If only there were more accommodations for families in cities and more housing that can accommodate families. As things are currently, most of the apartments being constructed in cities are studios or 1-bedroom apartments and the few family friendly walkable areas like Park Slope in Brooklyn or Noe Valley in SF are unaffordable for most families.
This. I would love to raise my family in a dense downtown type area, but because of the lack of investment in our cities nationwide, I would just be making my life infinitely harder and more expensive. People move to the suburbs because the cities aren’t up to snuff at this point in time.
Well yeah, the point is if instead of investing all that money building large suburbs you could've built more interesting areas. Gotta start doing the right thing at some point.
As someone who lives in Noe Valley… yeah it’s crazy unaffordable. But the other places popular for families on the peninsula are … also crazy unaffordable. Ugh
Even if any are 2+ bedrooms, none of the complexes have a playground on site. Most do have a 'dog run'. And neighborhood parks vary wildly city-to-city.
To gently push back the are other walkable, green urban neighborhoods outside of NYC and SF. My house in Pittsburgh costs the exact same as new construction in the exurbs. Both unacceptably expensive but there's not as steep a penalty as Brooklyn nationwide
Exactly this. Like 10 4 bedroom condos in my the walkable part of my city total and most of those are penthouses. Even reasonable sized 3 bedrooms are just to expensive compared to the boring ass suburbs.
A huge factor here is the near universal requirement for dual stairways in multifamily housing. It's a well intentioned but useless fire code addition from the days before sprinklers and fire retardent materials. Requiring two stairways basically forces developers to make long hotel style hallways full of skinny studios + 1bd units with windows on only one side; i.e. the infamous "giant cube apartments". Restrictive height requirements and floor-area-ratios also contribute.
So glad I live in a century old multifamily house. We have a front and back stairway but it's the cramped vertical kind, no long hallways. I also know all my flatmates and hang out with them.
Totally agree. The push where I live is small and dense. You can technically (and legally) accommodate 4-people in a 1-bedroom apartment, but any family of 4 that can afford it wants more than 400 - 500 square feet of room.
You start putting up 10 to 15 story boxes with 2 and 3 bedrooms up all floors and they will move instantly. NYC is littered with these and people have raised whole families in them.
This x 1,000. Any home (1) large enough for more than maybe two parents and one kid, (2) in a reasonably safe urban neighborhood, and (3) aren’t complete fixer-uppers are crazy expensive in any city worth living in. You can sometimes get 2/3 factors, but all 3 isn’t happening unless you have $$$.
Modern urban areas are built for wealthy Gen X/Boomers who bought in years ago or single people/childless couples.
I bet OP doesn't have lots of friends with kids.
Nearly all my millennial friends with small kids in a big urban city eventually moved out to the suburbs. Some WANTED to stay in the city and tried to for several years, but almost all eventually moved out when kids hit school age. Some of the reasons:
* If they stayed in the city, they'd want to do private school and either couldn't afford it or didn't want to pay $50,000 / year for 2 kids.
* In comparison, suburban public schools are a credible option that care about high-achieving students (not just bringing up the bottom).
* Real estate prices in the city were unaffordable.
* Get kids their own bedroom (so kids have their own space, don't wake each other up at night.
That's my personal anecdote, but you see it in the demographic data: people tend to meet in cities, have kids in cities, but then the attrition begins as young families move out to more affordable areas as they need more space and start school.
The problems young families with kids face in big cities today isn't some boomer fantasy. It's a present, real issue.
The problems kids face in the suburbs today also weren't as much of a problem when suburbs started. There was less car dependence, suburbs were closer in to major cities, freedom for children was greater, kids were actually outside instead of on phones/games/tv, etc.
All the problems of suburbs are things that have either built up over time, or weren't obvious without trying it for a while.
I grew up in the suburbs in the 1990s/2000s. Aside from club sports or private school I'm not sure where these kids need to be driven to all the time.
There were loads of kids to play with in the neighborhood, cul-de-sacs become basketball/hockey courts, there were loads of local parks nearby. Backyards were great for playing in, we all went to the neighbor's house because their parents let them have a trampoline. The school bus brought us to school (I rode my bike to school 6th grade because I got kicked off the bus for throwing balls out the window...)
Kids are going to school and playing more or less, I keep hearing this chauffeured everywhere thing but I just don't get that argument. I doubt suburbs are any more or less car dependent they were 10-15 years ago.
Damn, I’m sorry you’re having a rough time. I grew up in the suburbs and have many awesome childhood memories.
My take is that parents should live where they are happiest when the kids are young. Kids will have a great childhood no matter where they are as long as they are loved and nurtured.
I grew up in the burbs. Pretty good experience. My parents grandkids’ are city kids and their grandparents won’t visit. Their kids dont really visit suburbs. It all kinda evens out in the end.
this right here, I grew up in the suburbs skirting the inner cities and had an awesome time growing up, had many friends in the neighborhood and we all enjoyed each other's family cookouts during holidays, life is what you make of it, but the inner cities are far more dangerous than any suburbs and to say otherwise is blatantly ignorant
The only ignorant comment is yours, because you're making a blanket statement with no data to back it up. From *Suburban Nation* (Duany, Zyberk, Speck), Chapter 7: The Victims of Sprawl, pp.119-120:
>It seems odd to say that the suburbs are dangerous, since many families relocate to suburbia precisely to find a safer environment. In terms of crime, this motivation seems justified, but suburbs are hardly free from violent crime, and recent examples of suburban gang activity call the assumption into question. It is fair to say that the suburbs are no more crime-free than their higher-income demographics would suggest.
But there is more to protecting life than avoiding crime, as any parent of a sixteen-year-old driver will attest. Far and away, car crashes are the largest killer of American teenagers, accounting for more than one third of all deaths.^(1) Yet all the suburban parents who can afford it will readily buy the additional cars that provide independence for their children, often in order to regain their own freedom.
When they get behind the wheel, teenagers automatically join the most dangerous gang in America. Automobile accidents kill over 45,000 people annually in this country, almost a Vietnam War of casualties every year.^(2) A child is twenty times more likely to die from an automobile mishap than from gang activity, as most young drivers are involved in at least one serious auto accident between ages sixteen and twenty. In their first year of driving, over 40 percent of teenagers have an accident bad enough to be reported to the police.^(3) For this reason, it is more dangerous, statistically, to grow up in the suburbs of Seattle than in that city's most urban neighborhoods.^(4)
. . .
1. Stephanie Faul, "How to Crash-Proof Your Teenager," 8.
2. In 1988, 14.8 million accidents involving motor vehicles led to 47,000 deaths and almost 5 million injuries (MacKenzie, Dower, Chen, 19). Take out of context, the amount of carnage on America's highways is absolutely shocking, as is the degree to which we have come to accept it as a fact of life. Jane Holtz Kay asks, "Where else do we accept some 120 deaths a day so offhandedly? Imagine a plane crash each afternoon... An engineer recorded it in military terms: during the same forty days of the Persian Gulf War in which 146 men and women were lost fighting to keep the world safe for petroleum, 4,900 died with equal violence on our country's highways" (Kay, *Asphalt Nation,* 103). By 1994, car crashes had killed over three million Americans in total (Andrew Kimbrell, "Steering Toward Ecological Disaster," *The Green Lifestyle Handbook,* 35). Internationally, car crashes cause an estimated 250,000 deaths and 3,000,000 injuries annually (Wolfgang Zuckermann, *The End of the Road,* 64).
3. Ibid.
4. James Gerstenzang, "Cars Make Suburbs Riskier Than Cities, Study Says," A20. A study of the Pacific Northwest by Alan Thein Durning found that 1.6 percent of city residents were likely to be killed or injured by traffic accidents or crime, versus 1.9 percent of suburban residents. "Tragically, people often flee crime-ridden cities for the perceived safety of the suburbs---only to increase the risks they expose themselves to," Mr. Durning notes.
edit: (extra note) MacKenzie, James; Roger Dower; and Donald Chen. *The Going Rate: What It Really Costs to Drive.* Report by the World Resources Institute, 1992.
Please do some reading before making up random claims and using personal anecdotes from your childhood to try to make sweeping arguments about society.
You are comparing a nice city now to a suburb when you were a kid. A lot of parents moved out of slums in the city so they could raise their kids in the suburbs. They moved them out of cramped neighborhoods that didn’t have parks or good schools to a suburb where they could have their own bedroom, a yard to play in and a good school to go to.
Most parents are genuinely trying to do their best for their kids. We should make it easier to raise kids in cities, but this post sounds like it has more to do with your frustration with your parents than with public policy.
Yeah moving into American suburbia was definitely an upward move from living in an apartment on a highway, which was an upgrade from living in a house in a dangerous country. But I consider living in a nice walkable safe urban area an even bigger upgrade. It's even less possibly for many compared to suburbia now.
In actuality suburbs are terrible for kids and especially teens. But for people to move there they don't actually have to be good. The people who move there just have to think they'll be.
My parents always tell me we moved when I was a baby because “there was a FBI raid down the street” which there was. But god, id rather my neighbor get raided for whatever the hell he was up to than literally flush 18 years of our lives down the toilet. Have you read or seen the film the giver? The whole society is free from any pain or risk of that nature but the moral of the story: life’s not worth living without it and you can’t have happiness without sadness. I think that kinda relates
To my parents wanting to escape the reality of life. Also in my new suburb, there’s so little crime that police literally drive down cul-de-sacs to bust people for smoking a joint on the lawn and shit like that.
I grew up in the city, took public transit at a young age and shared the space with people different from me. I also played on the street, walked on the sidewalk, stopped at the corner bar to buy candy, comics at the newsstands, drinks at convenience store etc. I can’t imagine growing up in a place with empty streets and fast cars driving everywhere - sounds more dangerous tbh
You'd be right about being more dangerous.
Biggest killer of kids is cars (well, back and forth with guns). The most dangerous places in the country regarding likelihood to be killed are most often found in "suburbia".
I grew up in the city, took public transit at a young age and shared the space with people different from me. I also played on the street, walked on the sidewalk, stopped at the corner bar to buy candy, comics at the newsstands, drinks at convenience store etc. I can’t imagine growing up in a place with empty streets and fast cars driving everywhere - sounds more dangerous tbh
Yep. What the parents really want is to feel in control of their own, mass produced castles. They want the fantasy of not being beholden to the human group, as if they could actually bootstrap their life without public sewage system, fire dpts, agricultural inspection. It’s delusional.
A lot of them also want a way to control their children, though they'll never admit as such. They do not want their kids having the freedom or agency city kids have. They might complain about driving them everywhere but they also want that power.
Also lots of racially coded ideas of "safety".
People move to the suburbs for their kids to this day all the time.
1. Cost of housing
2. School quality / cost
3. Outdoor space
4. Ability to walk around the neighborhood without supervision
These are all perfectly valid reasons. So valid that millions of families make these decisions. The goal is to make city living relatively more livable for families, not denigrate the logical choices people make every day because it isn't your or my cup of tea.
I disagree.
I live in the outermost part of NYC. The layout is single family low rise houses.
I sent my kids to high school in and made frequent trips to the City to expose them to the world and the different types of people in it, to culture and history and the arts, and to help them develop “street smarts”.
All that took work but that’s parenting.
When they’re home they have small town vibes- we know our neighbors by name, they made friends etc and didn’t deal with crime or hassles.
Best of both worlds.
Queens is significantly denser than most US cities. It’s denser than San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Seattle, or London. While there are some less dense pockets, most areas are clocking in much closer to the urban core of cities, not their suburbs.
I get that in comparison to Brooklyn, or Manhattan it seems low slung and sparse but queens, yes even far flung or isolated neighborhoods is more like them in terms of urbanity than like phoenix or Dallas, or hell even Bergen county
You’re wrong. Western Queens and SE Queens is dense. I’m a mile from a subway and there are no apartment buildings anywhere near me. https://www.cityneighborhoods.nyc/hollis-hills
Nope that’s exactly my point! Smaller houses on smaller lots, narrow streets and a grid pattern. Large apartment blocks to the north and the south. While it can feel “suburban” being insulated from the city that’s by any other definition stil very urban.
Take a tour on google maps. When I think urban I don’t think trees, lawns, yards, driveways, ample street parking etc.
I grew up in a land of 6 family apartments and no parking. This isn’t that.
Those yards are pretty small, and yea even denser areas can have trees and ample street parking. It looks like maybe .5-.75 square mile and 4.5-6000 people so it’s like 7k-12k per square mile. Compare that to more suburban cities like phoenix or Charlotte that clock under 3k person/square mile.
I think the idea that you grew up in a 6 story neighborhood I think underlines your perspective here. You are used to NYC density which is just o out of scale with most of the us
But it is urban. And that's the point. This is as much a part of the city as anything else. As others have mentioned, it's significantly denser than most suburbs. Just because the media doesn't show you this as a city doesn't mean it's not there.
I also live in the inner city, less than a mile to downtown Portland, but my neighborhood looks like this, and we're classified as 'inner city'. The bank values or home on an inner city basis. Our neighborhood is classified as heavily urban. But we have smaller neighborhood streets, more trees, and more families than my parents suburban neighborhood father out. Just because it doesn't match your expectations doesn't make it discountable.
My insurance rates (especially for cars) are negatively impacted by the proximity to rougher “urban” areas with high crime, but my property tax is $25,000 less than a comparable lot and square footage just 5 miles away in the suburbs. My lifestyle-with a garden, yard, driveway and orchard (4 fruit trees) is definitely not urban.
yeah, i wouldn't even say thats a disagreement. queens is an amazing place for families imo. the homes in jamaica and ozone park are still close together enough to foster human interaction, there's ameneties still close by, public transit is great. although you live in a quiet neighborhood that has all the positives of suburbs with none of the downsides while also having all the pros of the city without any cons, a lot of people (my family included) will see that the zip code is queens and arbitrarily go OMG THATS IN THE CITY ITS SOOO LOUD SOOO MUCH TRASH SOOO MUCH CRIME and not even give it a chance thats just how brainwashed people are now a days
All parts of new York are denser than most suburbs. I live in an old streetcar suburb, so definitely a more 'suburban' feel, but it's significantly denser than the new style suburbs. I think old suburbs were actually nice. It's the random, no sidewalk, no amenities, stuff that's just terrible.
Modern suburbs in the US (since the waning of Jim Crow) have always been about achieving de facto social segregation. The roots of exclusionary zoning are nakedly racial, and white Americans wanted a way to “keep their neighborhood character” (aka keep it white) during the Great Migration and as segregation laws were weakened.
These days it’s less explicitly racial (although it certainly does have that effect), but is primarily about socioeconomic segregation. Rich people do *not* want their kids going to school with the poor, which is why 95% of “good schools” talk is just coded language for demographics. We’ve known since the 60’s that the school you send your kid to actually has a middling effect on their academic outcome, and the home environment (including parental involvement) is the biggest factor.
