I live in an inner ring suburb of a major city. Single family houses but no sprawling yards. I can walk to a rail station that gets me into the city, albeit slower than driving and much less reliably on weekends which is something that could probably use improvement. I lived in the city until there were 2 drive by shootings on my block and the noise (not general "life is happening" noise but "500-watt speakers blasting music at 2 am" nose) became unbearable. Those problems are solved out here. But I deeply miss being able to walk to the corner store when I just need to grab milk or eggs or, I'll admit it, a bag of chips. I want the urbanism that means I can get somewhere like that without walking alongside Route 1 to a gas station where the convenience store clerk is behind bullet proof glass and they don't carry eggs anyway. And if they build a few more apartments, too, that's just fine by me. Might be nice to have an in-town bus or two that went to the Main Street we do have. All of our bus routes are commuter routes into the city. Do all that and you'd be describing the UK village my friend lives in. She hasn't had a driver's license since she moved there from the US 15 years ago.
There are a lot of places like that around Boston (Somerville, much of Cambridge, Arlington, Brookline, parts of every town near the centers.) I moved from Somerville to a suburb here and the suburb is much louder, due to incessant mowers and leaf blowers. Expensive but so is metro London!
At one point our family decided we might want to move somewhere warmer, at least a bit cheaper, and with decent public schools. This is where we were frustrated…very hard to find combo of those three + walkability in the US.
This posting begins with ironic commentary on "fear of change" coupled with lament and fear of change in the de-peopling of big cities. The desirability of relocating to areas with cheaper landscape gets rude and summary treatment in this article. That's "fear of change" in a nutshell. Urbanists fixated on their urbanities thus misinterpret Vance and his audience. I suggest one ponder the ultimate destruction of the family due to abortion. Start there.
A discussion of change absent the substantive issues is not very helpful. Certainly some of the anti-urbanist, car-dependence pushback flow from personal hang-ups, but that is a bad case of underestimating the opposition. Nobody hates suburbia more than I do, but suburban apologists have a very coherent world view and we need to criticize the arguments on the merits rather than psychologize them.
I sent the Derek Thompson piece to a lot of friends
Kevin Erdman's thoughts on the Kalamazoo article were very interesting:
https://open.substack.com/pub/kevinerdmann/p/what-kalamazoo-reveals-about-the?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=c8k75
I live in an inner ring suburb of a major city. Single family houses but no sprawling yards. I can walk to a rail station that gets me into the city, albeit slower than driving and much less reliably on weekends which is something that could probably use improvement. I lived in the city until there were 2 drive by shootings on my block and the noise (not general "life is happening" noise but "500-watt speakers blasting music at 2 am" nose) became unbearable. Those problems are solved out here. But I deeply miss being able to walk to the corner store when I just need to grab milk or eggs or, I'll admit it, a bag of chips. I want the urbanism that means I can get somewhere like that without walking alongside Route 1 to a gas station where the convenience store clerk is behind bullet proof glass and they don't carry eggs anyway. And if they build a few more apartments, too, that's just fine by me. Might be nice to have an in-town bus or two that went to the Main Street we do have. All of our bus routes are commuter routes into the city. Do all that and you'd be describing the UK village my friend lives in. She hasn't had a driver's license since she moved there from the US 15 years ago.
There are a lot of places like that around Boston (Somerville, much of Cambridge, Arlington, Brookline, parts of every town near the centers.) I moved from Somerville to a suburb here and the suburb is much louder, due to incessant mowers and leaf blowers. Expensive but so is metro London!
At one point our family decided we might want to move somewhere warmer, at least a bit cheaper, and with decent public schools. This is where we were frustrated…very hard to find combo of those three + walkability in the US.
This posting begins with ironic commentary on "fear of change" coupled with lament and fear of change in the de-peopling of big cities. The desirability of relocating to areas with cheaper landscape gets rude and summary treatment in this article. That's "fear of change" in a nutshell. Urbanists fixated on their urbanities thus misinterpret Vance and his audience. I suggest one ponder the ultimate destruction of the family due to abortion. Start there.
A discussion of change absent the substantive issues is not very helpful. Certainly some of the anti-urbanist, car-dependence pushback flow from personal hang-ups, but that is a bad case of underestimating the opposition. Nobody hates suburbia more than I do, but suburban apologists have a very coherent world view and we need to criticize the arguments on the merits rather than psychologize them.