The other big thing was identifying the ideal as a detached single family house with a large lawn and dense housing as mostly for poor, likely brown, people with a few exceptions for rich people in desirable locations. Even things like condos have something of a “hasn’t made it” stigma for a lot of people, and that kind of thinking really locks in a lot of inefficient land use.
Awhile back I read an observation which really stuck with me questioning how much of the nostalgia many people have for college is due to that being the closest many Americans come to living in a walkable, high-density environment. Most people could do a lot better than 1-2 hours a day in solo car travel soaks up.
I like "walkable, high-density environments" myself, but most people who care about that are highly educated white people and white-adjacent minorities. Which is fine! Urbanism is compelling on its own merits. You don't have to "brown wash" it.
You’ll note that I was talking about how things are popularly portrayed, especially in the past — think about how “urban” became a popular euphemism when its literal meaning says nothing about about race. It’s not a coincidence that those images shifted notably after desegregation became the law of the land and that was enshrined as the way to know you’d made it for decades, and it’s certainly not a coincidence that almost everyone picked it up given how pervasive it was in mainstream discourse.
Once that became established, a lot of inefficiency was baked in: single-family rather than shared housing, driving yourself in a car rather than sharing a bus with strangers, not building things like sidewalks or favoring cul de sac designs to discourage non-residents traveling through a neighborhood, etc. You don’t need to know or care about the history half a century ago to think of those as the default when they’re what a lot of us were raised in and saw on TV/movies.
I still don’t understand the point of the race angle. Insofar as “urban” is undesirable because it’s a euphemism for “brown,” why would “brown” people be striving to move out of urban areas themselves? Bangladeshi immigrants don’t mind that Queens is full of other Bangladeshis. They mind that it’s crowded, you don’t have a big back yard, you have to walk everywhere, etc. The things you mention—shared housing, non-residents traveling though, aren’t things that “brown” people like any more than white people.
I think you’ve got the causality reversed. Most people, regardless of race, find suburban living more pleasant and more convenient. Urban areas tend to be more “brown” because that’s often where immigrants start out, because “brown” people tend to be younger and lower income, etc. Thus, whites are more able to attain the goal of suburban living. But it’s misleading to make it sound like the suburban preference arises out of white dislike for “brown” people, because the preference seems pretty uniform between races. (If anything, affluent people who prefer urban living are more likely to be white, judging from the demographics of gentrification.)
Urbanists have a good point that the suburban preference might be different if people in the suburbs were forced to bear the externalities of their lifestyle. But that has nothing to do with race.
The point is why there’s resistance to dense urban living. You seem intent on having a different argument entirely. It’s ok, no one’s saying people of color are supposed to inherently dislike the suburbs.
That some hipsters have found renewed value in density (mainly access to “culture”) is a separate, parallel development.
> The point is why there’s resistance to dense urban living.
Right—and OP theorized it was driven by associating “urban” living with “brown people.” My point is that this isn’t the reason, because “brown people” resist dense urban living as well and avoid it when they can afford suburban living.
(Mostly white) hipsters finding renewed value in density is fine. My objection is them working the “brown people” angle to make their cause more politically sympathetic.
To follow-up in that: as affluent urban professionals have become more progressive, “brown washing” of political issues has become a real problem. I think they realize that mostly white upper middle class professionals aren’t politically sympathetic blocs. So they project issues they disproportionately care about (urbanism, student loan debt relief, climate change) onto “brown people.”
Elizabeth Warren’s campaign did this extensively. Her voters on Super Tuesday were almost 80% white, out of an electorate (mostly southern and southwestern) that’s majority minority. But Warren tried to insert a racial angle into every issue.
Of course it’s the reason. It doesn’t matter if brown people do or don’t want to be in urban areas, the fact is they are there in greater numbers, and that keeps white folks away.
So I get it now, your angle here is the unfair presumption that POC are politically liberal. Which is fine, but the issue is tangential to the conversation about suburban density and urban renewal.
Do you really think it’s a just a random coincidence that suburbanization dramatically accelerated after the key civil rights era cases prevented cities from segregating city services? A ton of the suburbs had racial covenants, there was explicit imagery around who your kids would be going to school with, realtors and mortgages tried hard to steer people into certain areas, police departments were famous for following black or Latino drivers around if they entered a white suburb, etc. That lasted for decades — Palm Beach police did ID checks on black motorists to learn which resident hired them into the 1980s! — and one of the big things keeping it alive was this constant narrative that there were lawless hordes ready to leave the inner city and rampage through your neighborhood.