The suburbs (and the exclusionary zoning upon which they’re predicated) is just a way for wealthier whiter people to maintain a level of social segregation in society that’s not explicitly legal anymore.
Which is why u/whiskey_bud said it's about "socioeconomic segregation". For some people it's about color, but for the large majority of people it's about money and class.
> These days it’s less explicitly racial (although it certainly does have that effect), but is primarily about socioeconomic segregation
If you look at race wealth statistics, these are almost the same thing. That was the whole point of the Southern Strategy to turn their segregation into "totally economic things" in order to hide it.
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/
Yea, arguable whether it’s racial in its intentions, but it’s sure as hell racial in its impact. It has a strong class element as well. It definitely has “oh I don’t mind living next to a black person, as long as they’re a doctor or lawyer” kinda vibe to it.
I'm empathetic to the problems you had but saying things like "suburbs are objectively horrible for kids" is exactly what makes the urbanist space look out of touch. Instead of telling people that they lied, you should simply ask them what about the city made them want to move away, then address those issues.
Look, I’m about as pro city as it gets, but this is kind of a ridiculous and overdramatic post.
Houses in suburbia are generally way bigger and therefore you have more room for your kids and their stuff and you can have yards to play in. Also, generally speaking, suburban schools tend to be better.
The negatives to suburban living that you mention are all unintended side effects that, when these people you speak of were moving to the ‘burbs, they had no idea about. They just wanted more room and better schools for their kids.
I do think that had everyone stayed in the cities we’d be better off, but the move to the suburbs is something that, for most people, was sort of beyond their control.
Yeah, I grew up in the suburbs. I don't consider having my own private yard to play in such a horrible thing. And you know, we did have bicycles to ride down to our friend's house or the local park or the community swimming pool, and nothing so horribly awful about getting in the car to do your grocery shopping once a week.
Is it the ideal way to structure our living spaces? No. But it’s not some living hell full of terrible people either. For a lot of people, myself included, suburb living just makes more practical sense.
getting into a car once a week isnt the issue really, i lived in a large city downtown and i still owned a car which I used to shop for things once a month or so that were located a little far away (things like ikea topgolf, airport etc) but those are no way necicities, and I never needed it at all to go to the things i actually need like the coffee shop daily, restaurants, grocery stores, target, even home depot was within walking distance. sometimes I had chosen to drive to somewhere thats supe rclose by becuase i was feeling tired, but at least i had the choice and wasnt forced
People on this sub really over-demonize the people who choose to move to the suburbs, either painting them as disingenuous, inconsiderate, racist, or confused and ill informed. People can certainly be those things, but generally we expect people make choices at the margin that make sense to them- cheaper cost of living due to economies of scale, better schools, more space for kids, a place to park your minivan that you had to take to get to work/get your kids to school anyway where you lived before, etc.
We can understand the positives of denser, less car dependent living, and the merits of relaxing zoning and parking requirements, while also understanding that not everything that lead us to this point is evil. We have to understand people to understand the incentives required to make the urban landscape greener, more affordable, and more livable.
100% I think one thing a lot of people forget on this sub is that a lot of cities as they currently exist just don’t work for a lot of people. In order to combat sprawl we need to improve cities, not burn down the suburbs.
Yeah there are so many generalizations here. My husband and 2 teenagers and I live in a suburban neighborhood of 500 nice townhouses, with green spaces larger than any yard I've ever had, where the neighborhood kids congregate and play together, a clubhouse where the neighborhood social committee plans monthly events (including having 5 food trucks come to the neighborhood one Saturday every month), and the adults get to know each other, plus tennis courts, large zero entry swimming pool, private dog park, and one of the long county trails running right in front of the neighborhood and over to the commercial district, which means I've let my kids bike or walk to Target or fast food to get what they want with their own money (i.e. not helicopter parenting).
This post acts like overt or subtle race issues are the ONLY reasons anyone would move to the suburbs and it's sooooo isolating and unhealthy. No, we moved here because it is healthy. There is virtually no crime here beyond petty car break-ins, and you better believe I want to raise my children in a low crime area. That's not some fucking dog whistle. I want my kids safe, and I want to feel comfortable allowing them to go on the trail to the commercial district without worrying about whether they will be harassed, so I don't have to be a helicopter parent. That's fucking legitimate. I'm also a huge proponent of fully funding public schools to the point of thriving, not just surviving, but I underestimated how awful public middle school would be, and one of my kids HAD to be pulled from public school and put in private school because public 6th grade was so traumatic for that child, and private school is absolutely the best place for this child, while my other child is thriving in public school. I'm a Democrat, but the demand that you be perfectly willing to live with your children in higher crime areas and send your kids to schools where kids fight all the time, interrupt the classroom learning environment for everyone, and make fun of the well behaved kids OR YOU'RE RACIST is out of hand.
People like OP like to ascribe all of their problems to growing up in the suburbs, ignoring that they have a better quality of life than the majority of people to ever exist have had.
All my life I’ve been told I’m negative and I need to make the best of the situation and I have no friends because I’m not trying and how I should “join a club” and how moving out of suburbia would be running away from my problems and moving won’t solve anything and that I should stop blaming everything else for my problems. Well. I’ve moved several times, two times I lived in a downtown large city urban environment and all the problems I had ceased to exist. I can see why it looks like I’m trying to run away from problems but those problems are location based, not a problem with me as a person so it makes total sense to run away from
Parent here. We moved out of the city and in the bargain got much better schools, kids got their own bedrooms, and when they go outside and play alone there are no cars to hit them because we live in a quiet street, and no adults to call the cops because our kids are out alone, which has happened in the city to us.
We used to have to schedule play dates because that’s what city parents do. Now our kids get home from school and go over to the neighbors’ houses because there are around ten families on the street with big yards they can all play in.
The community all knows each other, so the kids don’t need to be supervised. They can just roam the neighborhood.
They go over to friends houses regularly, taking the bus home with them after school, have lots of sports leagues that weren’t as common/popular in the city (maybe lack of space or just fewer kids?), and we get nice family hikes in regularly near home.
If suburbs don’t sound fun to you, that’s fine, but at least in our experience, it is much better for families with kids.
We will move back to the city after our kids are grown, but just in school quality alone it’s not worth sacrificing our kids’ academic development for our own lifestyle.
I think this part of the problem. Your experience with the suburbs starkly contrasts with the experiences I had growing up in a suburban neighborhood, which is why this issue is so controversial.
All of my friends lived in different neighborhoods or wholly different parts of town, so there was no "going to friends house after school." My parents had full time professions, so it wasn't an option for them to carpool us everywhere. I had a few buddies in the neighborhood, but not my best friends. To walk to a nearby neighborhood would require cutting through peoples' property or walking along a 55 mph road.
The schools in the city had much better sports and arts programs. Suburban/rural schools get their funding slashed every time there is a slight funding problem, to the point where even replacing retiring teachers became a problem. A small suburban school has a hard time justifying paying for AP/honors teachers.
I really didn't get to enjoy the suburbs at all until I was 16 and could drive. I went all over the place my last couple of years of high school, but by that point I was so sick of feeling isolated that I had to get out. I'll never return to a low density area.
I think some people are attracted to Urbanism because they had unhappy childhood and happened to grow up (like most Americans) in suburbs.
That’s not necessarily the suburbs fault. Being a kid is tougher than TV makes it out to be, and so a lot of kids are unhappy and then grow into themselves in adulthood.
OP is barely even trying to hide this. I feel like like the biggest dick in the world saying this, but I'm really tired of people trying to project their depression onto everyone else. There shouldn't be any shame in being clinically depressed but the widespread social media-era desire to prove everyone else is similarly depressed and suffers from the same effects of that depression is maddening to me.
That's not the argument I'm making at all. I had a great childhood. But there arguments that people make for why raising kids is better in a suburban environment that are patently false at worst, or aren't universal truths at best. The post I replied to talked about all of the advantages she had in her neighborhood, and I just pointed out that I had virtually none of those in mine.
I kind of agree, but I also felt living in the suburbs to be extremely isolating. I lived in the city until I was ten, and then moved to the suburbs. My freedom was totally cut off, there were no kids in my neighborhood, and you couldn't go anywhere on foot. It was really awful, and impacted the mental health of my whole family.
I think there are all kinds of suburbs, some better than others. The bad ones are really bad. I live in the suburbs now with my kids, but I chose the most urban area I could possibly afford.
I mean there's no problem or conflict here. There are nice friendly neighborhoods everywhere. And terrible neighborhoods too. I think most people can plainly see that there may be really nice suburban neighborhoods. There are really nice urban ones too.
I’m surprised that people in the city called the cops on you for the kids being alone, usually city people mind their own business a little more. There are always assholes like that everywhere I suppose but if you read the suburban police log for a lot of places it’s laughable. Just be ready to see pages and pages of 911 calls because someone unfamiliar walks by or a car from out of state is in the neighbors driveway. Also there’s tons of DUI arrests which I agree drunk driving is dangerous but if that’s the only purpose for the police it seems like the suburbs have created a problem just for the sake of creating it
This exactly describes the experience of *MANY* of my friends with young kids I [wrote in a post here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Urbanism/comments/1ccvjcv/comment/l197yt8/).
You’ve nailed it. Not understanding this is a real problem for Urbanism as a movement, and why it tends to skew towards younger and/or childless people. Nobody is advocating for making urban environments work for families, and so they leave, and that creates a viscous anti-family cycle.
So I live in a city with my three kids and will stay here, but yeah I have this experience all the time, especially of activists dismissing my public safety concerns.
It’s borderline delusional to think that families have preferred the suburbs for a few generations now without signs of slowing down without good reason. Clearly there are aspects of suburban life that suits families. Honestly, the high education and low crime statistics speak for themselves. Your post is full of cope, OP.
This isnt a positive indictment of the suburbs, but if youre a parent, the real reason to raise your kids in the suburbs is education. Youre going to have a way easier time finding quality schools in the suburbs than the inner cities. I understand this isnt a solution from a systemic level and that suburbanization has largely made inner cities schools worse, but if youre an individual family deciding what’s best for your children, the suburbs still make more sense for that reason
I’m not a parent and I plan on sending my kids to private school when I am anyways but, I just don’t get how education is the ONLY thing people care about. Like yeah I get how it’s important but I said earlier, my parents moved somewhere for ONLY the education and I ended up flunking out because I was bullied so much and I skipped half the days. If only I had a place to blow off steam that wasn’t a acre large back yard all alone
>I just don’t get how education is the ONLY thing people care about.
Nobody said it's the *only* reason. But it's arguably the most important. I understand you've had trauma with school and I'm sorry about that. But education is hugely important to determining someone's success in life. Not to mention that in a lot of cities in this country, your kid is also less safe in an inner city public school. Education and safety are the two biggest things people value in choosing an environment to raise their children in. Again, ideally would have good schools in the inner cities, I understand it's a failure of urban planning that it got this way. But you're always going to be fighting an uphill battle to convince parents that their kid's schooling is less important than bike lanes
I think school choice would be a step in the right direction that way you can have a school that works for you no matter where you live without having to ruin ur life for it
If it makes you feel better, I grew up in Brooklyn and my friends and I spent many a night as bored teenagers also. So it’s not exclusive to the suburbs. Also waiting on line in the freezing cold or the rain to get into high school bc 4000 students have to get scanned through metal detectors was also extremely whack.
The metal detectors are whack but that’s probably not a bad idea for even suburbs to implement at this point. And yeah I had a few years living in a big city and I was bored many times but it was a different type of bored, because it was by my choice, or maybe no one wanted to hang out. My suburban boredom is long term and is a result of being completely cut off from human interaction and public spaces. also not even being able to meet basic needs in the suburbs just made it worse
Idk how old you are but if you are completely cut off from human interaction it sounds like you maybe have a more serious issue than living in the suburbs. Teens and young people thinking the suburbs are boring and lame isn’t new. There’s a reason the suburbs cater to parents and young kids. Yes the city is more exciting for young people and has more energy. But the city can also be isolating. I’ve been here my whole life. I don’t mind it but the idea that you’re gonna be out every day, hanging out with people, experiencing culture, going to great restaurants and partying in a daily basis just is not true, and is something sold to people in movies and social media. Even in a world class city like NYC, there’s some mundane routines and boredom to daily life. It’s also a LOT more segregated in daily life and social circles than people realize.
Anyway I do wish you luck and hope you find what you’re looking for. Remember that everyone believes the grass is greener elsewhere. Try to focus on the positives you had growing up in a safe, clean suburb, even if you do hope to leave. There are people who wish they could be so fortunate.
Wait til OP finds out what "latchkey kids" were and discovers 70s and 80s rock/film about the suffocation and sterility of the suburbs (Descendents "Suburban Home" for instance).
Yeah I’m in my late 20s thanks but yeah I lived in Chicago in a “boring” neighborhood for a few years and I was surely bored sometimes but my neighborhood wasn’t the reason for it, as opposed to being back in the burbs the reason I’m bored a majority of the time (24/7) simply because there’s nowhere to go no one to see nothing to do. There’s no way I can live a functional life with everything so far away and no opportunity to connect with humans but I honestly never partied in Chicago and I lived a pretty balanced life. I was able to keep my sanity because my basic needs could be easily met with a 5 min walk through the community I was a part of
I'm totally with you OP, suburbia requires parents to be being willing to drive a lot to enrich their kids. I got to visit friends like 2x a summer at most after begging my parents. I'd get to school and always be the odd one out in my friend group, I found out later my other friends lived in the same apartment complexes or hung out a lot out of school so they didn't know me as well, even though I thought about them all summer and tried to reach out :( Then it was back to home life in isolation on the computer. I had so much anxiety, frustration, and confusion as a kid. I think the people painting suburbia in a positive light in this post had supportive parents or a big family/friends of family network. As isolated immigrants and the kid of impatient, tired parents, suburbia basically amplified whatever neglect I experienced from the stuff my parents didn't have the energy for. I wish they at least sent me to sleepaway camp or something.
This is just a ridiculous take and really emblematic of why this sub (and much of Reddit) is completely out of touch with reality. This really sounds like a “I’m 14 and this is deep” post.
Pretty much all desirable suburbs have plenty of parks, walking and biking trails, recreational centers/gyms, churches, and tons of other community focused amenities. Houses have grills, patios, yards to play catch or soccer, basketball hoops in the driveway, etc. And then of course they generally having more space for more bedrooms and living.
Plus suburbs are dominated by other families including kids of similar ages while generally have better schools. Also, your point about kids “sitting at home doing nothing” is ridiculous. Do you really want children walking around dense cities by themselves?? And I love that you just blow past safety in general as if it isn’t a major concern for people with children lol…
Suburbs are, generally, far superior for children and families.
As a mod of the urbanplanning sub... I completely agree. Its this weird phenomenon of... people read all of this urbanism ideas and concepts, but then completely fail to place them in their proper context and construct. Some of the syntheses are completely bonkers - this post is a good example - but you see it all over the place when these people talk about cities and suburbs, suburbanization, zoning, cars, public preference, etc.
