Historical Image of the Day

Last night on the plane, I read D. J. Waldie's fascinating ode to his suburban neighborhood in Lakewood, California, Holy Land. Lakewood still sounds awful, but he does give his long-abused town and its residents a real dignity.

In honor of the book, this week images will focus on the history of the suburbs.

Political ad opposing the rezoning of El Camino Real, the major street through the San Francisco suburb of Burlingame, California, for business development, 1930s.

Texas Public Schools and Dress Codes

In case you didn't think the Dallas suburbs were hellish enough, here's Mesquite's absurd crackdown on fashion in the public schools:

The parents of a 4-year-old boy disciplined for having long hair have rejected a compromise from a Texas school board that agreed to adjust its grooming policy.

The impasse means pre-kindergartner Taylor Pugh will remain in in-school suspension, sitting alone with a teacher's aide in a library. He has been sequestered from classmates at Floyd Elementary School in Mesquite, a Dallas suburb, since late November.

After a closed-door meeting Monday, the Mesquite school board decided the boy could wear his hair in tight braids but keep it no longer than his ears. But his parents say the adjustment isn't enough for Taylor, who wears his hair long, covering his earlobes and shirt collar.

I've known a lot of parents who have their boys' hair long. And this is absurd. In clearly trying to create heteronormativity among their students, I wonder what would happen in this district if a student came out as gay. Or transgender for that matter. Would they violate the students' civil rights and suspend the person? I'm sure they would.

It gets better too:

The district is known for standing tough on its dress code. Last year, a seventh-grader was sent home for wearing black skinny pants. His parents chose to home-school him.

On its Web site, the district says its code is in place because ''students who dress and groom themselves neatly, and in an acceptable and appropriate manner, are more likely to become constructive members of the society in which we live.''

Great. By "acceptable and appropriate" we mean Christian, conservative, and heterosexual. Fantastic!

And we all know nothing undermines the moral fabric of our society like skinny jeans.

Hell, I'd home school my child too before subjecting them to that. And I don't even support home schooling.

More Exurbs

Building on my piece about the future of exurbs from yesterday, I strongly recommend Rob Inglis' and Jonathan Thompson's profile of Surprise, Arizona in High Country News.

While Ben Adler's piece I discussed yesterday typically focused on the DC area (what a surprise coming from a national political publication!), exurbs are far more prevalent in the Sunbelt. There are hundreds of communities like Surprise in the Southwest, in Texas, Georgia, Florida, and around the Sunbelt. Inglis and Thompson hint at why I think the glory days of exurbia might be behind us. There are literally millions of housing units in exurbs. Most of them were built because of the housing bubble kool-aid. Many of the people who bought these homes did so with adjustable-rate mortgages and then got thrown out of their homes when the payments ballooned.

As the authors point out, people don't move to the Phoenix suburbs for the weather or even for jobs. They move there because California is too expensive. Cheap land means development. But the overbuild of housing has led to plummeting prices. So it will continue to remain cheap. However, they still don't get at the core issue of what I believe will be exurban decline--oil. If you actually have a job now, you can buy those homes tremendously cheap if you can get then mortgage. But what good are those homes going to be when gas is $5, as I believe it will be in 2-3 years? The affordability of extreme suburbia will be undermined by structural problems beyond the real estate industry's control. Again, I think many of those houses will be occupied, but as working-class housing by people who will have to use their meagre resources to commute long distances to work, commutes that will eat up their low salaries in astronomical gas prices. There won't be public transit as an option. The West and Southeast will come to look like the Santa Fe area, with an expensive city surrounded by poor areas filled with working-class people forced to drive 30 miles from home to get to their jobs.

The Exurbs

Via Yglesias, Ben Adler has an excellent piece up on exurbs and walkable suburbs. He compares Leesburg, VA to Kentlands, MD. Leesburg is the ultimate exurban disaster. Far from the metro, the community has not invested in public transportation, sidewalks, or any amenities of urban life. It exists to facilitate whatever developers want. Its primary concern about growth is traffic. On the other hand, Kentlands was a dense suburban community from the beginning with good public transportation and sidewalks. People use this public infrastructure, creating a strong community.

These are the two models of suburban development in the United States. Probably 90% of America has followed the Leesburg model. In Texas, probably 100%. Here in Georgetown, at the northern edge of the Austin suburbs, about 1/2 of the streets do not have sidewalks. It's an old city, but most of the commercial infrastructure has moved to newish strip malls on the edges of town. It's virtually impossible to survive here without a car. When I walk to work, I have to walk on the road most of the time. And people frequently pull over to ask me if I need a ride. That's nice of them and all, but they do it because they think why on earth would a white guy be walking down the road if his car didn't break down? That walking is such a foreign concept here suggests real problems in American urban and suburban living.

While I highly recommend Adler's article, I do think he misses on his predictions for the future.

The edge of today's civilization could be tomorrow's exurb. Despite the current state of the economy, plenty more Leesburgs are likely to be in America's future. According to a study by the Brookings Institution, half of our built environment in 2030 will have been developed from 2000 onward. We know the next generation of exurbs is coming, and we'd better plan for it.

But I'm not sure this is true. There's a lot of structural issues getting in the way of this analysis. First is oil prices. While oil prices are down significantly from where they were a year ago, that's strictly because of the economic downturn. Even time there's even a hint of good economic news, oil prices inch up. When the recession ends and people start consuming and producing again, petroleum costs will again skyrocket. While I know that predicting oil futures is notoriously difficult, this fact seems clear enough to me.

