Does Anyone Like Suburbia?

How do we know which choices indicate a preference?

Longtime readers will know one of my core contentions here in articulating a center-right (or really, nonpartisan) American urbanism is the idea that small towns are cities. By which I mean, urbanism can come in a small-town or a big-city setting, size, and intensity, but it’s the same basic thing. Here are a couple of pieces on that theme.

Now sometimes, I’ll get comments like this one:

The small town of 200 people I live near is literally nothing like a city. It has community and a common culture. There are no pride flags on any business or government buildings. There aren’t people from all around the world. There is very little crime as everyone is heavily armed and people know better than to f*ck around. It is literally the antithesis in all respects of a city….

Some of us are consciously and with clarity of purpose rejecting the soullessness of bustling urban hustle culture that strips mines life of the personal and unique which gives life meaning.

That’s a particularly trollish example. But I’ll get more reasonable versions of this, basically saying, look, we like driving ten minutes to the store, we like having a house with a front and back yard, we don’t want the energy of the city, or we’re at least willing to give it up for the benefits of suburbia. Or there will be people who don’t really distinguish between suburban and small-town life, implicitly thinking of towns not as distinct urban places but basically lifestyle amenities within suburbia. Other people love their small towns, but don’t have any sense of their fundamental urbanity. I still remember one comment to the effect of, “It’s our patriotism and our faith that make us who we are, not our land use.”

I believe these folks, I guess. Sometimes, I sort of think I’m saying, “Nobody really likes suburbia—everyone is an urbanist but just doesn’t know it.” Am I basically saying that suburbanites (or small-towners who don’t grok what small towns really are) are in thrall to false consciousness?

Well—only to the extent that I think I was.

I’ve written many times that I easily could have grown up to be your typical NIMBY-ish suburbanite who rarely rides transit, drives everywhere, groans at all the new construction and traffic coming all the way out here, etc. etc. That’s more or less how I grew up. I never lived in a city, I didn’t grow up riding transit (there was hardly any to speak of where I lived, anyway), and it was sort of a truism that of course we don’t want more traffic and more crowding. I articulated that here, and why—in fairness to NIMBYs—a lot of new stuff in suburbia isn’t well designed and does create a feeling of crowdedness and unease.

But I never would have come to the realization that automobile traffic is not equal to people. That sprawl generates traffic because of its low densities. I would not have had any real sense that there was any other way to live. I would have only seen urbanist ideas presented through right-wing media: “war on cars,” “control how you live,” “you must have low-income people for neighbors because equity,” “the bike freaks want to take away traffic lanes,” “they’re coming for your schools.” “Cities are for barren women with dogs.” “Cities are dens of crime.” Whatever.

I emphasize this because I need to remind myself—and some progressive urbanists need to learn—that this sort of thing is literally the only urbanist-adjacent opinion that a huge number of Americans have ever heard.

I would very likely have thought I believed it. That’s disquieting to me, because there’s no way to know what you truly believe, and what you have simply absorbed by osmosis.

This is what attracted me to Strong Towns way back: they managed to take many of the same ideas you get from left-leaning urbanists and housing advocates, and strip them of all the political signifiers that would have made my old self suspicious. By doing this, they helped me to see the ideas, not the packaging that would have signaled to me, wrongly, that the idea was no good.

You see this with bikes. A lot of people who are sort of bike advocates are very angry. They’re angry—I now understand—because cycling is needlessly dangerous. Almost all of them have had close calls with motorists, who often are themselves angry. Many of them have had friends injured or killed by motorists. Couple that with the internet and the style of social media, and they can come across as bitter and snarky, in addition to sounding “activisty.”

A lot of people will never stop and wonder what real, material reasons they have for feeling or sounding that way. All they will do is pattern-match and say “These bike people sound kind of socialist or lefty, so whatever they want must be wrong.” And that’s it.

Until a few years ago, that was my reaction, more or less. I never knew a single person who biked for transportation purposes. It would never have occurred to me that it was possible to bike somewhere for the purpose of running an errand. None of it felt like a real thing from my vantage point. If you express that on social media you might get piled on for being clueless, which will only confirm your impressions about these people.

All this is to say, the things people say and do don’t necessarily reveal preferences or beliefs, because to some real extent, we don’t know what we want or believe.

So I want to raise this tweet from National Review (the piece is by Joel Kotkin, who’s been beating the “war against the suburbs” drum for so many years I’m surprised it isn’t broken):

No, planners’ preference for density shouldn’t supersede Americans’ preference for suburbia! I agree. It’s a good thing the setup is false.

I’ve quoted this piece at length before, so I’ll just quote it a little bit here. But it’s a fantastic breakdown by Daniel Herriges, over at Strong Towns, of why the opinion surveys supposedly showing large majority preferences for the car-and-suburb status quo are basically useless at telling us anything about preferences.

Here’s just one little piece of it:

What are you buying when you buy a house (or rent one)? The answer is a "bundle" of housing and neighborhood attributes. These include the location, nearby amenities, and transportation options; the features of the home itself; the (perceived or real) quality of the school district; the local tax rate; the crime rate and your own subjective feelings of safety or comfort; and a community of people you might find like-minded and agreeable or otherwise.

You don't get to pick these characteristics à la carte: they only come bundled. And it's nearly impossible for a survey to neatly separate the pieces of that bundle for us, to the point where most respondents would make a dispassionate judgment about something like walkability separate from any other cultural, class, or lifestyle associations they carry in their minds.

Read the whole thing.

In short, it’s like this: ask people if they prefer chocolate or vanilla ice cream, or if they prefer Democrats or Republicans, or cats or dogs, and those answers will reflect preferences, because everyone knows what both of those options are and can choose which one they like. But asking Americans if they prefer suburbia over dense, urban, walkable places is like asking them if they prefer cats or unicorns. You can’t poll people about things that effectively don’t exist and which they effectively can’t choose.

So I’m not saying people don’t know what’s good for them and urbanists have to decide it for them. And I’m not accusing the folks who do like suburbia of being in thrall to “false consciousness.” I just find the experience of having changed my own mind—and realizing that there was a time I would have disagreed with a lot of my own writing today—rather humbling, and almost spooky.

And if you’ve had that feeling before, maybe you should wonder how many of your seemingly strongly held preferences might just…not be.

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Related Reading:

Have You Ever Seen A City?

NIMBYs and Neocons

Swingin’ in the Train

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