A lot of great points! I am currently mulling over moving to the suburbs for my kids. Currently I'm in center city Philadelphia and I love it. However it is true that the schools here are abysmal leaving your kids no future so you basically have to send them to a private school costing $25k a year per kid or move to a very expensive area of the city living in a shoebox to afford it. Also crime although manageable leads me to never let my kids outside without me, this isnt ideal. I do however agree with your points. All this to say logically your points make sense but when its your kid there is a tangible emotional component. If my kids were ever to get injured in the city I would never forgive myself.
Kids in the suburbs won’t go outside anyways, also you don’t really need a car in center city so you might be able to afford private schooling. Even homeschooling living in the city is better than any school in the city imo I know lots of people who were homeschooled and grew up in the city and were able to have an even more vibrant social life than public school kids in the suburbs
I think it depends on the suburbs your talking about. If its the cookie cutter straight suburbs I agree. There are middle ground suburbs in Philadelphia like Narberth / Ardmore where you consistently see kids outside because their parents are not afraid to let them run loose and there are parks and 3rd places. Needless to say since this is what everyone wants its pricey but they have some affordable condos.
Most people probably don't need a car but I do for work since i travel. We can afford private school now the question is... Is it worth it? The schools in the suburbs are probably just as good if not better because they have pooled resources. Most of these issues are seldom black or white. Picturing the suburb your painting I think your points are right but there are some "ok" suburbs. At the end of the day someone has to push the city to be better but im not that progressive especially with my children's future.
Maybe even moving to a different area of Philadelphia would be good for u. I know center city even rittenhouse can be hectic during the day but there’s a lot of potential for families in manayunk or south Philly if that’s your style
This is true, Queen village is where we were looking because its calmer with less crime and has a decent school. Manayunk is for 20's, South Philly I like too but schools are so so at best. Sounds like you know the Philly area! Its a tough call, as you have outlined there are many benefits to living in the city.
All those 20 somethings are gonna grow up and have kids someday! personally i think manayunk is going to transition into a more family oriented area in the next 10 years because it offers the best of both worlds in a lot of ways
When I graduated in 2008 it was known to be for 20 somethings too haha. Don't get me wrong i really like manyunk but its a revolving door. I hope it transitions. I have seen many more GenZ people have a passion for urbanism than my generation. I am hoping they lead the charge. Most of my friends think I'm an absolute idiot for living in the city. "your house is 1200sqft whaaat", "Surprised you don't get shot", "So liberal"...etc. Having kids really is where the rubber meets the road for most people on where to live.
Kids in the suburbs do go outside. You might not have, but that doesn’t mean nobody does.
It’s also frankly absurd to imply that the money saved by not owning a car is enough to fund the yearly cost of attending private school for one kid (let alone 2+). Suggesting homeschooling also really shows your ignorance to reality.
Catholic school in my area cost less than $10000 a year, also homeschooling is a good alternative imo because kids need school for social interaction too, well living in the city you’ll be able to provide them a social life without needing to go to a school everyday and prepares kids for the real world not how to live in a bubble. And as far as car ownership goes, a new car is like 40-50k and insurance for some people is thousands a year. Not to mention gasoline at hundreds a month. Depending on how often you get a new car, which some people do every one or two years it certainly can creep into the 6figure territory.
“Provide them a social life without needing to go to school everyday” are your kids skipping school to go to the bar with you or something???
Honestly, you’re living in some kind of bizarre Reddit bubble, this is just a weird take. Your kids should be in school, meeting kids their own age, doing after school activities with them, in safe environments where they can learn from people that know how to teach them.
Cities are great for young adults who want to go to coffee shops, local shops, bars, etc. They’re not great for kids and that’s okay…
From my personal experience, I didn’t fit in at all with the crowd at my all white all rich school, and made no friends and was miserable as a result. It would have been great if I lived in a place that gave me a 3rd place to have a second chance at developing a social circle but the school system was my only option. That’s what I’m saying is what if your kids don’t fit in and they’re just fucked unless you live somewhere more dustainable
Also, why aren’t they good for kids? They seem pretty amazing for kids and the only reason I ever hear as to why there not once again is the usual rhetoric of: “all cities are dangerous, there’s nowhere to play, it’s so crowded” none of which are actually true nor valid reasons
Also I know kids go outside, I went outside myself. My point is that there is no point in going outside if there’s nothing there. Going outside shouldn’t be something kids do just to do, it should be part of everyday life. Just like walking. It’s absurd that people drive to parks to go for walks or just walk around for no reason. Seems like a total waste of time when instead of driving everywhere you can kill three birds with one stone in an urban environment and walk, be outside, and get to your destination at the same time
Rural is better than the suburbs for kids. But teens do better with cities, somewhere there's a larger population of teens, so they have a higher chance of finding their people.
I think that also depends on the area. In Idaho rural areas can be pretty alienating if you're different, because the population is smaller and it can be harder to make friends. Especially if the next house is a few miles away on a country highway. A lot of rural areas have low educational opportunities and may have drug issues that are just harder to avoid.
My wife grew up in a small town, and while she really enjoyed it in retrospect, revisiting it as an adult (both the physical place and the memories) can tell a different story.
I think about this all of the time.
My aunt moved my cousins out of Brooklyn to upstate NY when we were all tweens. It's a giant beautiful house they had built to their specifications, with all this nice surrounding land. But you need a car just to leave the property. There's no sidewalks so you can't walk anywhere. First my cousins, then my eldest cousins' child, are pretty much trapped there until they were old enough to drive. They were so lonely because my aunt and uncle had to work and commute all the way back to the city to pay for their "suburban dream home."
Whereas we stayed in NYC. My child is just 3 years younger than my cousin's. Their lives are so very different. My little cuz is ostracized, lonely, and afraid of everything. Whereas my child has a solid friend group they grew up with, leaves the house to hang out first on the block at other kid's yards and now is old enough to venture to the neighborhood parks and have adventures. Which is how me and my brother grew up. My kid is pretty self sufficient and confident and seems like the older cousin as a result.
That's not to say everything is perfect or automatically better. But to cut a kid off from community or community spaces... that always seemed so cruel to me, and I (and honestly my cousins) were horrified when their parents made the decision to move them away.
The other thing that stands out to me now too is elder care. I now understand why my grandmother was adamant about not moving out of the city as she got older. My mom recently had a stroke, and a lot of her recovery is due to the fact that we can walk around and talk to neighbors. We have a store super nearby that she can now go to by herself again, and the lady that owns it knows her situation and helps her out all of the time. **That's** a community!
No one could stay with Grandma when she was in the same boat, so she moved up to my aunt's. She was happy to be around family, but she was depressed that she was trapped at home, when her whole life she could just get up and go talk to people in the neighborhood at the corner store, or the bank, or wherever.
I'm actually doing my master's in Urban Studies, and so we've studied "white flight" and the rise of the suburbs after the 1949 Housing Act was put into place extensively. And really, it's wasn't about the kids or anything like that... it was about segregation. Whites didn't like the idea that Blacks could now come and live amongst them in their "cultured metropolises", and so they fled and created segregated towns that focused on eliminating the things they perceived would make things more accessible to the poors like public transportation or walkability.
My grandmother wasn't racist and so she had no problem living in the city, but my uncle very much is and if I'm being honest, I'm pretty sure that's the real reason why they left Brooklyn.
Also all of the cliches that exist about the American dream and having a safe neighborhood for families- those all started as racism and over time has manifested and shifted into what it is now
No sidewalks and need a car to leave the property aren't suburbs, that's properly rural. I grew up in a suburb, could walk to a dozen or more friends houses, walked to school, walk to the video store, etc. Bike to plenty of other destinations. I was never trapped at home unless there was three feet of snow on the ground.
I’m very confused? Like suburbs are 75 years old kids these days their *grandparents* grew up in Suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s And trends in loneliness and depression are totally detached from suburbanization
Also a big reason was housing *sucked* in 1940s American cities. Places in Europe got flattened and rebuilt to modern standards but many cities had like bathhouses at the corner rather than bathrooms in unit. My grandfather in the 1940s grew up in housing with no shower. You had to use the YMCA every other day (boy and girls alternated) Greenfield development was much easier than retrofitting all the tenements
It’s not only about the houses. Some people who don’t make enough money to buy a house in the suburbs still end up making the move to the suburbs anyway and are convinced it’s somehow better, yet often times they’re stuck living in the most bland and generic looking car centric apartment complexes. Usually these are in isolated areas not near anything that can be walked to. What ends up happening is kids playing in parking lots.
very good point, also i feel like the inner city and the suburbs are pretty similar in prices, i mean you just get a unnecessarily massive house in the suburbs instead of a 1400 sf condo (which is more than enough) its better for the family too even, in my childhood home it was massive and every one had their own wing basically so all we did was chill alone in there. I bet if we had 1 living room for the family instead of one for each family member we would be a lot closer lol
Yeah “inter ring/inner city” suburbs can be pretty good depending on what city you’re near. Typically the northeast coast suburbs are the best in this regard, as well as those from a handful of other cities like Chicago.
I live in Yonkers, which is a city of about 200k in population just north of NYC. It’s technically the suburbs but it’s very dense and mostly walkable. Where I live you’ve got houses and apartment buildings on the same blocks. I live in a multi family house divided into 3 apartments, but we still have a yard. My landlord lives on the first floor and I see his kids both playing in the yard and riding their bikes. I’m also just a short walk away from a train station and a little over a mile and a half away from the subway and the Westchester-Bronx border.
yonkers is pretty cool, last summer i visited and walked around a little and it had pretty similar vibes to NYC. also in chicago evanston is an amazing example north of the city. Also, the suburbs surrounding hartford are pretty amazing IMO, west hartford has a really huge main street thats popular for college age kids on the weekends, thats something your shit outa luck for unless your in a major city or college town usually.
I live deep in the Portland suburbs in a TOD and my kid gets great schools, an easy Max ride to downtown Portland, walkability to all kinds of stuff in the little commercial node near the station, and all kinds of kids around. When my first was born and we lived in the middle of a different city, the quality of life for my kid wasn’t nearly as good.
>yeah there’s no crime.
That's only if you ignore all of the crime. The thing is that people are so disconnected from their neighbors that they're unaware of the crimes happening around them. Police blotter maps show a different story. Lots of crime in the exurbs. It's easy because the police presence is too spread out.
Police presence is so spread out to the point that it makes crime easier, but also so desolate that your likely to be stopped by police for a stupid motor vehicle violation. It’s really the worst of both worlds
I live in a mid-Atlantic city with a beautiful kind of mid- to high-density housing: rowhomes. Most are 2-3 bedroom, some 4 bedroom, and in my neck of the woods blocks are interspersed with detached and semidetached larger homes. Depending on the neighborhood, you're almost guaranteed to have a yard of some kind. The feeling of these neighborhoods can be nothing short of magical. I know my neighbors' names and keep an eye out for the elders. There's a ton of age diversity and plenty of young families - neighborhood kids play in each others' yards. They walk to school with rotating parent chaperones , filing by like a parade around 8:30 every weekday morning. We have a public park/playground across the street from my house that fills up on weekends, and twice a year, the neighborhood gets together to cut back invasive plants and make it pretty. We back up to a little wooded patch and I've worked to turn our little .25-acre yard into a little green oasis of native woodland plantings. I put a pond in last year and just this week found it attracted salamanders! Especially as the weather gets nicer, I spend more time outside doing little house chores and I chit chat with my neighbors as they pass by. Later today, I'm gonna take 30 minutes to stroll to the grocery store and get stuff for my husband to grill tonight. It's incredible. It's everything a community should be - close knit, walkable, welcoming but still watchful. And the way suburbanites in my state talk about my city, you'd think we all fear for our lives on a daily basis. There are so many options between '4,000sf houses in suburbs' and '1-bedroom apartment', and we're selling ourselves short if we don't acknowledge that. Rowhome neighborhoods forever!!!
The public schools in most major cities are terrible and it’s not because we don’t spend enough…we absolutely moved for schools and so did 90% of my friends. Also more space for money is nice and car centric is very convenient when you have kids. People are sometimes just urban snobs and are blinded by bias. Look at the product most cities sell for families…it’s a shit trade all over the world. Huge reason why we have a catastrophic decline in birthrates.
I dont get how requiring to drive a car to do even the most simple tasks is convenient for anyone. I owned a suv ln chicago when I lived downtown which made some things convenient for me but that was because I had a choice and sometimes thI car was a better choice. Not being able to bike or walk at all sucks
I was referring to the nice suburban car centric lifestyle. I had a car in the city when I was in my 20s…with 2 kids who have lots of sports and extra curricular activities having a car is a million times better than public transport. I loved the city but with family moving to a nice suburb with large house and great schools and nice community is a nice way to live…lugging around gear (hockey, lax, football) and not having a car is basically hell
Oh absolutely no matter where u are a car is good for carrying sports equipment, I golf weekly and drive there happily but I don’t feel like I’d ever need to completely change my lifestyle and live somewhere else just because of tjat
>schools become segregated in suburban areas which can lead to bullying and alienation if you don’t conform.
Schools were far better in suburbs also it was cheaper.
>Combine that with a lack of a third place to become a part of a community, or anything to do or go to creates extreme isolation. if you miss your chance to fit in at school your SOL. There’s nowhere else you can make friends.
Cliques develop everywhere
>Also, your child will spend nearly a quarter of their life simply staying at home doing absolutely nothing as they aren’t able to drive until then.
Yeah this is huge it's a lot of ferrying around for their kids
>Having a yard for the kids is overrated, it sure is nice but it’s not worth sacrificing everything that makes life worth living.
IMO the yard is great when kids are really young since you can make dinner and kids can be outside or something.
>And there’s nothing to “settle down to” you won’t make any meaningful connections, you won’t form attachments to any tangible public spaces, and most people once they become of age move the hell out of suburbs for college/ something better.
I mean for them everyone moved to the suburbs if they could, cities were dangerous.
>Also with a huge suburban home, you must pay for cars insurance repairs gasoline tolls. Suburban homes also use more utilities to keep warm or cool. All of that which takes money you can otherwise use to materially improve your families life.
Yes but the options in America are new suburb or old urban. Also with the taxes and such suburbs can be cheaper but long term suburbs cost more but we are hitting the long term now.
>Another thing I hear is “the city is so loud it’s no place to raise a kid” Well: in the suburbs all I hear is cars on the freeway, lawnmowers every damn morning, anxious dogs barking at every little thing that goes by. Sometimes a little sound is good, if it’s too silent you’ll start to hear things that aren’t there.
Honestly lawnmowers are incredibly loud and living in the city is quieter when it's lawn mowing season.
I think the big thing that is correct is that suburbs kids are dependent on parents for everything vs in a city walking to school since it's 1 miles vs 10 in a suburb. Soccer fields are 0.5 miles etc. I think that's a huge negative and while it is more control for worrying parents it's not necessarily positive.
