I have a couple thoughts. 1) I have never lived in an apartment or known anybody who does live in an apartment with keycards. I've hardly known people who lived in buildings with lobbies. Just because we live in apartments doesn't mean we don't have doors to lock.
2) The weather matters for apartment dwellers. I might not have to run a wet dry vac myself, but I still might need to fight with my landlord about getting leaks fixed, or informing them that the basement flooded, put out the furnaces and we can't do our laundry. I knew someone living in a basement apartment in NYC who was flooded out of their home. Many places I've lived, tenants are responsible for shoveling snow in the driveway and sidewalk. In fact, I would say weather ties the apartment dweller to their home more than the householder -- if it's pouring with rain, you can just get in your car and go. I have to walk 10 minutes to a train or bus. I have to ask myself if I want to get soaked to the bone to see my friends.
3) It is possible to own an apartment. It's called a condo or co-op. People always forget about them. Similarly, I've known people who rented single family houses and had to take care of lawns.
4) This whole dichotomy does not exist in Europe. As Adna Ferrin Weber wrote in 1899, Americans have a "penchant for dwelling in cottage homes" that even predated the streetcar. European artisocrats built townhouses in cities and did urban things like hosting parties and salons and so on in them, or went to cafes, while saving country pursuits for their country houses. We put country houses in our cities and complain that we can't do our country pursuits in them. Despite the enormous amount of money and effort expended to promote homeownership in the United States, it's not that much higher than in European countries that don't use policy to favor homeowners and hurt apartment-dwellers.
Good points, especially re the Europe/US dichotomy. I did specify, though, that my experience was in a modern building, of the sort they're building everywhere. The thing is these modern buildings are *nice*, and if the management company is decent you don't have to worry about much. That's partly where the idea comes from that it's an easy luxury and homeownership is responsible work.
Are there any stats on public transit use by renters vs. homeowners (or condo owners) in the same city or neighborhood? I do notice that friends who own homes or condos in areas with plenty of public transit are warier of using the subway than adults in arrested development like me who still rent. But I have no data to support this.
I think a core idea that's ... not missing exactly, but undescribed here is the idea of home as a space of retreat. A home, any home, is a place that is *yours*, where you can go to be not-in-public. Where things get interesting is when we consider group affairs. At the smallest sizes, a home might be a simple studio apartment, or one shared with roommates, or similar. In that sort of situation, you can't really provide a private space to others without it being fairly intimate. Either poker night is played on your bed, or you're not exactly in a private space because it's shared with another party. Likewise there's very little space to do things, even when alone. You might go out to dinner or see a movie just to be somewhere other than the one room that is "yours". As the home expands, so to do the possibilities. You become able to bring others into this private space of yours without ceding all of your privacy. When your private space is less restrictive, there's less need to escape it. And of course, as private life expands, public life shrinks.
I think it's important to understand this, and to know not only where your own private/public boundary is, but to see when others have their boundary in a different place. Doutthat is a moron and his endorsement is as good a reason as any to ignore Crawford, but that's neither here nor there. The actual friction you're describing can be seen, at least partially, as a consequence of people saying "that should be public" or, more often in the suburbanite's case, "that should be kept private" without regard for the varied volumes of our private spaces.
I agree that there is an underlying tension here between privacy and responsibility. To spell it out, anything that's private is wholly your responsibility, whereas anything non-private has a shared responsibility (through various mechanisms and at various scales).
The American Dream of suburbia celebrates an ever-"biggering" of private space. Bigger home, bigger yard, more vehicles, etc. To Addison's point, your skin in the game goes up as does the cost maintaining your sphere.
At a certain point, however, it appears that we become so preoccupied by our private world that we forget how truly dependent we become on society around us. "If people only knew how damn hard I had to work to keep my affairs in order...." quickly takes a protectionist turn. On a micro scale, we must limit risk to our massive investments. On a macro scale, I believe an over-expansion of private space leads to a suburban forgetting of just how beholden the surburbs are to the rest of the city.
I think Addison's getting at the tension between the outsourcing of responsibility that comes with fancy apartment life (and understandably doesn't get into the dynamics of low-income renters with little choice in the matter, which would massively expand the scope of the article) and the over-appropriation of private space in the suburbs that leads to an insular, risk- and change-averse ideology.
That privacy bubble consequence is something I definitely experience here in the suburbs.
My kids' bus stop is on a corner where the sidewalk is perpetually overgrown with weeds. I kept thinking "Why doesn't the town take care of this?" ... until I realized that (a) the responsibility to keep the sidewalk clear belongs to the bordering property owner, and (b) the difference between that stretch and another parcel further down.
That particular sidewalk borders several BACK yards, but further down it borders FRONT yards. The front-yard people see the sidewalk in front of their house, and it's no extra work to mow the grass all the way to the edge. The backyard people don't see the sidewalk; it's behind a hedge or a copse of trees or down a brambly hill. Because they don't SEE it, they don't have to think about how it affects others, and they don't maintain it. Their privacy affects the public nature of the sidewalk.
(Also, I stopped complaining and now I just trim those spots back myself. Because I have a vested interest in keeping them clear, unlike the property owners.)
Wrt to your closing question -- suburbia is totally isolating. Even leaving aside questions of whether / how becoming an owner/occupier might impact our psychology, the suburban environment literally separates us. Setbacks, minimum lot sizes, private car dependency, etc all create physical separation and create friction for face to face interaction. We could argue whether that's a feature or a bug, but I think it's a factually accurate account of suburbia.
Also, it kills me when folks try to code car driving / SFHs as somehow ideologically conservative. I'm pretty sure the only logically consistent conservative take on that is the Chuck Marohn / Strong Towns position.
