriced mom-and-pop, you were out of luck. If you wanted a specialized job, you were in for a brutal commute into the city. Amazon and work-from-home have fundamentally changed that. We don't have to be near "stuff" anymore, it all comes to us.

Real solutions from the suburbs

Right now, I live in a townhouse in a master-planned new urbanist suburb. It's medium density, I have no yard, and the houses barely have any. There's a mini-park every few blocks, the elementary school is in the neighborhood itself, some blocks are designed extra long to prioritize sidewalks and eliminate street crossing, and the "town center" has a supermarket, a coffee shop, and a few adequate restaurants. We go there all the time, often on our onewheels.

If you're not in the family stage of life, the town center also has a four-over-one mid-rise that's pretty nice.

We have all the human-scale upside of a streetcar suburb, and all the modern benefits of suburbia (close to 3k sq ft, a real two car garage, modern appliances). We even have ethnic diversity (upscale immigrants) and a low carbon footprint (modern insulation, and I have a place to charge my Tesla)

Surprisingly, people who complain about the suburbs never say that we should all move to a master-planned New Urbanist suburb.

I love it, I would recommend it to anyone, and I'm leaving.

What we're really talking about when we talk about suburbs

I'm moving to an 80s suburb, with all the problems I just described. It has a pointless bench on a lawn built in a roundabout. Every week I see someone mowing that stupid patch of grass. You can't walk anywhere.

I'm moving from my semi-New Urbanist paradise to this terribly-designed 80s suburb for the same reason that some people live in Minneapolis instead of San Diego. San Diego has better weather, beaches, hot girls in bikinis, and you'll never shovel snow again, but if your family lives in Minneapolis, you live in Minneapolis, you shovel snow, and you ride your polar bear to work. If I grew up in Manhattan, NY, I would want to live there - and if I lived in Manhattan, KS, I would want to live there too.

I'm moving there for the same reason people hate suburbs: community. People talk about how suburbs are alienating and have no third spaces. I'm moving for the community, which is my wife's extended family. The third space was her grandparent's house. Now it is her parent's house, and someday (hopefully far in the future) it will be our house.

We might prefer one physical environment to another, but the main factor for where people live is the human environment - family, jobs, schools, crime.

That's also what people are really talking about when they complain about suburbs. They complain that suburbs are isolating and atomizing, which is obviously not true if you have family there.

What we really talk about when we talk about suburbs is social climbing. The suburbs are associated with the middle class, and if you're a social climber, you have to denounce the suburbs. A century ago, when industrial working class families lived in urban flats and townhomes, the social climbers made a point of talking about how they escaped the city.

When us proles couldn't afford cars, the social climbers flaunted their cars. Now that us proles can afford cars but can't afford Manhattan, the social climbers disdain cars and flaunt their apartments.

A century from now, if a shingle-sided split-level becomes expensive, you'll see disaffected young social climbers sneer that the 70s suburb is the pinnacle of human organization, unlike whatever form of housing the proles of that day live in.

Suburbs come in all different kinds. Some have community, some are very atomized.

From Arthur Doyle's The Adventure of the Copper Beeches

By eleven o’clock the next day we were well upon our way to the old English capital. Holmes had been buried in the morning papers all the way down, but after we had passed the Hampshire border he threw them down and began to admire the scenery. It was an ideal spring day, a light blue sky, flecked with little fleecy white clouds drifting across from west to east. The sun was shining very brightly, and yet there was an exhilarating nip in the air, which set an edge to a man’s energy. All over the countryside, away to the rolling hills around Aldershot, the little red and grey roofs of the farm-steadings peeped out from amid the light green of the new foliage.

“Are they not fresh and beautiful?” I cried with all the enthusiasm of a man fresh from the fogs of Baker Street.

But Holmes shook his head gravely.

“Do you know, Watson,” said he, “that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.”

“Good heavens!” I cried. “Who would associate crime with these dear old homesteads?”

“They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”

“You horrify me!”

“But the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser. Had this lady who appeals to us for help gone to live in Winchester, I should never have had a fear for her. It is the five miles of country which makes the danger."

Now, myself I am a big fan of atomization. I hate the idea of living in a small gossip-ridden community where everything that I do is discussed soon afterward at the local watering hole (and in such a community, there are only 2 or 3 watering holes, so essentially just one because almost everyone who goes to one of them goes to the others as well).

But suburbs can actually encourage, and I can say this from personal experience, a bit too much atomization, to the point that people go insane and pop pills and such with no feedback from anyone, and people can spiral down into shit without having any helping hands to try to pull them out of it.

The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours

This is a lovely theory that was thoroughly disproved by the murder of Kitty Genovese.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kitty_Genovese

In my experience, not one person in an urban area ever attempted to stop my abuser. At least out in the countryside they called the cops a few times.