Second, already existing signs suggest that a lot of people are opting out of suburban life. Adler himself cites this information. He points out that one zip code in suburban Virginia has seen home prices drop by 44.7% between September 2007 and September 2008 versus a 3.9% drop in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C. The exurbs are overbuilt at a time when a lot of people no longer want to live there. Moreover, we have millions of homes, mostly in suburban developments, that have foreclosed. Now owned by the banks, there is little demand for these buildings. We're probably seeing a long-term cultural shift toward urban living by a big chunk of young Americans. There's no doubt that cities now need to provide infrastructure for families, including good schools. Until that happens, a lot of people will want to live in the suburbs. But what kind of suburbs? My guess is that they will flock to places like Kentlands, where they can still live a semi-urban kind of life and get to the city on public transportation.

So I don't think that in 2030 half of our infrastructure will have been built since 2000. Or if that's true, a lot of it will be rebuilt urban infrastructure. I wonder if the future of a place like Leesburg is not one of poverty. Will the United States become like Europe, with the wealthy in the city and the poor in the suburbs? Probably not precisely because of our love affair with the car and with the idealized suburban American Dream that still affects many people. But I can see a day in the near future with the wealthy in the cities, in semi-urban suburban developments like Kentlands, and in pricey exclusive subdivisions with lots of land on the far edges. In the vision, the working-class are basically priced out of the cities and are forced to live in these Leesburg-like subdivisions, living in places with poor schools, rotting infrastructure, and forced to spend much of their meagre income on gas to get to work in the cities. I don't think of this as ideal by any means, but I do believe that we have seen the end of exurban development as far as space from the central city goes.

The American Dream That Should Die

Poor Denver exurban residents. How can they keep living 60 miles away from work in their homes with 6 car garages. Waaaaaa!!!!!

Seriously, one good thing about the rise in gas prices is the knife in the heart of a core part of the American Dream. Should people even be allowed to live this far from work when they don't have to? Should anyone in the entire world own a 6 car garage?

The potential down side is forcing poor people out of the cities and making them commute to work when they don't have the money. The entire nation could become like Santa Fe in this sense and the economic disparities are disturbing. But this is something that could be dealt with through decent planning and public investment in transportation. But I feel zero sympathy for these exurban people who hate cities and cherish their open space while destroying that space through their lifestyles, crushing habitat and sending wildlife to localized extinction. Such living is a huge burden on taxpayers and local services. These people live on the wildland edge and expect the same hospital, police, and most importantly fire services as any other resident. As they age, ambulances will routinely have 50 + mile drives to bring people to hospitals. They cry for the killing of mountain lions and bears when they eat poor Fluffy. Well, don't put your cat outside when you live in mountain lion habitat!

Seriously, people living like this needed to end yesterday.

Democrats, Urban Sprawl, and Exurban Voters

Max Bergmann at Democracy Arsenal has an interesting point about exurban voters turning to the Democrats because of transportation issues. This is the kind of issue Democrats can really be leaders on. Living in the far-out exurbs sucks. Certainly some of the blame goes to the people who choose to live in these places. Everyone wants their big house (after all, how did humans live for so long with less than 1500 square feet per dwelling?) and their yard. The American Dream remains strong in our mythology. While lots of people are moving back into the cities, lots more continue to pour into ever expanding suburban development.

For years, these people voted for the Republicans, in large part because of racial issues and to some extent over taxes as well. But as Bergmann points out, this is changing. Much of the Democratic resurgence in Virginia has come from these areas. People move out there and then realize that the complete lack of urban planning makes their dreams a lot more like nightmares than they thought. With the collapsing housing market, massive debt load many of these homeowners took on, and the Republican crackdown on bankruptcies, a lot of voters seem to be reconsidering their political allegiances. Democrats are taking advantage and becoming increasingly competitive in places like Virginia, Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado--all states that face these problems.

I am also stealing Bergmann's photo here of the line between development and farmland. It's worth seeing what happens to America's beauty when we decide to live in the suburbs. The massive expansion of northern Virginia has destroyed tens of thousands of acres of our most beautiful and historical land. Does this beauty, so well-contrasted here with suburban dreck, not deserve to be saved? Obviously this is no wilderness, as if there really is such a thing anyway, but just because Europeans have a long historical interaction with a piece of land does not mean that we shouldn't save it from pointless development.

Bird Declines

This article on the speeding decline of songbird populations in the East distrubed me greatly, though I had heard this before. Some numbers:

Bobwhite:
40 years ago--31 million
Today--5.5 million

Evening Grosbeak:
40 years ago--17 million
Today--3.8 million

The study suggests a few major reasons for this. Climate change likely has something to do with it. Increasingly industrialized agriculture severely decimates bird habitat and definitely played a part too.

But probably the biggest reason is suburban expansion. The worst culprits are often second home buyers building a home in a previously undeveloped field. They need roads, power lines, and other services. Those roads are deathways for animals, though not birds so much. Moreover, many animals, both birds and others, need undeveloped land. A home, even if it is 1/8 mile away from the next home, destroys that. Suburban development is actually better in many cases than ex-urban development. And of course, animals and humans often like the same habitat, particularly along waterways.

One of the bigger lessons here is that the few people have more of a negative impact on the environment than the middle to upper class person who builds a second home. Ironically, many of these people claim to be environmentalists. They recycle and give money to the Wilderness Society. But they impact the planet far more negatively than the city dweller.