I have a couple thoughts. 1) I have never lived in an apartment or known anybody who does live in an apartment with keycards. I've hardly known people who lived in buildings with lobbies. Just because we live in apartments doesn't mean we don't have doors to lock.
2) The weather matters for apartment dwellers. I might not have to run a wet dry vac myself, but I still might need to fight with my landlord about getting leaks fixed, or informing them that the basement flooded, put out the furnaces and we can't do our laundry. I knew someone living in a basement apartment in NYC who was flooded out of their home. Many places I've lived, tenants are responsible for shoveling snow in the driveway and sidewalk. In fact, I would say weather ties the apartment dweller to their home more than the householder -- if it's pouring with rain, you can just get in your car and go. I have to walk 10 minutes to a train or bus. I have to ask myself if I want to get soaked to the bone to see my friends.
3) It is possible to own an apartment. It's called a condo or co-op. People always forget about them. Similarly, I've known people who rented single family houses and had to take care of lawns.
4) This whole dichotomy does not exist in Europe. As Adna Ferrin Weber wrote in 1899, Americans have a "penchant for dwelling in cottage homes" that even predated the streetcar. European artisocrats built townhouses in cities and did urban things like hosting parties and salons and so on in them, or went to cafes, while saving country pursuits for their country houses. We put country houses in our cities and complain that we can't do our country pursuits in them. Despite the enormous amount of money and effort expended to promote homeownership in the United States, it's not that much higher than in European countries that don't use policy to favor homeowners and hurt apartment-dwellers.
Good points, especially re the Europe/US dichotomy. I did specify, though, that my experience was in a modern building, of the sort they're building everywhere. The thing is these modern buildings are *nice*, and if the management company is decent you don't have to worry about much. That's partly where the idea comes from that it's an easy luxury and homeownership is responsible work.
Are there any stats on public transit use by renters vs. homeowners (or condo owners) in the same city or neighborhood? I do notice that friends who own homes or condos in areas with plenty of public transit are warier of using the subway than adults in arrested development like me who still rent. But I have no data to support this.
I don't know, but that's a very good question!
I think a core idea that's ... not missing exactly, but undescribed here is the idea of home as a space of retreat. A home, any home, is a place that is *yours*, where you can go to be not-in-public. Where things get interesting is when we consider group affairs. At the smallest sizes, a home might be a simple studio apartment, or one shared with roommates, or similar. In that sort of situation, you can't really provide a private space to others without it being fairly intimate. Either poker night is played on your bed, or you're not exactly in a private space because it's shared with another party. Likewise there's very little space to do things, even when alone. You might go out to dinner or see a movie just to be somewhere other than the one room that is "yours". As the home expands, so to do the possibilities. You become able to bring others into this private space of yours without ceding all of your privacy. When your private space is less restrictive, there's less need to escape it. And of course, as private life expands, public life shrinks.
I think it's important to understand this, and to know not only where your own private/public boundary is, but to see when others have their boundary in a different place. Doutthat is a moron and his endorsement is as good a reason as any to ignore Crawford, but that's neither here nor there. The actual friction you're describing can be seen, at least partially, as a consequence of people saying "that should be public" or, more often in the suburbanite's case, "that should be kept private" without regard for the varied volumes of our private spaces.
I agree that there is an underlying tension here between privacy and responsibility. To spell it out, anything that's private is wholly your responsibility, whereas anything non-private has a shared responsibility (through various mechanisms and at various scales).
The American Dream of suburbia celebrates an ever-"biggering" of private space. Bigger home, bigger yard, more vehicles, etc. To Addison's point, your skin in the game goes up as does the cost maintaining your sphere.
At a certain point, however, it appears that we become so preoccupied by our private world that we forget how truly dependent we become on society around us. "If people only knew how damn hard I had to work to keep my affairs in order...." quickly takes a protectionist turn. On a micro scale, we must limit risk to our massive investments. On a macro scale, I believe an over-expansion of private space leads to a suburban forgetting of just how beholden the surburbs are to the rest of the city.
I think Addison's getting at the tension between the outsourcing of responsibility that comes with fancy apartment life (and understandably doesn't get into the dynamics of low-income renters with little choice in the matter, which would massively expand the scope of the article) and the over-appropriation of private space in the suburbs that leads to an insular, risk- and change-averse ideology.
That privacy bubble consequence is something I definitely experience here in the suburbs.
My kids' bus stop is on a corner where the sidewalk is perpetually overgrown with weeds. I kept thinking "Why doesn't the town take care of this?" ... until I realized that (a) the responsibility to keep the sidewalk clear belongs to the bordering property owner, and (b) the difference between that stretch and another parcel further down.
That particular sidewalk borders several BACK yards, but further down it borders FRONT yards. The front-yard people see the sidewalk in front of their house, and it's no extra work to mow the grass all the way to the edge. The backyard people don't see the sidewalk; it's behind a hedge or a copse of trees or down a brambly hill. Because they don't SEE it, they don't have to think about how it affects others, and they don't maintain it. Their privacy affects the public nature of the sidewalk.
(Also, I stopped complaining and now I just trim those spots back myself. Because I have a vested interest in keeping them clear, unlike the property owners.)
Wrt to your closing question -- suburbia is totally isolating. Even leaving aside questions of whether / how becoming an owner/occupier might impact our psychology, the suburban environment literally separates us. Setbacks, minimum lot sizes, private car dependency, etc all create physical separation and create friction for face to face interaction. We could argue whether that's a feature or a bug, but I think it's a factually accurate account of suburbia.
Also, it kills me when folks try to code car driving / SFHs as somehow ideologically conservative. I'm pretty sure the only logically consistent conservative take on that is the Chuck Marohn / Strong Towns position.