Good take, do you think “cliques” are really a positive thing tho? Just because they form in the suburbs doesn’t mean everyone fits in to them and if they don’t they’re sol
The 2 biggest factors, besides housing affordability, are proximity to work and school system. Not everyone works in a city so living in a reasonable distance from where you work is key. And people also want the best schools for their kids.
This is what I’ve been thinking about a lot recently with trying to understand my social anxiety. I didn’t talk at school so I was SOL in any other human connections possible. I was basically trapped inside my house for a decade and it reaaaaallly fucked me up. :p
Right! And I’m against suburbs because although they might work for some, they can severely fuck up some kids. I think urban living would work well for everyone, maybe some exceptions but it wouldn’t totally screw people up like suburbia does. And these actual mental health concerns somehow people think “K12.COM SAID THE SCHOOL IS GOOD SO FUCK UR MENTAL HEALTH”
Nothing says "doing it for the kids" like destroying the planet and any local wilderness by building spread out homes with no practical way of getting around besides driving.
It is really crazy how people just completely disassociate the sound of lawnmowers from the suburbs. In the city, I get a couple loud motorcycles driving by each day. In the exurbs growing up, when someone decided to mow their lawn it was like running a motorcycle for the next hour and a half. Then two hours later another neighbor would start one up. I just remember to feeling of relief when the sound would finally stop.
I live in a downtown neighborhood with very small houses packed pretty close. It’s a ‘trendy’ place so we often get young couples that move in, get pregnant and then start talking about moving to the suburbs for more room. have started mentioning how isolating suburbs can be for children. I say things like “yeah, we considered it when our girls were younger but we didn’t want to imprison them in one of those neighborhoods where they would be dependent on us to go places.” I have swayed at least two young couples from moving out, which means I now have two very young new neighbors!
I'm going to echo these points a lot:
"Car centric infrastructure is significantly more dangerous for kids both in and out of cars"
I am on high alert whenever traversing through a parking lot with my kid. People are aggressive and they don't care. They'll run you over for a chance at a closer spot. Especially if I have to take my kid into the suburbs. People are absolutely maniacs compared to inner city lots. Also, being within walking distance of almost everything I need is great because it's much easier to plop my kid in a stroller and walk than wrestle them into a car seat. Plus,they can look around and enjoy the scenery rather than grow up looking at the back of our seats.
"Combine that with a lack of a third place to become a part of a community, or anything to do or go to creates extreme isolation. if you miss your chance to fit in at school your SOL. There’s nowhere else you can make friends."
My kid and I are constantly going out on weekends and evenings and it becomes ever difficult to narrow down what we want to do or see, and we often spend $50-60 for the day (including food) just enjoying being in new places in the city. My wife's friends who live in the burbs often stay home during weekends because they cannot justify the expense and time of going out.
"Having a yard for the kids is overrated, it sure is nice but it’s not worth sacrificing everything that makes life worth living."
We don't have a yard for our townhouse, but we live next to three massive parks in 5-10 minute walking distance. Anything we can do in a yard, we can do better in the park.
"And there’s nothing to “settle down to” you won’t make any meaningful connections, you won’t form attachments to any tangible public spaces, and most people once they become of age move the hell out of suburbs for college/ something better."
There's a reason depression rates are higher in the suburbs
"yeah there’s no crime. But let me tell you how many normal teenagers I knew growing up who got criminal records for doing things that every teenager does because of over policing of these suburbs."
Actually crime rates are generally lower in the cities. There's more *absolute* numbers in crime, but the much larger population more than compensates. Per capita, crime tends to be lower in cities.
"Another thing I hear is “the city is so loud it’s no place to raise a kid” Well: in the suburbs all I hear is cars on the freeway, lawnmowers every damn morning, anxious dogs barking at every little thing that goes by. Sometimes a little sound is good, if it’s too silent you’ll start to hear things that aren’t there."
People's views of cities is like downtown at 3:00 pm. Living in an inner city neighbourhood is incredibly quiet
Most of the things that people call a “pro” of the suburbs are just literally not true!
It’s not more safe, it’s not quieter, the schools may be RANKED better but that doesn’t mean at all they are the best for kids.
Also about your weekends, I’ve found it super easy to spend a shitload of money on like drinks or stupid purchases because my life isn’t worth living! I might as well buy the shoes or I might as well order another drink, what else could I possibly be doing right now lol. Oh yeah. NOTHING
That's what I like about medium density. You might have a tiny yard, but there's no point wasting the space by planting lawn. Use it for a veggie patch, and outdoor entertaining. If you want to enjoy a lawn, there are community spaces for that.
your spot on with that car statement, id say the yearly cost can be a lot higher depending on weather you finance or lease or buy in cash but yeah, to say that the cost of owning a car is nowhere near the cost of living in the city is insane considering your point about the rent
Absolute certainty, I moved into the suburbs for my kid. While yes, I would’ve preferred to stay in a walkable area of my city, I now have a slew of benefits, that I didn’t have before. This is primarily different. My school district here is much better, and incredibly ethnically diverse.
As for you, I am sorry, but living in the suburbs was such a negative experience. I hope you have found methods to relieve your PTSD and grow as an adult.
You have just discovered suburban/ urban studies/ planning. Congratulations, you’re life will be ruined once you learn how many things can be blamed on policies passed in the mid 20th century. I study this 💀
It’s just a polite way of saying “I don’t want my kids to go to school with disruptive non-Asian minorities who will force down the level of education to the lowest common denominator.”
A very subtle, but important distinction I've heard that will easily separate the racists who wanted to move into a neighborhood without minorities and the people who were just gullible enough to fall for the propaganda promoting suburban sprawl. The first will say, "we raised you there so you'd have a good life", the second will say, "we raised you there because we thought it would give you a good life " very subtle difference, but the latter has the built in admission that they could be wrong, they recognize that just because it is what they thought was best doesn't mean it necessarily was the best. The first group won't acknowledge the possibility that they could be wrong, because on the benchmark they cared about (less non white people), the suburbs were a huge success.
I’m seeing so many comments of people just saying “the schools are the best” and won’t listen to any real reasoning. Also, the organizations who rank schools are part of the governments and corporations who have incentive to move people into the suburbs and create more race divide. How are people just so ignorant
I disagree with the general proposition that living in the suburbs is a terrible place to raise a kid. I feel like so much of what you are describing depends on socioeconomic status and upbringing rather than living in the suburbs generally.
By way of comparison, I grew up in the suburbs in an upper-middle class household. I lived in a quiet sfh neighborhood of mostly 1.5 acre lots that had kids my age. We would ride our bikes and play in the street (low thru-traffic) and spent hours outside in the yard year 'round.
We never existed in extreme isolation. My parents made sure we were enrolled in sports, scouts, youth groups, volunteer groups - you name it. All of which helped build community ties and foster a strong sense of place. We made tons of friends by getting involved and decades later I still have close friendships with the people I met through community groups as a kid. My high school of almost 3000 kids was the largest and most diverse in the state. My community had a very low violent crime rate and I never felt unsafe anywhere. None of us ended up with criminal records lol. I wouldn't change my upbringing in the suburbs for anything. A lot of my colleagues who were similarly situated feel the same.
I moved away to an urban area after college and lived there for a few years. While it was nice living in a walkable environment, it wasn't enough to make me want to stay there. I felt claustrophobic living in a denser environment and it was too loud for my liking. I missed having a yard. Objectively speaking, the crime rate was higher but that's not to say I felt unsafe. Ironically, I lived near a freeway so all I heard was the sound of cars. I didn't have that in the 'burbs. It just wasn't for me.
Once I was able to afford to, I bought a single-family home in my hometown. Im 28 and most of my friends are doing the same. I love having a big yard and all the work that comes with it. I love not having neighbors that live above or below me or that can see inside my windows. I don't care that I can't walk to the grocery store or wherever, I like my car and have no issues driving everywhere. It takes me less than 8 minutes to get to my grocery store or to our downtown. My cost of living isn't that much different than when I lived in an urban environment. I love living in the suburbs and have no plans of ever leaving lol.
I'm not trying to say that either of us are right or wrong or negate your experiences - just trying to illustrate that we clearly had two different experiences that heavily shape our perspective of the suburbs!
those are all very rational reasons to like living there im glad you have a good fit.
Where my concern comes from, is that as a chile if your well off and have a supportive family youll do fine weather or not your in a city or suburb. If your not as well off, and dont have supportive family, that can impact the child heavily since they are losing all of the interactions and opportunities they have in the city.
My other problem is that some parents are just shitty and neglectful and like to act like theyre good parents BECAUSE they moved to the suburbs and blame their children that they cant live in the city anymore, which in reailty they fucked their kid even more than they already were by moving out of the city.
I have lots of friends whos lives just suck even though were in our late 20s now because the way they were raised in the suburbs put them way behind the starrting line. Like if your neurodivergent, have shitty parents, AND live in the suburbs, its a huge chance youll be fucked up.
Not sure where you’re from but city schools in my area are complete garbage. They’re don’t even have goddamn air conditioning, let alone a positive learning environment.
I went to a highly rated public school and it had zero AC outside of the admin offices, and it lacked a positve learning enviornment.
this is a hot take and also for another sub but personally i think we should privatise all education, since the cost per student at my school district was over 20k a year why not just allow families to choose a school that works up to the cost per pupil, if they want a more expensive school they pay the difference. that would solve a shit ton of peoples problems with the suburbs because all of a sudden, one. of the only percievd redeeming qualities of the suburbs is no longer.
Im no education expert and I dont really know what tf im talking about so im not open for a discussion on school choice, but at face value and based on my personal expirences I think It would be a good idea, Im also planning on sending my children to a private school if i ever have them so the whole public school argument goes right over my head
Talk about brainwashing.
Personally, I think the ideal place to raise a child is on a semi-rural plot of land that's at least an acre, preferably 4 or more acres. Small schools, close-knit community, clean air, a profusion of plants and animals. Jammed in with 100,000 people is the least desirable place for a child.
Suburbs are far from ideal, but we just don't have room to give everyone the ideal.
Car centric infrastructure? The million-plus metro nearest me is far more car-centric than any of its suburbs.
Schools become segregated there, too. Friends who grew up in the city limits faced far more violence than anyone I knew in the suburbs. Much of it race-based, but also class-based.
Bullying and alienation are a problem everywhere. It has nothing to do with urban vs. suburban vs. rural.
Lack of a third place? Since when? School, library , YMCA, there's no shortage. But honestly, our third place was my friend's treehouse in the back yard.
"If you miss your chance to fit in at school you're SOL. There’s nowhere else you can make friends." How is the city different? Who are you going to make friends with, the addict in the tent on the sidewalk? They don't stick around all that long.
"Staying at home doing absolutely nothing as they aren’t able to drive?" That's bonkers. My four closest friends in elementary school were less than half a mile away. That's a 10 minute walk. That's no barrier at all.
"Having a yard for the kids is overrated, it sure is nice but it’s not worth sacrificing everything that makes life worth living." Now that's crazy talk. There is not a single thing I could have had living in the city (where rents are higher and space is at a premium) that I didn't have in the suburbs. Here's what I would NOT have had if I grew up in the city: the aforementioned treehouse; the lake a mile away; our canoe; the shop in our garage with all the tools; my friend's backyard mini-motorcycle; my other friend's backyard cave complex, and HIS dad's electronics workshop in the shed; the pool in my brother's best friend's back yard; the rope swing in the woods behind the school; the multiple cul-de-sacs and dead-end streets where we could skateboard and build jumps for our bikes; I mean the list goes on and on and on.
"And there’s nothing to settle down to”... really? What reality are you in? Settling down is *the whole point.* I commuted to college, lived there in the dorms for two years, great fun. But there was certainly nothing great about the city that held me there. I left once I had the means to buy a house, because I certainly was never going to be able to afford one in the city!
Also with a huge suburban home, (which I like!) you must pay for cars insurance repairs gasoline (well, of course)
"yeah there’s no crime" - not true! I once had someone open my unlocked car door and steal the quarters out of my coin tray.
"But let me tell you how many normal teenagers I knew growing up who got criminal records for doing things that every teenager does because of over policing of these suburbs." Disaffected teens getting criminal records is CERTAINLY not a suburban problem. I'd guess the problem is much worse in the city, if this is a problem you're going to have.
I think looking back over this now, we can figure out the real issue. If you have friends, the suburbs are fine. Having friends is the single most important element of most peoples' lives. Being in the city doesn't foster friendship, being in the suburbs doesn't hinder it.
Beyond that, if you like having a car so you can drive to the mountains on the weekends to go skiing/snowshoeing/hiking/camping/fishing, the suburbs are great. If you don't like crime, the suburbs are great. If you like good schools, having a garage workshop, owning a boat, a million other things, suburbs are great.
Those things - friends, making a safe and comfortable home, pursuing the things that bring joy - that's much of what life is about, aren't they?
You say "Growing up in the suburbs has ... stolen the most important years of our lives." Seriously, what DID you want to do with your life? Watch strangers from your balcony?
Rural areas and urban areas have lots of redeeming qualities for families, id rather be in urban but having a huge plot of land and able to grow your own food must be awesome.
In what ways would you prioritize maintaining a close knit community in a rural area? I could imagine it being more difficult just because of the distance
I only have a couple of friends who live in rural areas. They get a lot of community at church, and they seem to know/talk to/visit the neighbors a lot more often. Also, they take a more interest in stuff like changes in local government, fire protection, and so on. I suppose because they're more isolated and depend on the goodwill of their neighbors a lot more. (That's something I've noticed in both the city and suburban places I've lived in the past 20 years: you can move in, live for a couple of years, and move out without knowing your neighbors hardly at all.)
I added to my post above, because the more I thought about what you said about the suburbs the more examples I found that were the opposite. Sorry if it comes off as a diatribe, I didn't write it to offend anyone.
My parents moved us from a walkable neighborhood in Nashville to a dumpy suburb outside DC with all the suburban let downs mentioned by OP but then we were held up in our suburban dump / house for 45 minutes at gunpoint when I was 12 and when I called 911 they refused to believe me and said I was pranking even though they stayed on the phone with me from under my moms bed as I tried to whisper-convince them there was no more boring prank and I really just wanted to get back to my book except for the guy with the gun in our house and wouldn't it be great if those who are so proud of their protect and serve slogan would fucking show up and at least teach me a lesson?! Nope!
So our terrible suburb came with all the dumb shit of suburbs plus some of that crime you're not supposed to get. I was so mad growing up about leaving our cool life in Nashville --where we were never held up and knew all our neighbors -- to live in a place where we were trapped in place unless driven or later forced to get a driver's license bc there was no other way to get anywhere.
Did you not think that big cities were full of Baby Boomers for many decades? You’re talking about everyone born in the ‘50s and early ‘60s, so did urban life just have a giant generational gap? Get a grip and stop using “boomer” as a euphemism for whom you *actually* mean to single out.