I don’t think it’s the only factor but I find it very hard to believe that decades of that imagery, often openly embraced by the political candidates those neighborhoods voted for, was coming from nowhere. Absent that, I think there would have been a very different arc for American cities between WWII and the turn of the century.
Suburbanization happened all over the world around that time. E.g. Amsterdam: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bic.... It happened more in the US than Europe because we had big swaths of empty land while Europe was much more developed already. And it happened as well in American cities that had no segregation to begin with, or non-whites to flee from.
“White flight” happened, but I think urbanists misunderstand the causality. The 1960s economic and technological revolution allowed people to enjoy comfortable suburban lives. Black people were prevented from doing so by economic circumstances and discrimination. But the impulse to leave to city wasn’t caused by that.
Over here in Sweden there was a massive investment in public transport and I think it's called transportation driviven development. So we did not get the same amount of dettached housing. The view of suburbs as comfortable has always been away to exploit the commons of cities like Galesburg. It's not only Galesburg that pays for this, it's the surrounding towns. People live in the suburbs of Galesburg travel to another town making it impossible to use public transport unless everyone works in a star network topology.
We are seeing that develooment in Stockholm now work is much more organic so and the rays of the star are over burdened by suburb transportation (public true, but mostly private).
> Most people, regardless of race, find suburban living more pleasant and more convenient.
This is very easy to disprove: houses and apartments in urban areas cost more than in the suburbs.
Most people are not able to afford a large enough apartment downtown because there is not enough supply, and so they prefer to pay the same for a larger place in the suburbs, but this is not the same as preferring the suburbs.
> This is very easy to disprove: houses and apartments in urban areas cost more than in the suburbs.
No. Prices are a function of both supply and demand. Demand for housing in cities is high relative to the supply of housing in cities. That doesn’t mean that the demand for urban housing is more than the demand for suburban housing—because the supply of the latter is vastly larger.
I interpreted the parent's comment as a reference to post-war deurbanization and "white flight," further fueled by openly discriminatory lending and occupation policies (redlining, etc.) at all levels of government and business.
Reurbanization by wealthy whites (and deurbanization by some minority groups) are part and parcel with the earlier trend, and don't entirely subvert it.
Black folks, too, as you can see from the phenomenon of the South Side of Chicago hemorrhaging residents to south suburbs like Olympia Fields. It's also, as I understand it, the story of the ringed suburbs of St. Louis.
The highest rates of population decline in the City of St. Louis are indeed on the mostly-black Northside, as those residents move to the North St. Louis County suburbs. See here:
Galesburg Illinois has a total population of 30k people, so nobody in Galesburg is spending 2 hours in a car unless they're commuting to another state.
I grew up not far from Galesburg, in a town roughly the same size. Many of the rural subdivision roads outside of downtown are paved with chipseal [1] rather than asphalt concrete or portland cement. While chipseal is certainly not as nice as concrete to drive on, it is much cheaper to maintain. I remember the road in front of my house getting re-treated every few years. Meanwhile the paved blvd connecting all these subdivisions hasn't been maintenanced since the 1980s, and is turning to rubble. So I personally think the problem (at least for small-ish midwestern towns) is the bias of state DOTs towards creating new infrastructure (paving new roadways / bridges) over maintaining the infrastructure they've already built (there's no ribbon-cutting ceremony when you're just filling potholes). Of course, this mentality only exacerbates the problem.
> Galesburg Illinois has a total population of 30k people, so nobody in Galesburg is spending 2 hours in a car unless they're commuting to another state.
Yes, that's why that was the upper range. Note also that I did not restrict it to commuting — designing around car-only transportation means that almost every common activity becomes time spent immobile in a car, and people famously underestimate the amount of time they spend driving, looking for parking, etc. — usually “a 20 minute drive” means “25 minutes if you exceed the speed limit, hit every light, and there's minimal traffic and parking right in front”. If you start measuring that, you realize how much time people spend on things like unnecessary (we have relatives who'll spend an hour going shopping for like half a bag of groceries) or single purpose errands in addition to commuting.
