Fifty Million Private Realms Might Be Wrong

Can't we do public space better?

I was at an ice cream shop a few months ago, and the starting point of the line was unclear. “Are you guys on line?” I asked a small group. “We’re not standing here sunning ourselves,” he said, “sure we are.”

Well.

Some time in the summer of last year, when the vaccine rollout had only been in earnest for a few months, I remember one particular drive to the supermarket. It was a beautiful, still, sunny day, comfortable but not hot. Walking from the parking lot into the supermarket, I noticed a lot of people.

They were standing there, sunning themselves in the asphalt like turtles. Leaning against their cars. Idling in cars, doing work or taking meetings. It was odd. I had never seen, or perhaps never noticed, people using a store’s parking lot as a sort of public space. At least not affluent, white-collar folks in Fairfax County. I’d seen this sort of thing in more working-class neighborhoods, where fewer people own cars and the legacy parking lots have become underutilized. Though in those cases, people were using the parking lots for commerce. And they weren’t in their cars.

I still notice what seems like a larger share of people than before the pandemic sitting in their cars, talking on the phone or doing nothing in particular. Maybe it’s remote work. Maybe it’s staying cool, or staying warm, while getting out of the house. But I doubt anybody really likes it. Maybe it’s because we just lack comfortable public spaces, especially in the suburbs, where you can sun yourself or take a meeting or go for a quick walk.

In fact, lots of the private developments with HOAs around here advertise these kinds of amenities; walking trails, a lake, etc. Generally those amenities are not parks, but private spaces for residents only.

There’s a point I’ve made before, which is germane here: our suboptimal built environment makes normal human behavior look odd or even suspicious. And there’s another point: private amenities in every development, and in every home, replicate the public realm in miniature, to the detriment of the public realm itself.

This reminds me of an experience back in college. In one of my environmental studies classes, we read an excerpt from Michael Maniates, a professor and environmental policy writer. (It was likely from this book, though I cannot find the exact reading.) He was critiquing the reliance on individual choices in environmentalism, and in American life. But not because change has to be from the top down, or because people cannot be trusted; more because what we perceive as “choices” are constrained and limited possibilities.

It is no good, for example, to urge people to take public transit instead of driving, when good public transit is not an option we are actually given, and when reliance on the automobile runs deep in our transportation policy. If better transit were an individual preference—and it often is—what “market” is there to express it? You can’t hold up cars and suburbia as America’s revealed preference when it’s baked into the cake as deeply as it is.

That’s what I remember, anyway, and how I would describe it today. It was interesting stuff. Was there a little academic, analytical Marxism in there? Sure, probably. But it was insightful, and above all it made the point that perhaps what we have now is not the unimpeachable, pure expression of our preferences, but rather one of many possible arrangements. For some people that’s elitist. I find it hopeful, and also pretty obviously true.

At a conservative political conference a year or two later, I ran into a student from Allegheny College, where Maniates then taught, and the student mentioned that he’d had a class with him. “Oh yeah, how was he?” I asked, intrigued. “He’s a communist,” the student scoffed.

Well, you could probably call me a communist, for writing something like this, elaborating on my observation above:

Suburbia can make totally normal behavior and activity look suspect, not because it is but because such a built environment runs contrary to what is normal behavior for quite a lot of people. Vending out of a parking lot is normal. Walking to nearby places is normal. Stopping to chat and just exist outside, in public, is normal. We’ve engineered an environment and a set of attitudes and perceptions that makes these totally normal things look odd and suspect. A huge part of urbanism, for me, is grasping this.

And it also brings me back to this question I posed last year, from the first related reading link:

Obviously, a lot of people like having a little piece of private land. Yet many of the same people dislike the ever-growing penumbra of sprawl in the region. And pretty much all growing metros see the same pattern.

I’d like raise an alternative arrangement: if you live in the D.C. area or a region like it, would you trade some private, small green space, and maybe even a little bit of privacy, for more coherent, functioning open space and countryside closer to the population center? For more access to nature?

I guess I’m asking you again.

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Related Reading:

Have You Ever Seen a Nursery Like This?

Everyone’s a Little Bit NIMBY

The Path of Most Desire

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