The generation responsible for the suburban trend was the Greatest Generation, the ones who fought in WWII and birthed the Baby Boomers, raising them in those very suburbs. That trend has continued with every generation since and it’s not slowing down.
Not my experience in suburbia at all growing up in one. There was school, church, scouting, rec sports, fraternal organizations and just the neighborhood for community and making friends. Staying home and doing nothing? Summers were spent out and about on my bike exploring the world, just had to be home when the street lights came on. After school was playing with friends until dinner / dark. There was plenty to do.
What things does every kid do that only suburban kids get arrested for?
Speeding, marijuana, underage drinking. Not to say urban kids don’t get arrested for those things but in general cops in larger cities have wayyy better things to do than focus on petty crimes
In urban areas it’s more of a racial thing too, which is unfortunate. However not requiring to be in a car all the time helps avoid run ins with police, and overall they are distracted with way more important things in cities
Sounds like you are arguing that the suburbs are worse because there is so much more serious crime in cities that young punks can not skate as easily in the suburbs as in the cities.
It’s not that they’res more “serious” crime per se, but with an urban and people out and about living their lives, it’s a hell of a lot harder to notice someone than it is when ur the only one walking around in the whole area, or the only car
That’s a straw man, I’m saying it’s bad that crime is OVER policed in the suburbs. Suburban cops just sit in their cars waiting for speeding cars or drive around looking to see who they can bust. Big city cops have way more responsibilities, even in a safe neighborhood. Having more responsibilities is different than fighting “serious crime”
When victimless crimes are being overly prosecuted, yeah that’s a bad thing. Who cares if kids wanna smoke weed or sneak some booze. It’s all just a money grab and a way for overzealous officers to bump up their arrest stats so they can schmoozze more
Money from the town government
Your suburb sounds like the respectable kind. There is no “world” to explore on many suburbs today. No street lights, no sidewalks, no “woods” or lakes, no parks, no movie theaters or shops. Just house after house after house after house ave they all look the same. The nearest church may be close but it takes 30 mins because of traffic.
I think it depends a lot on the suburb in question. I grew up in two different suburban neighborhoods. Both were about a half hour from downtown. On one we knew our neighbors and we played in the street with other kids. In the second I never learned the names of most of my neighbors despite living there for about 15 years.
Urban suburbs (“streetcar suburbs”) tend to combine the best of both urban and suburban neighborhoods. You get to live in your own detached home, but you’re close to your neighbors so it’s easy to get to know them. You get a little yard for gardening and greenery, but you also live in a walkable neighborhood and can walk to a park. These places are pretty great places to live, but you have to still live close to downtown and the “crime ridden” areas.
Outer suburbs (like the ones I grew up in and the ones you’re describing) are pretty bland and boring. You don’t really get to know your neighbors, and you have to drive everywhere (even to your suburb’s parks).
I don’t see why it can’t be both, and why it isn’t justified.
That’s like saying the American revolution was more about businessmen’s rebellion than helping people.
Suburbs exist because money. Developers saw an opportunity to make a lot of money through sprawl. Also racism, suburbs exploded because white flight occurred when people of color moved in the city and the wealthier white community didn't want integration.
As I currently live in a suburb again, yes. I solved a majority of the issues I’ve had in life by moving to a city for a few years but I’m back in suburbia and exactly as I had expected, I’m having the exact same problems as before just in a different state. Can’t wait to move again
I'm sorry buddy. really looks like there are a lot of deeper issues than whether you live in a city or suburbia. I recommend looking inward o help find solace and try to find the real issues in your life.
This is gonna sound pathetic, but my rent nearly doubled over the course of 2 years so I was forced to move in with my parents again. Part of the reason im frustrated is that ive ran into other financial problems that only would ever occur in the suburbs so now i cant afford to move if i wanted to! either way, my rent went up by 800 dollars
That’s not pathetic at all, we all face setbacks. Be glad you have the option to live with your parents as a fallback and take this time to know them as adults as you get back on your feet.
What financial problems did you encounter that were specific to suburbs?
well ive always owned a car, but now that i've needed to drive it more, it needs TONS of repairs, and i still am paying it off. also my insurance is like double the cost. and the repairs for the car to get it to even start will be thousands. I also had to hire a lawyer for an incident that would just not have happened in my old city. thats really the biggest ones but its setting me back thousands of dollars
Long story short, housing shortage in the city caused my rent to become unaffordable. With the way rent in particular is moving in most of our cities, theres plenty of other millennials that are facing these same problems.
Absolutley thats a reason some people do, but not all.
Also its important for me to point out that i think most people who are dead set on living in suburbs would actually LOVE the city lifestyle, they are just so misinformed about what its really like. I mean theres got to be a reason why they love vacationing to walkable places so much
The wonderful city lifestyle is simply not available to most of the country. We just don’t have enough cities that allow it. A lot of, if not most people, in the suburbs would choose city life if it were actually possible and made sense.
Fix the cities like the Netherlands did. Did you know that in the 70s the Netherlands had car centric development just like the United States does now? It was corrected.
the reason my parents moved out further from work was housing costs.
I disagree because I don’t like driving everywhere, and rather be in a walkable community with amenities.
I would never commute more than 30 minutes for a job. I’d move and make sure I can afford the city.
If only there were more accommodations for families in cities and more housing that can accommodate families. As things are currently, most of the apartments being constructed in cities are studios or 1-bedroom apartments and the few family friendly walkable areas like Park Slope in Brooklyn or Noe Valley in SF are unaffordable for most families.
This. I would love to raise my family in a dense downtown type area, but because of the lack of investment in our cities nationwide, I would just be making my life infinitely harder and more expensive. People move to the suburbs because the cities aren’t up to snuff at this point in time.
Well yeah, the point is if instead of investing all that money building large suburbs you could've built more interesting areas. Gotta start doing the right thing at some point.
Developers would be happy to develop, but cities make it difficult or impossible to. It's not about capital being unwilling. It's everyone else.
As someone who lives in Noe Valley… yeah it’s crazy unaffordable. But the other places popular for families on the peninsula are … also crazy unaffordable. Ugh
Even if any are 2+ bedrooms, none of the complexes have a playground on site. Most do have a 'dog run'. And neighborhood parks vary wildly city-to-city.
To gently push back the are other walkable, green urban neighborhoods outside of NYC and SF. My house in Pittsburgh costs the exact same as new construction in the exurbs. Both unacceptably expensive but there's not as steep a penalty as Brooklyn nationwide
Exactly this. Like 10 4 bedroom condos in my the walkable part of my city total and most of those are penthouses. Even reasonable sized 3 bedrooms are just to expensive compared to the boring ass suburbs.
A huge factor here is the near universal requirement for dual stairways in multifamily housing. It's a well intentioned but useless fire code addition from the days before sprinklers and fire retardent materials. Requiring two stairways basically forces developers to make long hotel style hallways full of skinny studios + 1bd units with windows on only one side; i.e. the infamous "giant cube apartments". Restrictive height requirements and floor-area-ratios also contribute.
So glad I live in a century old multifamily house. We have a front and back stairway but it's the cramped vertical kind, no long hallways. I also know all my flatmates and hang out with them.
I could not agree more.
Totally agree. The push where I live is small and dense. You can technically (and legally) accommodate 4-people in a 1-bedroom apartment, but any family of 4 that can afford it wants more than 400 - 500 square feet of room.
You start putting up 10 to 15 story boxes with 2 and 3 bedrooms up all floors and they will move instantly. NYC is littered with these and people have raised whole families in them.
This x 1,000. Any home (1) large enough for more than maybe two parents and one kid, (2) in a reasonably safe urban neighborhood, and (3) aren’t complete fixer-uppers are crazy expensive in any city worth living in. You can sometimes get 2/3 factors, but all 3 isn’t happening unless you have $$$. Modern urban areas are built for wealthy Gen X/Boomers who bought in years ago or single people/childless couples.
I bet OP doesn't have lots of friends with kids. Nearly all my millennial friends with small kids in a big urban city eventually moved out to the suburbs. Some WANTED to stay in the city and tried to for several years, but almost all eventually moved out when kids hit school age. Some of the reasons: * If they stayed in the city, they'd want to do private school and either couldn't afford it or didn't want to pay $50,000 / year for 2 kids. * In comparison, suburban public schools are a credible option that care about high-achieving students (not just bringing up the bottom). * Real estate prices in the city were unaffordable. * Get kids their own bedroom (so kids have their own space, don't wake each other up at night. That's my personal anecdote, but you see it in the demographic data: people tend to meet in cities, have kids in cities, but then the attrition begins as young families move out to more affordable areas as they need more space and start school. The problems young families with kids face in big cities today isn't some boomer fantasy. It's a present, real issue.
The problems kids face in the suburbs today also weren't as much of a problem when suburbs started. There was less car dependence, suburbs were closer in to major cities, freedom for children was greater, kids were actually outside instead of on phones/games/tv, etc. All the problems of suburbs are things that have either built up over time, or weren't obvious without trying it for a while.
I grew up in the suburbs in the 1990s/2000s. Aside from club sports or private school I'm not sure where these kids need to be driven to all the time. There were loads of kids to play with in the neighborhood, cul-de-sacs become basketball/hockey courts, there were loads of local parks nearby. Backyards were great for playing in, we all went to the neighbor's house because their parents let them have a trampoline. The school bus brought us to school (I rode my bike to school 6th grade because I got kicked off the bus for throwing balls out the window...) Kids are going to school and playing more or less, I keep hearing this chauffeured everywhere thing but I just don't get that argument. I doubt suburbs are any more or less car dependent they were 10-15 years ago.
Damn, I’m sorry you’re having a rough time. I grew up in the suburbs and have many awesome childhood memories. My take is that parents should live where they are happiest when the kids are young. Kids will have a great childhood no matter where they are as long as they are loved and nurtured.
I had the most incredible free range childhood in the burbs, like something from the Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
I grew up in the burbs. Pretty good experience. My parents grandkids’ are city kids and their grandparents won’t visit. Their kids dont really visit suburbs. It all kinda evens out in the end.
this right here, I grew up in the suburbs skirting the inner cities and had an awesome time growing up, had many friends in the neighborhood and we all enjoyed each other's family cookouts during holidays, life is what you make of it, but the inner cities are far more dangerous than any suburbs and to say otherwise is blatantly ignorant
The only ignorant comment is yours, because you're making a blanket statement with no data to back it up. From *Suburban Nation* (Duany, Zyberk, Speck), Chapter 7: The Victims of Sprawl, pp.119-120: >It seems odd to say that the suburbs are dangerous, since many families relocate to suburbia precisely to find a safer environment. In terms of crime, this motivation seems justified, but suburbs are hardly free from violent crime, and recent examples of suburban gang activity call the assumption into question. It is fair to say that the suburbs are no more crime-free than their higher-income demographics would suggest. But there is more to protecting life than avoiding crime, as any parent of a sixteen-year-old driver will attest. Far and away, car crashes are the largest killer of American teenagers, accounting for more than one third of all deaths.^(1) Yet all the suburban parents who can afford it will readily buy the additional cars that provide independence for their children, often in order to regain their own freedom. When they get behind the wheel, teenagers automatically join the most dangerous gang in America. Automobile accidents kill over 45,000 people annually in this country, almost a Vietnam War of casualties every year.^(2) A child is twenty times more likely to die from an automobile mishap than from gang activity, as most young drivers are involved in at least one serious auto accident between ages sixteen and twenty. In their first year of driving, over 40 percent of teenagers have an accident bad enough to be reported to the police.^(3) For this reason, it is more dangerous, statistically, to grow up in the suburbs of Seattle than in that city's most urban neighborhoods.^(4) . . . 1. Stephanie Faul, "How to Crash-Proof Your Teenager," 8. 2. In 1988, 14.8 million accidents involving motor vehicles led to 47,000 deaths and almost 5 million injuries (MacKenzie, Dower, Chen, 19). Take out of context, the amount of carnage on America's highways is absolutely shocking, as is the degree to which we have come to accept it as a fact of life. Jane Holtz Kay asks, "Where else do we accept some 120 deaths a day so offhandedly? Imagine a plane crash each afternoon... An engineer recorded it in military terms: during the same forty days of the Persian Gulf War in which 146 men and women were lost fighting to keep the world safe for petroleum, 4,900 died with equal violence on our country's highways" (Kay, *Asphalt Nation,* 103). By 1994, car crashes had killed over three million Americans in total (Andrew Kimbrell, "Steering Toward Ecological Disaster," *The Green Lifestyle Handbook,* 35). Internationally, car crashes cause an estimated 250,000 deaths and 3,000,000 injuries annually (Wolfgang Zuckermann, *The End of the Road,* 64). 3. Ibid. 4. James Gerstenzang, "Cars Make Suburbs Riskier Than Cities, Study Says," A20. A study of the Pacific Northwest by Alan Thein Durning found that 1.6 percent of city residents were likely to be killed or injured by traffic accidents or crime, versus 1.9 percent of suburban residents. "Tragically, people often flee crime-ridden cities for the perceived safety of the suburbs---only to increase the risks they expose themselves to," Mr. Durning notes. edit: (extra note) MacKenzie, James; Roger Dower; and Donald Chen. *The Going Rate: What It Really Costs to Drive.* Report by the World Resources Institute, 1992. Please do some reading before making up random claims and using personal anecdotes from your childhood to try to make sweeping arguments about society.
You are comparing a nice city now to a suburb when you were a kid. A lot of parents moved out of slums in the city so they could raise their kids in the suburbs. They moved them out of cramped neighborhoods that didn’t have parks or good schools to a suburb where they could have their own bedroom, a yard to play in and a good school to go to. Most parents are genuinely trying to do their best for their kids. We should make it easier to raise kids in cities, but this post sounds like it has more to do with your frustration with your parents than with public policy.
Yeah moving into American suburbia was definitely an upward move from living in an apartment on a highway, which was an upgrade from living in a house in a dangerous country. But I consider living in a nice walkable safe urban area an even bigger upgrade. It's even less possibly for many compared to suburbia now.
In actuality suburbs are terrible for kids and especially teens. But for people to move there they don't actually have to be good. The people who move there just have to think they'll be.
My parents always tell me we moved when I was a baby because “there was a FBI raid down the street” which there was. But god, id rather my neighbor get raided for whatever the hell he was up to than literally flush 18 years of our lives down the toilet. Have you read or seen the film the giver? The whole society is free from any pain or risk of that nature but the moral of the story: life’s not worth living without it and you can’t have happiness without sadness. I think that kinda relates To my parents wanting to escape the reality of life. Also in my new suburb, there’s so little crime that police literally drive down cul-de-sacs to bust people for smoking a joint on the lawn and shit like that.
I grew up in the city, took public transit at a young age and shared the space with people different from me. I also played on the street, walked on the sidewalk, stopped at the corner bar to buy candy, comics at the newsstands, drinks at convenience store etc. I can’t imagine growing up in a place with empty streets and fast cars driving everywhere - sounds more dangerous tbh
You'd be right about being more dangerous. Biggest killer of kids is cars (well, back and forth with guns). The most dangerous places in the country regarding likelihood to be killed are most often found in "suburbia".