This is a lovely theory that was thoroughly disproved by the murder of Kitty Genovese.

No, it wasn't. If you read that Wikipedia article carefully, this was a case of misreporting by the New York Times and the popular account is incorrect. This is all from your own link:

More recent investigations have questioned the original version of events.[58][24][67] A 2004 article in The New York Times by Jim Rasenberger, published on the 40th anniversary of Genovese's murder, raised numerous questions about claims in the original Times article. A 2007 study (confirmed in 2014[24]) found many of the purported facts about the murder to be unfounded, stating there was "no evidence for the presence of 38 witnesses, or that witnesses observed the murder, or that witnesses remained inactive".[7] After Moseley's death in March 2016, the Times called their second story "flawed", stating:[8]

While there was no question that the attack occurred, and that some neighbors ignored cries for help, the portrayal of 38 witnesses as fully aware and unresponsive was erroneous. The article grossly exaggerated the number of witnesses and what they had perceived. None saw the attack in its entirety. Only a few had glimpsed parts of it, or recognized the cries for help. Many thought they had heard lovers or drunks quarreling. There were two attacks, not three. And afterward, two people did call the police. A 70-year-old[fn 1] woman ventured out and cradled the dying victim in her arms until they arrived. Ms. Genovese died on the way to a hospital.

Because of the layout of the complex and the fact that the attacks took place in different locations, no witness saw the entire sequence of events. Investigation by police and prosecutors showed that approximately a dozen individuals had heard or seen portions of the attack, though none saw or was aware of the entire incident.[68] Only one witness, Joseph Fink, was aware Genovese was stabbed in the first attack, and only Karl Ross was aware of it in the second attack. Many were entirely unaware that an assault or homicide had taken place; some thought what they saw or heard was a domestic quarrel, a drunken brawl or a group of friends leaving the bar when Moseley first approached Genovese.[7] After the initial attack punctured her lungs, leading to her eventual death from asphyxiation, it is unlikely that Genovese was able to scream at any volume.[69]

A 2015 documentary, featuring Kitty's brother William, discovered that other crime reporters knew of many problems with the story even in 1964. Immediately after the story broke, WNBC police reporter Danny Meehan discovered many inconsistencies in the original article in the Times. Meehan asked Times reporter Martin Gansberg why his article failed to reveal that witnesses did not feel that a murder was happening. Gansberg replied, "It would have ruined the story." Not wishing to jeopardize his career by attacking a powerful figure like Rosenthal, Meehan kept his findings secret and passed his notes to fellow WNBC reporter Gabe Pressman. Later,[when?] Pressman taught a journalism course in which some of his students called Rosenthal and confronted him with the evidence. Rosenthal was irate that his editorial decisions were being questioned by journalism students and angrily berated Pressman in a phone call.[70]

On October 12, 2016, the Times appended an Editor's Note to the online version of its 1964 article, stating that, "Later reporting by The Times and others has called into question significant elements of this account."[5]

On the one hand, the pattern you are pointing to, where a knowledge-producer who provided a foundational block to a lot of peoples' worldview is, yet again, revealed to have simply made it up is deeply infuriating.

On the other hand, this seems to be the quote that's being questioned:

"There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock."

...And I find that description absolutely absurd when it is applied to our modern world. Maybe it was true in Doyle's time and place. It certainly is not true now.

...And I find that description absolutely absurd when it is applied to our modern world. Maybe it was true in Doyle's time and place. It certainly is not true now.

It is true now in first-world Asian cities. It is sufficiently true sufficiently much of the time in most European cities that the average European urbanite would find the discussion above bizarre.

America (apart from NYC) is bad at policing, in the sense that they can't convert dollars spent on policing into crime reduction efficiently. One upshot of this is that Americans keep trying to move to places that don't need policing. Others are that America is unusually tolerant of vigilantism, and that America tends to substitute harsh punishments for effective policing in the same way and for the same reasons that medieval societies did. Americans are sufficiently used to this that they don't seem to find it a problem - probably because they think it is a universal fact about what is possible - and assume that there must be some reason why Singapore doesn't need policing. Singapore does need policing, and is effectively policed. London and Paris also need policing, are less effectively policed, and while safe by American standards have levels of crime that Singaporeans would find intolerable.

Given the absence of any political faction that wants policing to be expensive and useless, I suspect the reasons for this (which are not well understood) are structural rather than being a policy choice. This excellent substack by a retired cop blames the Bill of Rights.

Right. The statement is false now, but the break isn't where the Kitty Genovese story places it -- witnesses will call the police, but they likely won't come in time (also true in Doyle's time) and the machinery of justice is both uncertain and slow.

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