An Emergency On Your Part

Further thoughts on the psychology of suburbanites towards cities

I’ll start with a semi-tangent: I hate the phrase “a lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.” It’s kind of like, yeah, I know, I know, but you don’t have to tell me. It’s like the stuffy old colleague I had once who got a drink spilled on him by a waitress and then later in the meal, when asked how the drink was, remarked, “I like it better when it isn’t on me.” Not wrong, but come on, man.

That phrase might be strictly speaking true, but think about how kind it is for someone to go out of their way to accommodate your mistake. If you fumble and drop your coffee before you’ve even left the coffee shop, a lot of the time they’ll make you a new drink for free, even though they don’t have to.

Or, I remember a story I read about someone’s grandmother (I think) on a farm, who bought all the kids new clothes for school from Sears, the only time they ever could afford clothes. The pigs went crazy and pushed over the washtub which somehow ruined the clothes (something to do with the color running). The grandmother wrote a desperate letter to Sears explaining what happened, and they replaced all the ruined clothes for free.

Not the right thing to do, per se, but the kind thing, which maybe is the right thing.

Anyway, I want to focus in on something I’ve expressed before, and which some folks have found kind of mystifying and others have found perfectly encapsulates the suburbanite psychology towards big cities.

In my long essay on my visit to New York City that I published before Christmas, I had an introductory bit about being a suburban kid visiting Manhattan from rural-exurban Hunterdon County, in New Jersey. I wrote about how I experienced the city and probably formed my (pre-urbanist!) views on cities, which were kind of inchoately resentful and suspicious and fearful. If you read that piece you can skip this, but I’m going to quote that part here:

I’d never really liked New York City—by which I always meant Manhattan—growing up. My father commuted to Manhattan every day, and we would daytrip in on the weekends fairly often. This was in the late 1990s and early 2000s, so New York was probably about as clean and low-crime as it ever was or will be. We never had any safety issues. We saw homelessness, though not of the aggressive or intoxicated variety—once I gave a homeless man a quarter, and he said I made his day.

But despite never having any issues or close encounters, I always found the city too loud, too dirty—too much. I remember the drives home more than the days out, when we’d pull off I-78, then U.S. 22, and get on a quiet country road heading home to our multi-acre lot.

Looking back, I probably took the city for granted. I had no understanding that it was something unique in America. I remember my mother, who grew up in Manhattan, would always seem so excited and lively when we first stepped out into the street (from a parking garage—I think we drove into Manhattan and parked for the day every time we visited). I could never understand that. I certainly never felt it.

Part of this, in addition to not really understanding what a “big city” was, was experiencing it through the lens of the prevailing suburban attitude. I experienced my parents’ sensible advice, about not pointing at people or yelling “Mommy why is that man doing that?” and whatnot, as evidence that cities were places where you could never let your hair down. I think, even at that age, I felt that the difficulty of arriving to the city by car meant that it was somehow walled off for me, not for me—the car, in my imagination, being like the air I breathed. And since I had little understanding that millions of people lived in cities, these annoyances seemed arbitrary, and directed at us. This, I think, is how so many suburbanites develop a vaguely conspiratorial view of cities.

I understood, if that’s the right word, that your house and your land was your refuge, and that you ventured out into the city and braved its discomforts once in awhile for the amenities the city had. Museums, shows, food tours, fine restaurants, quirky neighborhoods, the highest forms of things like Italian and Jewish delis. I don’t think it ever even occurred to me that cities have these things mostly because cities have a lot of people. Cities were just sort of there, for other people, their existence inducing a kind of suspicion.

In other words, I never really saw the city for what it actually was—a large, densely populated human settlement full of all of the things people do. I really wonder how many people never think of it this way at all.

And because congestion pricing in New York City just began recently, I’ll also share a line from my piece on that which touches on this:

For a lot of people, the subway is too dirty/too dangerous/too unreliable, and it isn’t an option in their minds. So they perceive a tax on car entry as basically a ban on their right to visit the city unmolested.

To this day, when I drive on the I-95 past Philadelphia, I get a certain feeling—something like, it would be fun to pull off at the Central Philly exit and grab some takeout from Chinatown for dinner! But the city throws up so much friction for doing that that it’s effectively off-limits for me. I’m supposed to like and support this place that is set up to not let me access it?

I no longer—at all—actually think this. But it’s still kind of my gut reaction when I see a big urban skyline from the highway. I now realize that my choice to be in a car imposes this inconvenience on me. The city is just being faithful to what a city is, in making it frictional to drop in with your car and park easily or free right in front of the thing you want. (Actually, if the cost of parking were higher, it would be easier to find a spot near the thing you want.)

Now this does, in fact, circle back to “a lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.” Cities require more work than suburbia—more planning, more wayfinding, more figuring out, more street smarts. Suburbia, in its oceans of free parking at every destination, effectively outsources the planning of the shopper/visitor to everyone else: to property and business owners, and taxpayers.

The necessity of thinking about where and how to park, or planning and learning the train or bus schedule, is done for you—in the form of extremely expensive zoning mandates (minimum parking-space requirements) or taxpayer-funded infrastructure projects (road networks built on the assumption that nearly all mobility takes place via the car.) Someone on social media (maybe paraphrasing an urban planner, I can’t dig up the tweet) once said something like “the problem with the car is it must be accommodated everywhere it can go.” And if those accommodations are not made, the motorist experiences that as a slight against him.

To a suburbanite who’s used to this built environment that does a great deal of planning and logistical work for them—at a cost that is not easy to discern—simply being in the city feels like someone is imposing a mental load on you, and then turning around and laughing at you for struggling. A lack of planning on your part, suburbanite, does not constitute an emergency on mine.

And if you’re someone who—like me, at one time—has never even considered that cities are not there to extract some cost or burden from you, but just there, full of people like you who live a little differently, then suspicion and resentment are the most normal and understandable human responses.

What I’m getting to here is that apart from some annoying online folks, urbanists are not about hassling suburbanites to get a rise out of them, and cities are not there to extract taxes or tolls or time from noble commuters who worked hard enough to afford an actual house with some land. It may very well be the case that a lot of people who like cities or grew up in them or advocate for them don’t really have any idea that this loose narrative about cities exists in the heads of regular suburbanites.

So what I’m doing here is not trying to justify, but to explain. Honestly, I don’t know where this idea came from, and certainly not how I absorbed it. My parents never taught me to think about cities like this. But somehow, I did absorb it, and based on the comments I’ve gotten over the years writing pieces like this, I don’t think I’m alone.

I understand that it’s frustrating for advocates to treat people opposed to them with good faith and patience, but sometimes that’s what you need to do. Especially when the people who disagree with you may themselves not be fully aware that there are other viewpoints that it is possible to hold.

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Related Reading:

An Urban People

No Harm, No Foul?

Urbanism Without Cities?

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