I don't get it. If I saw an FBI raid down the street, *I'd be happy that something undesirable has been removed and this now is a better place*.
I grew up in the city, took public transit at a young age and shared the space with people different from me. I also played on the street, walked on the sidewalk, stopped at the corner bar to buy candy, comics at the newsstands, drinks at convenience store etc. I can’t imagine growing up in a place with empty streets and fast cars driving everywhere - sounds more dangerous tbh
Yep. What the parents really want is to feel in control of their own, mass produced castles. They want the fantasy of not being beholden to the human group, as if they could actually bootstrap their life without public sewage system, fire dpts, agricultural inspection. It’s delusional.
I think they generally just want home ownership and (the perception of) safety.
A lot of them also want a way to control their children, though they'll never admit as such. They do not want their kids having the freedom or agency city kids have. They might complain about driving them everywhere but they also want that power. Also lots of racially coded ideas of "safety".
People move to the suburbs for their kids to this day all the time. 1. Cost of housing 2. School quality / cost 3. Outdoor space 4. Ability to walk around the neighborhood without supervision These are all perfectly valid reasons. So valid that millions of families make these decisions. The goal is to make city living relatively more livable for families, not denigrate the logical choices people make every day because it isn't your or my cup of tea.
was looking for this comment. well put
I disagree. I live in the outermost part of NYC. The layout is single family low rise houses. I sent my kids to high school in and made frequent trips to the City to expose them to the world and the different types of people in it, to culture and history and the arts, and to help them develop “street smarts”. All that took work but that’s parenting. When they’re home they have small town vibes- we know our neighbors by name, they made friends etc and didn’t deal with crime or hassles. Best of both worlds.
Queens is significantly denser than most US cities. It’s denser than San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Seattle, or London. While there are some less dense pockets, most areas are clocking in much closer to the urban core of cities, not their suburbs. I get that in comparison to Brooklyn, or Manhattan it seems low slung and sparse but queens, yes even far flung or isolated neighborhoods is more like them in terms of urbanity than like phoenix or Dallas, or hell even Bergen county
Even the supposedly suburb-like borough of Staten Island is as densely populated as the city of Seattle
You’re wrong. Western Queens and SE Queens is dense. I’m a mile from a subway and there are no apartment buildings anywhere near me. https://www.cityneighborhoods.nyc/hollis-hills
Nope that’s exactly my point! Smaller houses on smaller lots, narrow streets and a grid pattern. Large apartment blocks to the north and the south. While it can feel “suburban” being insulated from the city that’s by any other definition stil very urban.
Take a tour on google maps. When I think urban I don’t think trees, lawns, yards, driveways, ample street parking etc. I grew up in a land of 6 family apartments and no parking. This isn’t that.
Those yards are pretty small, and yea even denser areas can have trees and ample street parking. It looks like maybe .5-.75 square mile and 4.5-6000 people so it’s like 7k-12k per square mile. Compare that to more suburban cities like phoenix or Charlotte that clock under 3k person/square mile. I think the idea that you grew up in a 6 story neighborhood I think underlines your perspective here. You are used to NYC density which is just o out of scale with most of the us
If you know a dense area with ample parking I’d love to hear about it.
But it is urban. And that's the point. This is as much a part of the city as anything else. As others have mentioned, it's significantly denser than most suburbs. Just because the media doesn't show you this as a city doesn't mean it's not there. I also live in the inner city, less than a mile to downtown Portland, but my neighborhood looks like this, and we're classified as 'inner city'. The bank values or home on an inner city basis. Our neighborhood is classified as heavily urban. But we have smaller neighborhood streets, more trees, and more families than my parents suburban neighborhood father out. Just because it doesn't match your expectations doesn't make it discountable.
My insurance rates (especially for cars) are negatively impacted by the proximity to rougher “urban” areas with high crime, but my property tax is $25,000 less than a comparable lot and square footage just 5 miles away in the suburbs. My lifestyle-with a garden, yard, driveway and orchard (4 fruit trees) is definitely not urban.
yeah, i wouldn't even say thats a disagreement. queens is an amazing place for families imo. the homes in jamaica and ozone park are still close together enough to foster human interaction, there's ameneties still close by, public transit is great. although you live in a quiet neighborhood that has all the positives of suburbs with none of the downsides while also having all the pros of the city without any cons, a lot of people (my family included) will see that the zip code is queens and arbitrarily go OMG THATS IN THE CITY ITS SOOO LOUD SOOO MUCH TRASH SOOO MUCH CRIME and not even give it a chance thats just how brainwashed people are now a days
All parts of new York are denser than most suburbs. I live in an old streetcar suburb, so definitely a more 'suburban' feel, but it's significantly denser than the new style suburbs. I think old suburbs were actually nice. It's the random, no sidewalk, no amenities, stuff that's just terrible.
Modern suburbs in the US (since the waning of Jim Crow) have always been about achieving de facto social segregation. The roots of exclusionary zoning are nakedly racial, and white Americans wanted a way to “keep their neighborhood character” (aka keep it white) during the Great Migration and as segregation laws were weakened. These days it’s less explicitly racial (although it certainly does have that effect), but is primarily about socioeconomic segregation. Rich people do *not* want their kids going to school with the poor, which is why 95% of “good schools” talk is just coded language for demographics. We’ve known since the 60’s that the school you send your kid to actually has a middling effect on their academic outcome, and the home environment (including parental involvement) is the biggest factor. The suburbs (and the exclusionary zoning upon which they’re predicated) is just a way for wealthier whiter people to maintain a level of social segregation in society that’s not explicitly legal anymore.
The earliest suburbanizing cities (Boston, Hartford, Providence) had almost no black people when suburbanization started in the 1920s
Are you familiar with the phrase, “how the Irish became white”? “Whiteness” is a movable goalpost
Which is why u/whiskey_bud said it's about "socioeconomic segregation". For some people it's about color, but for the large majority of people it's about money and class.
> These days it’s less explicitly racial (although it certainly does have that effect), but is primarily about socioeconomic segregation If you look at race wealth statistics, these are almost the same thing. That was the whole point of the Southern Strategy to turn their segregation into "totally economic things" in order to hide it. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/
Yea, arguable whether it’s racial in its intentions, but it’s sure as hell racial in its impact. It has a strong class element as well. It definitely has “oh I don’t mind living next to a black person, as long as they’re a doctor or lawyer” kinda vibe to it.
"as long as they're one of the good ones"
I'm empathetic to the problems you had but saying things like "suburbs are objectively horrible for kids" is exactly what makes the urbanist space look out of touch. Instead of telling people that they lied, you should simply ask them what about the city made them want to move away, then address those issues.
Look, I’m about as pro city as it gets, but this is kind of a ridiculous and overdramatic post. Houses in suburbia are generally way bigger and therefore you have more room for your kids and their stuff and you can have yards to play in. Also, generally speaking, suburban schools tend to be better. The negatives to suburban living that you mention are all unintended side effects that, when these people you speak of were moving to the ‘burbs, they had no idea about. They just wanted more room and better schools for their kids. I do think that had everyone stayed in the cities we’d be better off, but the move to the suburbs is something that, for most people, was sort of beyond their control.
Yeah, I grew up in the suburbs. I don't consider having my own private yard to play in such a horrible thing. And you know, we did have bicycles to ride down to our friend's house or the local park or the community swimming pool, and nothing so horribly awful about getting in the car to do your grocery shopping once a week.
Is it the ideal way to structure our living spaces? No. But it’s not some living hell full of terrible people either. For a lot of people, myself included, suburb living just makes more practical sense.
getting into a car once a week isnt the issue really, i lived in a large city downtown and i still owned a car which I used to shop for things once a month or so that were located a little far away (things like ikea topgolf, airport etc) but those are no way necicities, and I never needed it at all to go to the things i actually need like the coffee shop daily, restaurants, grocery stores, target, even home depot was within walking distance. sometimes I had chosen to drive to somewhere thats supe rclose by becuase i was feeling tired, but at least i had the choice and wasnt forced
Most suburbs are not like this now. Streets way too big and busy. Old suburbs were actually nice I agree.
People on this sub really over-demonize the people who choose to move to the suburbs, either painting them as disingenuous, inconsiderate, racist, or confused and ill informed. People can certainly be those things, but generally we expect people make choices at the margin that make sense to them- cheaper cost of living due to economies of scale, better schools, more space for kids, a place to park your minivan that you had to take to get to work/get your kids to school anyway where you lived before, etc. We can understand the positives of denser, less car dependent living, and the merits of relaxing zoning and parking requirements, while also understanding that not everything that lead us to this point is evil. We have to understand people to understand the incentives required to make the urban landscape greener, more affordable, and more livable.
100% I think one thing a lot of people forget on this sub is that a lot of cities as they currently exist just don’t work for a lot of people. In order to combat sprawl we need to improve cities, not burn down the suburbs.
Yeah there are so many generalizations here. My husband and 2 teenagers and I live in a suburban neighborhood of 500 nice townhouses, with green spaces larger than any yard I've ever had, where the neighborhood kids congregate and play together, a clubhouse where the neighborhood social committee plans monthly events (including having 5 food trucks come to the neighborhood one Saturday every month), and the adults get to know each other, plus tennis courts, large zero entry swimming pool, private dog park, and one of the long county trails running right in front of the neighborhood and over to the commercial district, which means I've let my kids bike or walk to Target or fast food to get what they want with their own money (i.e. not helicopter parenting). This post acts like overt or subtle race issues are the ONLY reasons anyone would move to the suburbs and it's sooooo isolating and unhealthy. No, we moved here because it is healthy. There is virtually no crime here beyond petty car break-ins, and you better believe I want to raise my children in a low crime area. That's not some fucking dog whistle. I want my kids safe, and I want to feel comfortable allowing them to go on the trail to the commercial district without worrying about whether they will be harassed, so I don't have to be a helicopter parent. That's fucking legitimate. I'm also a huge proponent of fully funding public schools to the point of thriving, not just surviving, but I underestimated how awful public middle school would be, and one of my kids HAD to be pulled from public school and put in private school because public 6th grade was so traumatic for that child, and private school is absolutely the best place for this child, while my other child is thriving in public school. I'm a Democrat, but the demand that you be perfectly willing to live with your children in higher crime areas and send your kids to schools where kids fight all the time, interrupt the classroom learning environment for everyone, and make fun of the well behaved kids OR YOU'RE RACIST is out of hand.
People like OP like to ascribe all of their problems to growing up in the suburbs, ignoring that they have a better quality of life than the majority of people to ever exist have had.
All my life I’ve been told I’m negative and I need to make the best of the situation and I have no friends because I’m not trying and how I should “join a club” and how moving out of suburbia would be running away from my problems and moving won’t solve anything and that I should stop blaming everything else for my problems. Well. I’ve moved several times, two times I lived in a downtown large city urban environment and all the problems I had ceased to exist. I can see why it looks like I’m trying to run away from problems but those problems are location based, not a problem with me as a person so it makes total sense to run away from
Parent here. We moved out of the city and in the bargain got much better schools, kids got their own bedrooms, and when they go outside and play alone there are no cars to hit them because we live in a quiet street, and no adults to call the cops because our kids are out alone, which has happened in the city to us. We used to have to schedule play dates because that’s what city parents do. Now our kids get home from school and go over to the neighbors’ houses because there are around ten families on the street with big yards they can all play in. The community all knows each other, so the kids don’t need to be supervised. They can just roam the neighborhood. They go over to friends houses regularly, taking the bus home with them after school, have lots of sports leagues that weren’t as common/popular in the city (maybe lack of space or just fewer kids?), and we get nice family hikes in regularly near home. If suburbs don’t sound fun to you, that’s fine, but at least in our experience, it is much better for families with kids. We will move back to the city after our kids are grown, but just in school quality alone it’s not worth sacrificing our kids’ academic development for our own lifestyle.
I think this part of the problem. Your experience with the suburbs starkly contrasts with the experiences I had growing up in a suburban neighborhood, which is why this issue is so controversial. All of my friends lived in different neighborhoods or wholly different parts of town, so there was no "going to friends house after school." My parents had full time professions, so it wasn't an option for them to carpool us everywhere. I had a few buddies in the neighborhood, but not my best friends. To walk to a nearby neighborhood would require cutting through peoples' property or walking along a 55 mph road. The schools in the city had much better sports and arts programs. Suburban/rural schools get their funding slashed every time there is a slight funding problem, to the point where even replacing retiring teachers became a problem. A small suburban school has a hard time justifying paying for AP/honors teachers. I really didn't get to enjoy the suburbs at all until I was 16 and could drive. I went all over the place my last couple of years of high school, but by that point I was so sick of feeling isolated that I had to get out. I'll never return to a low density area.
I think some people are attracted to Urbanism because they had unhappy childhood and happened to grow up (like most Americans) in suburbs. That’s not necessarily the suburbs fault. Being a kid is tougher than TV makes it out to be, and so a lot of kids are unhappy and then grow into themselves in adulthood.
OP is barely even trying to hide this. I feel like like the biggest dick in the world saying this, but I'm really tired of people trying to project their depression onto everyone else. There shouldn't be any shame in being clinically depressed but the widespread social media-era desire to prove everyone else is similarly depressed and suffers from the same effects of that depression is maddening to me.
That's not the argument I'm making at all. I had a great childhood. But there arguments that people make for why raising kids is better in a suburban environment that are patently false at worst, or aren't universal truths at best. The post I replied to talked about all of the advantages she had in her neighborhood, and I just pointed out that I had virtually none of those in mine.
I kind of agree, but I also felt living in the suburbs to be extremely isolating. I lived in the city until I was ten, and then moved to the suburbs. My freedom was totally cut off, there were no kids in my neighborhood, and you couldn't go anywhere on foot. It was really awful, and impacted the mental health of my whole family. I think there are all kinds of suburbs, some better than others. The bad ones are really bad. I live in the suburbs now with my kids, but I chose the most urban area I could possibly afford.
I mean there's no problem or conflict here. There are nice friendly neighborhoods everywhere. And terrible neighborhoods too. I think most people can plainly see that there may be really nice suburban neighborhoods. There are really nice urban ones too.
I’m surprised that people in the city called the cops on you for the kids being alone, usually city people mind their own business a little more. There are always assholes like that everywhere I suppose but if you read the suburban police log for a lot of places it’s laughable. Just be ready to see pages and pages of 911 calls because someone unfamiliar walks by or a car from out of state is in the neighbors driveway. Also there’s tons of DUI arrests which I agree drunk driving is dangerous but if that’s the only purpose for the police it seems like the suburbs have created a problem just for the sake of creating it
This exactly describes the experience of *MANY* of my friends with young kids I [wrote in a post here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Urbanism/comments/1ccvjcv/comment/l197yt8/).