> So I personally think the problem (at least for small-ish midwestern towns) is the bias of state DOTs towards creating new infrastructure (paving new roadways / bridges) over maintaining the infrastructure they've already built
Definitely — and one big factor for this is that single-occupancy vehicles are extremely inefficient so there's always this call to add more lanes or a bypass road to “defeat” traffic, but that reliably encourages more usage so conditions usually only improve for a few months after opening.
Perhaps, but stacking houses into condos in Galesburg isn't going to change that. It seems like OP is suggesting that traffic is a problem (causing 2 hours in a car) that can be remedied by building up instead of out. The point I am making is that traffic is not a problem in Galesburg.
Do you mean there is some conspiracy that made people believe that not sharing walls and ceilings with others is somehow better than being always up to date on your neighbors business including their music preferences and substances they like to consume?
I find this very implausible. I grew up in Soviet block and all my friends and relatives grew in very dense small apartments yet all of them who could afford moved to houses as soon as they could.
Millions of people make that work and there are many advantages: it’s cheaper, more energy efficient, and if you drive less it’s healthier and safer for you and your neighbors. If you want to be social, like music, want a variety of healthy local businesses, etc. having considerably more people makes that work better.
My point was that when one style of living was picked as the goal and heavily promoted by policy it locked in a lot of negative outcomes like traffic jams and challenging local government finances.
It sure seems like you're trying to force a perspective without taking some fundamental human nature factors into account. Or deliberately ignoring them. But I'll go with just not realizing one thing... there's a lot of things about close quarters residency that a great many people ACTIVELY F'ING DESPISE. Noise, smells, and just... well, meet enough people and you may develop slightly less positive opinions of them as a whole and choose to live with some degree of space/separation that's not "ideal" from an efficiency standpoint.
Sure, the numbers say living like a meat popsicle is absolutely more 'cost effective' but that's a hard-pass from me.
Great - if you read my comment more carefully, note that I’m not saying you shouldn’t be able to live in suburb, but that that lifestyle choice should not be subsidized by everyone else.
I’m aware. Note how I specifically highlighted the imbalance caused by pretending it was the best option which most of the country was told to aspire to.
So who told Roman nobility to pretend they liked to live in their own houses and forced them out of lovely insulae with all the people living nearby and music and social life? I am guessing the "corporate media" is telling this to the people now, but who had been doing this all through the history before the printing press had been invented?
Sure, lots of people want to live like nobility but that doesn’t make it practical. Consider that when I wrote “the ideal” I was referring to the practicality of having a single style pushed as the goal for everyone. I don’t think suburbs should be banned but I do think they should be sustainably self-funding and that cities should reverse course and favor their own residents over car commuters.
I am not arguing practicality, I was just curious about the whole idea that people don't actually like to live separately and had been tricked into liking that by some unnamed forces. Obviously many people cannot afford the lifestyle they desire, I dare say nobody can. Even Elon Musk probably wants to live in a flying castle on Mars yet he has to make do with various mansions on Earth, such is life.
This is also a hint that people were not told to pretend they like it, is not it? Rich and powerful all through the history do not shun low density living and personal transport yet the message that I've replied to asserts that people only want these things because they are told to pretend they are desirable but without external influence people would rather live in apartments and have no personal transport.
You were contrasting a world that had about 150,000,000 people living it with today where we have about 7,800,000,000.
It's nothing to do with "class conflict", and all to do with load bearing. As things stand, we only just have the resources to support a fraction of those at Western living standards, and we damned well can't support the billions who haven't achieved them yet as things stand.
So yes, it's all about practicality.
And you and I are amongst the "patricians" already.
If it had nothing to do with the class conflict then you would not care how rich people live because rich accommodations do not create any noticeable load. And as for practicality - somebody living in a big house would not make your apartment any less practical yet you think everybody has to live like you.
I don't know if you are fooling yourself into thinking you are being rational and caring for environment and practicality but you are not fooling me.
Awhile back I read an observation which really stuck with me questioning how much of the nostalgia many people have for college is due to that being the closest many Americans come to living in a walkable, high-density environment. Most people could do a lot better than 1-2 hours a day in solo car travel soaks up.