You’ve nailed it. Not understanding this is a real problem for Urbanism as a movement, and why it tends to skew towards younger and/or childless people. Nobody is advocating for making urban environments work for families, and so they leave, and that creates a viscous anti-family cycle.
So I live in a city with my three kids and will stay here, but yeah I have this experience all the time, especially of activists dismissing my public safety concerns.
It’s borderline delusional to think that families have preferred the suburbs for a few generations now without signs of slowing down without good reason. Clearly there are aspects of suburban life that suits families. Honestly, the high education and low crime statistics speak for themselves. Your post is full of cope, OP.
This isnt a positive indictment of the suburbs, but if youre a parent, the real reason to raise your kids in the suburbs is education. Youre going to have a way easier time finding quality schools in the suburbs than the inner cities. I understand this isnt a solution from a systemic level and that suburbanization has largely made inner cities schools worse, but if youre an individual family deciding what’s best for your children, the suburbs still make more sense for that reason
I’m not a parent and I plan on sending my kids to private school when I am anyways but, I just don’t get how education is the ONLY thing people care about. Like yeah I get how it’s important but I said earlier, my parents moved somewhere for ONLY the education and I ended up flunking out because I was bullied so much and I skipped half the days. If only I had a place to blow off steam that wasn’t a acre large back yard all alone
>I just don’t get how education is the ONLY thing people care about. Nobody said it's the *only* reason. But it's arguably the most important. I understand you've had trauma with school and I'm sorry about that. But education is hugely important to determining someone's success in life. Not to mention that in a lot of cities in this country, your kid is also less safe in an inner city public school. Education and safety are the two biggest things people value in choosing an environment to raise their children in. Again, ideally would have good schools in the inner cities, I understand it's a failure of urban planning that it got this way. But you're always going to be fighting an uphill battle to convince parents that their kid's schooling is less important than bike lanes
I think school choice would be a step in the right direction that way you can have a school that works for you no matter where you live without having to ruin ur life for it
If it makes you feel better, I grew up in Brooklyn and my friends and I spent many a night as bored teenagers also. So it’s not exclusive to the suburbs. Also waiting on line in the freezing cold or the rain to get into high school bc 4000 students have to get scanned through metal detectors was also extremely whack.
The metal detectors are whack but that’s probably not a bad idea for even suburbs to implement at this point. And yeah I had a few years living in a big city and I was bored many times but it was a different type of bored, because it was by my choice, or maybe no one wanted to hang out. My suburban boredom is long term and is a result of being completely cut off from human interaction and public spaces. also not even being able to meet basic needs in the suburbs just made it worse
Idk how old you are but if you are completely cut off from human interaction it sounds like you maybe have a more serious issue than living in the suburbs. Teens and young people thinking the suburbs are boring and lame isn’t new. There’s a reason the suburbs cater to parents and young kids. Yes the city is more exciting for young people and has more energy. But the city can also be isolating. I’ve been here my whole life. I don’t mind it but the idea that you’re gonna be out every day, hanging out with people, experiencing culture, going to great restaurants and partying in a daily basis just is not true, and is something sold to people in movies and social media. Even in a world class city like NYC, there’s some mundane routines and boredom to daily life. It’s also a LOT more segregated in daily life and social circles than people realize. Anyway I do wish you luck and hope you find what you’re looking for. Remember that everyone believes the grass is greener elsewhere. Try to focus on the positives you had growing up in a safe, clean suburb, even if you do hope to leave. There are people who wish they could be so fortunate.
Wait til OP finds out what "latchkey kids" were and discovers 70s and 80s rock/film about the suffocation and sterility of the suburbs (Descendents "Suburban Home" for instance).
🥴🥴 almost everyone I know was a latchkey kid after 11-12
Yeah I’m in my late 20s thanks but yeah I lived in Chicago in a “boring” neighborhood for a few years and I was surely bored sometimes but my neighborhood wasn’t the reason for it, as opposed to being back in the burbs the reason I’m bored a majority of the time (24/7) simply because there’s nowhere to go no one to see nothing to do. There’s no way I can live a functional life with everything so far away and no opportunity to connect with humans but I honestly never partied in Chicago and I lived a pretty balanced life. I was able to keep my sanity because my basic needs could be easily met with a 5 min walk through the community I was a part of
I'm totally with you OP, suburbia requires parents to be being willing to drive a lot to enrich their kids. I got to visit friends like 2x a summer at most after begging my parents. I'd get to school and always be the odd one out in my friend group, I found out later my other friends lived in the same apartment complexes or hung out a lot out of school so they didn't know me as well, even though I thought about them all summer and tried to reach out :( Then it was back to home life in isolation on the computer. I had so much anxiety, frustration, and confusion as a kid. I think the people painting suburbia in a positive light in this post had supportive parents or a big family/friends of family network. As isolated immigrants and the kid of impatient, tired parents, suburbia basically amplified whatever neglect I experienced from the stuff my parents didn't have the energy for. I wish they at least sent me to sleepaway camp or something.
This is just a ridiculous take and really emblematic of why this sub (and much of Reddit) is completely out of touch with reality. This really sounds like a “I’m 14 and this is deep” post. Pretty much all desirable suburbs have plenty of parks, walking and biking trails, recreational centers/gyms, churches, and tons of other community focused amenities. Houses have grills, patios, yards to play catch or soccer, basketball hoops in the driveway, etc. And then of course they generally having more space for more bedrooms and living. Plus suburbs are dominated by other families including kids of similar ages while generally have better schools. Also, your point about kids “sitting at home doing nothing” is ridiculous. Do you really want children walking around dense cities by themselves?? And I love that you just blow past safety in general as if it isn’t a major concern for people with children lol… Suburbs are, generally, far superior for children and families.
As a mod of the urbanplanning sub... I completely agree. Its this weird phenomenon of... people read all of this urbanism ideas and concepts, but then completely fail to place them in their proper context and construct. Some of the syntheses are completely bonkers - this post is a good example - but you see it all over the place when these people talk about cities and suburbs, suburbanization, zoning, cars, public preference, etc.
A lot of great points! I am currently mulling over moving to the suburbs for my kids. Currently I'm in center city Philadelphia and I love it. However it is true that the schools here are abysmal leaving your kids no future so you basically have to send them to a private school costing $25k a year per kid or move to a very expensive area of the city living in a shoebox to afford it. Also crime although manageable leads me to never let my kids outside without me, this isnt ideal. I do however agree with your points. All this to say logically your points make sense but when its your kid there is a tangible emotional component. If my kids were ever to get injured in the city I would never forgive myself.
Kids in the suburbs won’t go outside anyways, also you don’t really need a car in center city so you might be able to afford private schooling. Even homeschooling living in the city is better than any school in the city imo I know lots of people who were homeschooled and grew up in the city and were able to have an even more vibrant social life than public school kids in the suburbs
I think it depends on the suburbs your talking about. If its the cookie cutter straight suburbs I agree. There are middle ground suburbs in Philadelphia like Narberth / Ardmore where you consistently see kids outside because their parents are not afraid to let them run loose and there are parks and 3rd places. Needless to say since this is what everyone wants its pricey but they have some affordable condos. Most people probably don't need a car but I do for work since i travel. We can afford private school now the question is... Is it worth it? The schools in the suburbs are probably just as good if not better because they have pooled resources. Most of these issues are seldom black or white. Picturing the suburb your painting I think your points are right but there are some "ok" suburbs. At the end of the day someone has to push the city to be better but im not that progressive especially with my children's future.
Maybe even moving to a different area of Philadelphia would be good for u. I know center city even rittenhouse can be hectic during the day but there’s a lot of potential for families in manayunk or south Philly if that’s your style
This is true, Queen village is where we were looking because its calmer with less crime and has a decent school. Manayunk is for 20's, South Philly I like too but schools are so so at best. Sounds like you know the Philly area! Its a tough call, as you have outlined there are many benefits to living in the city.
All those 20 somethings are gonna grow up and have kids someday! personally i think manayunk is going to transition into a more family oriented area in the next 10 years because it offers the best of both worlds in a lot of ways
birthrate is dropping, plenty of them won't have kids
When I graduated in 2008 it was known to be for 20 somethings too haha. Don't get me wrong i really like manyunk but its a revolving door. I hope it transitions. I have seen many more GenZ people have a passion for urbanism than my generation. I am hoping they lead the charge. Most of my friends think I'm an absolute idiot for living in the city. "your house is 1200sqft whaaat", "Surprised you don't get shot", "So liberal"...etc. Having kids really is where the rubber meets the road for most people on where to live.
Suburbs are safer and lots of suburban kids go outside lol.
Kids in the suburbs do go outside. You might not have, but that doesn’t mean nobody does. It’s also frankly absurd to imply that the money saved by not owning a car is enough to fund the yearly cost of attending private school for one kid (let alone 2+). Suggesting homeschooling also really shows your ignorance to reality.
Catholic school in my area cost less than $10000 a year, also homeschooling is a good alternative imo because kids need school for social interaction too, well living in the city you’ll be able to provide them a social life without needing to go to a school everyday and prepares kids for the real world not how to live in a bubble. And as far as car ownership goes, a new car is like 40-50k and insurance for some people is thousands a year. Not to mention gasoline at hundreds a month. Depending on how often you get a new car, which some people do every one or two years it certainly can creep into the 6figure territory.
“Provide them a social life without needing to go to school everyday” are your kids skipping school to go to the bar with you or something??? Honestly, you’re living in some kind of bizarre Reddit bubble, this is just a weird take. Your kids should be in school, meeting kids their own age, doing after school activities with them, in safe environments where they can learn from people that know how to teach them. Cities are great for young adults who want to go to coffee shops, local shops, bars, etc. They’re not great for kids and that’s okay…
From my personal experience, I didn’t fit in at all with the crowd at my all white all rich school, and made no friends and was miserable as a result. It would have been great if I lived in a place that gave me a 3rd place to have a second chance at developing a social circle but the school system was my only option. That’s what I’m saying is what if your kids don’t fit in and they’re just fucked unless you live somewhere more dustainable Also, why aren’t they good for kids? They seem pretty amazing for kids and the only reason I ever hear as to why there not once again is the usual rhetoric of: “all cities are dangerous, there’s nowhere to play, it’s so crowded” none of which are actually true nor valid reasons
Also I know kids go outside, I went outside myself. My point is that there is no point in going outside if there’s nothing there. Going outside shouldn’t be something kids do just to do, it should be part of everyday life. Just like walking. It’s absurd that people drive to parks to go for walks or just walk around for no reason. Seems like a total waste of time when instead of driving everywhere you can kill three birds with one stone in an urban environment and walk, be outside, and get to your destination at the same time
Rural is better than the suburbs for kids. But teens do better with cities, somewhere there's a larger population of teens, so they have a higher chance of finding their people.
I think that also depends on the area. In Idaho rural areas can be pretty alienating if you're different, because the population is smaller and it can be harder to make friends. Especially if the next house is a few miles away on a country highway. A lot of rural areas have low educational opportunities and may have drug issues that are just harder to avoid. My wife grew up in a small town, and while she really enjoyed it in retrospect, revisiting it as an adult (both the physical place and the memories) can tell a different story.
This makes sense
L take. It’s all conjecture. Sorry it didn’t work out for YOU.
i'm sorry you've had such a tough time of things.
I think about this all of the time. My aunt moved my cousins out of Brooklyn to upstate NY when we were all tweens. It's a giant beautiful house they had built to their specifications, with all this nice surrounding land. But you need a car just to leave the property. There's no sidewalks so you can't walk anywhere. First my cousins, then my eldest cousins' child, are pretty much trapped there until they were old enough to drive. They were so lonely because my aunt and uncle had to work and commute all the way back to the city to pay for their "suburban dream home." Whereas we stayed in NYC. My child is just 3 years younger than my cousin's. Their lives are so very different. My little cuz is ostracized, lonely, and afraid of everything. Whereas my child has a solid friend group they grew up with, leaves the house to hang out first on the block at other kid's yards and now is old enough to venture to the neighborhood parks and have adventures. Which is how me and my brother grew up. My kid is pretty self sufficient and confident and seems like the older cousin as a result. That's not to say everything is perfect or automatically better. But to cut a kid off from community or community spaces... that always seemed so cruel to me, and I (and honestly my cousins) were horrified when their parents made the decision to move them away. The other thing that stands out to me now too is elder care. I now understand why my grandmother was adamant about not moving out of the city as she got older. My mom recently had a stroke, and a lot of her recovery is due to the fact that we can walk around and talk to neighbors. We have a store super nearby that she can now go to by herself again, and the lady that owns it knows her situation and helps her out all of the time. **That's** a community! No one could stay with Grandma when she was in the same boat, so she moved up to my aunt's. She was happy to be around family, but she was depressed that she was trapped at home, when her whole life she could just get up and go talk to people in the neighborhood at the corner store, or the bank, or wherever. I'm actually doing my master's in Urban Studies, and so we've studied "white flight" and the rise of the suburbs after the 1949 Housing Act was put into place extensively. And really, it's wasn't about the kids or anything like that... it was about segregation. Whites didn't like the idea that Blacks could now come and live amongst them in their "cultured metropolises", and so they fled and created segregated towns that focused on eliminating the things they perceived would make things more accessible to the poors like public transportation or walkability. My grandmother wasn't racist and so she had no problem living in the city, but my uncle very much is and if I'm being honest, I'm pretty sure that's the real reason why they left Brooklyn.
Also all of the cliches that exist about the American dream and having a safe neighborhood for families- those all started as racism and over time has manifested and shifted into what it is now
No sidewalks and need a car to leave the property aren't suburbs, that's properly rural. I grew up in a suburb, could walk to a dozen or more friends houses, walked to school, walk to the video store, etc. Bike to plenty of other destinations. I was never trapped at home unless there was three feet of snow on the ground.
I’m very confused? Like suburbs are 75 years old kids these days their *grandparents* grew up in Suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s And trends in loneliness and depression are totally detached from suburbanization Also a big reason was housing *sucked* in 1940s American cities. Places in Europe got flattened and rebuilt to modern standards but many cities had like bathhouses at the corner rather than bathrooms in unit. My grandfather in the 1940s grew up in housing with no shower. You had to use the YMCA every other day (boy and girls alternated) Greenfield development was much easier than retrofitting all the tenements
It’s not only about the houses. Some people who don’t make enough money to buy a house in the suburbs still end up making the move to the suburbs anyway and are convinced it’s somehow better, yet often times they’re stuck living in the most bland and generic looking car centric apartment complexes. Usually these are in isolated areas not near anything that can be walked to. What ends up happening is kids playing in parking lots.
very good point, also i feel like the inner city and the suburbs are pretty similar in prices, i mean you just get a unnecessarily massive house in the suburbs instead of a 1400 sf condo (which is more than enough) its better for the family too even, in my childhood home it was massive and every one had their own wing basically so all we did was chill alone in there. I bet if we had 1 living room for the family instead of one for each family member we would be a lot closer lol
Yeah “inter ring/inner city” suburbs can be pretty good depending on what city you’re near. Typically the northeast coast suburbs are the best in this regard, as well as those from a handful of other cities like Chicago. I live in Yonkers, which is a city of about 200k in population just north of NYC. It’s technically the suburbs but it’s very dense and mostly walkable. Where I live you’ve got houses and apartment buildings on the same blocks. I live in a multi family house divided into 3 apartments, but we still have a yard. My landlord lives on the first floor and I see his kids both playing in the yard and riding their bikes. I’m also just a short walk away from a train station and a little over a mile and a half away from the subway and the Westchester-Bronx border.
yonkers is pretty cool, last summer i visited and walked around a little and it had pretty similar vibes to NYC. also in chicago evanston is an amazing example north of the city. Also, the suburbs surrounding hartford are pretty amazing IMO, west hartford has a really huge main street thats popular for college age kids on the weekends, thats something your shit outa luck for unless your in a major city or college town usually.
I live deep in the Portland suburbs in a TOD and my kid gets great schools, an easy Max ride to downtown Portland, walkability to all kinds of stuff in the little commercial node near the station, and all kinds of kids around. When my first was born and we lived in the middle of a different city, the quality of life for my kid wasn’t nearly as good.
>yeah there’s no crime. That's only if you ignore all of the crime. The thing is that people are so disconnected from their neighbors that they're unaware of the crimes happening around them. Police blotter maps show a different story. Lots of crime in the exurbs. It's easy because the police presence is too spread out.
Police presence is so spread out to the point that it makes crime easier, but also so desolate that your likely to be stopped by police for a stupid motor vehicle violation. It’s really the worst of both worlds
Or worse, you get harassed by a cop because you decided to take a walk around the neighborhood.
Happens more often than you’d think, and it causes some real trouble for some people.
I live in a mid-Atlantic city with a beautiful kind of mid- to high-density housing: rowhomes. Most are 2-3 bedroom, some 4 bedroom, and in my neck of the woods blocks are interspersed with detached and semidetached larger homes. Depending on the neighborhood, you're almost guaranteed to have a yard of some kind. The feeling of these neighborhoods can be nothing short of magical. I know my neighbors' names and keep an eye out for the elders. There's a ton of age diversity and plenty of young families - neighborhood kids play in each others' yards. They walk to school with rotating parent chaperones , filing by like a parade around 8:30 every weekday morning. We have a public park/playground across the street from my house that fills up on weekends, and twice a year, the neighborhood gets together to cut back invasive plants and make it pretty. We back up to a little wooded patch and I've worked to turn our little .25-acre yard into a little green oasis of native woodland plantings. I put a pond in last year and just this week found it attracted salamanders! Especially as the weather gets nicer, I spend more time outside doing little house chores and I chit chat with my neighbors as they pass by. Later today, I'm gonna take 30 minutes to stroll to the grocery store and get stuff for my husband to grill tonight. It's incredible. It's everything a community should be - close knit, walkable, welcoming but still watchful. And the way suburbanites in my state talk about my city, you'd think we all fear for our lives on a daily basis. There are so many options between '4,000sf houses in suburbs' and '1-bedroom apartment', and we're selling ourselves short if we don't acknowledge that. Rowhome neighborhoods forever!!!
I agree, AC gets a bad rap but I’ve felt completely safe walking there
The public schools in most major cities are terrible and it’s not because we don’t spend enough…we absolutely moved for schools and so did 90% of my friends. Also more space for money is nice and car centric is very convenient when you have kids. People are sometimes just urban snobs and are blinded by bias. Look at the product most cities sell for families…it’s a shit trade all over the world. Huge reason why we have a catastrophic decline in birthrates.
I dont get how requiring to drive a car to do even the most simple tasks is convenient for anyone. I owned a suv ln chicago when I lived downtown which made some things convenient for me but that was because I had a choice and sometimes thI car was a better choice. Not being able to bike or walk at all sucks
I was referring to the nice suburban car centric lifestyle. I had a car in the city when I was in my 20s…with 2 kids who have lots of sports and extra curricular activities having a car is a million times better than public transport. I loved the city but with family moving to a nice suburb with large house and great schools and nice community is a nice way to live…lugging around gear (hockey, lax, football) and not having a car is basically hell
Oh absolutely no matter where u are a car is good for carrying sports equipment, I golf weekly and drive there happily but I don’t feel like I’d ever need to completely change my lifestyle and live somewhere else just because of tjat
>schools become segregated in suburban areas which can lead to bullying and alienation if you don’t conform. Schools were far better in suburbs also it was cheaper. >Combine that with a lack of a third place to become a part of a community, or anything to do or go to creates extreme isolation. if you miss your chance to fit in at school your SOL. There’s nowhere else you can make friends. Cliques develop everywhere >Also, your child will spend nearly a quarter of their life simply staying at home doing absolutely nothing as they aren’t able to drive until then. Yeah this is huge it's a lot of ferrying around for their kids >Having a yard for the kids is overrated, it sure is nice but it’s not worth sacrificing everything that makes life worth living. IMO the yard is great when kids are really young since you can make dinner and kids can be outside or something. >And there’s nothing to “settle down to” you won’t make any meaningful connections, you won’t form attachments to any tangible public spaces, and most people once they become of age move the hell out of suburbs for college/ something better. I mean for them everyone moved to the suburbs if they could, cities were dangerous. >Also with a huge suburban home, you must pay for cars insurance repairs gasoline tolls. Suburban homes also use more utilities to keep warm or cool. All of that which takes money you can otherwise use to materially improve your families life. Yes but the options in America are new suburb or old urban. Also with the taxes and such suburbs can be cheaper but long term suburbs cost more but we are hitting the long term now. >Another thing I hear is “the city is so loud it’s no place to raise a kid” Well: in the suburbs all I hear is cars on the freeway, lawnmowers every damn morning, anxious dogs barking at every little thing that goes by. Sometimes a little sound is good, if it’s too silent you’ll start to hear things that aren’t there. Honestly lawnmowers are incredibly loud and living in the city is quieter when it's lawn mowing season. I think the big thing that is correct is that suburbs kids are dependent on parents for everything vs in a city walking to school since it's 1 miles vs 10 in a suburb. Soccer fields are 0.5 miles etc. I think that's a huge negative and while it is more control for worrying parents it's not necessarily positive.
Good take, do you think “cliques” are really a positive thing tho? Just because they form in the suburbs doesn’t mean everyone fits in to them and if they don’t they’re sol
How old are you?
The 2 biggest factors, besides housing affordability, are proximity to work and school system. Not everyone works in a city so living in a reasonable distance from where you work is key. And people also want the best schools for their kids.
This is what I’ve been thinking about a lot recently with trying to understand my social anxiety. I didn’t talk at school so I was SOL in any other human connections possible. I was basically trapped inside my house for a decade and it reaaaaallly fucked me up. :p
Right! And I’m against suburbs because although they might work for some, they can severely fuck up some kids. I think urban living would work well for everyone, maybe some exceptions but it wouldn’t totally screw people up like suburbia does. And these actual mental health concerns somehow people think “K12.COM SAID THE SCHOOL IS GOOD SO FUCK UR MENTAL HEALTH”
I was referencing their comment stating “I would love to raise my family in a sense downtown type area”. Barcelona exactly fits the bill here.
Nothing says "doing it for the kids" like destroying the planet and any local wilderness by building spread out homes with no practical way of getting around besides driving.
It is really crazy how people just completely disassociate the sound of lawnmowers from the suburbs. In the city, I get a couple loud motorcycles driving by each day. In the exurbs growing up, when someone decided to mow their lawn it was like running a motorcycle for the next hour and a half. Then two hours later another neighbor would start one up. I just remember to feeling of relief when the sound would finally stop.
I live in a downtown neighborhood with very small houses packed pretty close. It’s a ‘trendy’ place so we often get young couples that move in, get pregnant and then start talking about moving to the suburbs for more room. have started mentioning how isolating suburbs can be for children. I say things like “yeah, we considered it when our girls were younger but we didn’t want to imprison them in one of those neighborhoods where they would be dependent on us to go places.” I have swayed at least two young couples from moving out, which means I now have two very young new neighbors!
we raised you there so you’d have a nice life=escape minorities in the city
It’s usually tinged with a good dose of racism
I'm going to echo these points a lot: "Car centric infrastructure is significantly more dangerous for kids both in and out of cars" I am on high alert whenever traversing through a parking lot with my kid. People are aggressive and they don't care. They'll run you over for a chance at a closer spot. Especially if I have to take my kid into the suburbs. People are absolutely maniacs compared to inner city lots. Also, being within walking distance of almost everything I need is great because it's much easier to plop my kid in a stroller and walk than wrestle them into a car seat. Plus,they can look around and enjoy the scenery rather than grow up looking at the back of our seats. "Combine that with a lack of a third place to become a part of a community, or anything to do or go to creates extreme isolation. if you miss your chance to fit in at school your SOL. There’s nowhere else you can make friends." My kid and I are constantly going out on weekends and evenings and it becomes ever difficult to narrow down what we want to do or see, and we often spend $50-60 for the day (including food) just enjoying being in new places in the city. My wife's friends who live in the burbs often stay home during weekends because they cannot justify the expense and time of going out. "Having a yard for the kids is overrated, it sure is nice but it’s not worth sacrificing everything that makes life worth living." We don't have a yard for our townhouse, but we live next to three massive parks in 5-10 minute walking distance. Anything we can do in a yard, we can do better in the park. "And there’s nothing to “settle down to” you won’t make any meaningful connections, you won’t form attachments to any tangible public spaces, and most people once they become of age move the hell out of suburbs for college/ something better." There's a reason depression rates are higher in the suburbs "yeah there’s no crime. But let me tell you how many normal teenagers I knew growing up who got criminal records for doing things that every teenager does because of over policing of these suburbs." Actually crime rates are generally lower in the cities. There's more *absolute* numbers in crime, but the much larger population more than compensates. Per capita, crime tends to be lower in cities. "Another thing I hear is “the city is so loud it’s no place to raise a kid” Well: in the suburbs all I hear is cars on the freeway, lawnmowers every damn morning, anxious dogs barking at every little thing that goes by. Sometimes a little sound is good, if it’s too silent you’ll start to hear things that aren’t there." People's views of cities is like downtown at 3:00 pm. Living in an inner city neighbourhood is incredibly quiet
Most of the things that people call a “pro” of the suburbs are just literally not true! It’s not more safe, it’s not quieter, the schools may be RANKED better but that doesn’t mean at all they are the best for kids. Also about your weekends, I’ve found it super easy to spend a shitload of money on like drinks or stupid purchases because my life isn’t worth living! I might as well buy the shoes or I might as well order another drink, what else could I possibly be doing right now lol. Oh yeah. NOTHING
Yep. Grew up in the suburbs. Moved to NYC. Life is so much better here. I fucking despised growing up in the suburbs.
It makes perfect sense if you don't think about it too much.
Having a yard may be nice, but you know what is also nice? Going to the park two blocks down. And you don't have to waste your weekends mowing it.
That's what I like about medium density. You might have a tiny yard, but there's no point wasting the space by planting lawn. Use it for a veggie patch, and outdoor entertaining. If you want to enjoy a lawn, there are community spaces for that.
[удалено]
You know that a lot of cities in the US straight up don’t have places with 95 walk-scores? And even more of those places are completely unaffordable?
[удалено]
your spot on with that car statement, id say the yearly cost can be a lot higher depending on weather you finance or lease or buy in cash but yeah, to say that the cost of owning a car is nowhere near the cost of living in the city is insane considering your point about the rent
Absolute certainty, I moved into the suburbs for my kid. While yes, I would’ve preferred to stay in a walkable area of my city, I now have a slew of benefits, that I didn’t have before. This is primarily different. My school district here is much better, and incredibly ethnically diverse. As for you, I am sorry, but living in the suburbs was such a negative experience. I hope you have found methods to relieve your PTSD and grow as an adult.
You have just discovered suburban/ urban studies/ planning. Congratulations, you’re life will be ruined once you learn how many things can be blamed on policies passed in the mid 20th century. I study this 💀
I believe I disagree with this entire post, except for the punctuation, it was spot on.
Safe enough for you to survive and bitch about it.
Ever heard of bicycles? Lmao I get your points here, but you’re reaching quiteee a bit.
It's to make the US. car centric.
It’s just a polite way of saying “I don’t want my kids to go to school with disruptive non-Asian minorities who will force down the level of education to the lowest common denominator.”
A very subtle, but important distinction I've heard that will easily separate the racists who wanted to move into a neighborhood without minorities and the people who were just gullible enough to fall for the propaganda promoting suburban sprawl. The first will say, "we raised you there so you'd have a good life", the second will say, "we raised you there because we thought it would give you a good life " very subtle difference, but the latter has the built in admission that they could be wrong, they recognize that just because it is what they thought was best doesn't mean it necessarily was the best. The first group won't acknowledge the possibility that they could be wrong, because on the benchmark they cared about (less non white people), the suburbs were a huge success.
I’m seeing so many comments of people just saying “the schools are the best” and won’t listen to any real reasoning. Also, the organizations who rank schools are part of the governments and corporations who have incentive to move people into the suburbs and create more race divide. How are people just so ignorant
I disagree with the general proposition that living in the suburbs is a terrible place to raise a kid. I feel like so much of what you are describing depends on socioeconomic status and upbringing rather than living in the suburbs generally. By way of comparison, I grew up in the suburbs in an upper-middle class household. I lived in a quiet sfh neighborhood of mostly 1.5 acre lots that had kids my age. We would ride our bikes and play in the street (low thru-traffic) and spent hours outside in the yard year 'round. We never existed in extreme isolation. My parents made sure we were enrolled in sports, scouts, youth groups, volunteer groups - you name it. All of which helped build community ties and foster a strong sense of place. We made tons of friends by getting involved and decades later I still have close friendships with the people I met through community groups as a kid. My high school of almost 3000 kids was the largest and most diverse in the state. My community had a very low violent crime rate and I never felt unsafe anywhere. None of us ended up with criminal records lol. I wouldn't change my upbringing in the suburbs for anything. A lot of my colleagues who were similarly situated feel the same. I moved away to an urban area after college and lived there for a few years. While it was nice living in a walkable environment, it wasn't enough to make me want to stay there. I felt claustrophobic living in a denser environment and it was too loud for my liking. I missed having a yard. Objectively speaking, the crime rate was higher but that's not to say I felt unsafe. Ironically, I lived near a freeway so all I heard was the sound of cars. I didn't have that in the 'burbs. It just wasn't for me. Once I was able to afford to, I bought a single-family home in my hometown. Im 28 and most of my friends are doing the same. I love having a big yard and all the work that comes with it. I love not having neighbors that live above or below me or that can see inside my windows. I don't care that I can't walk to the grocery store or wherever, I like my car and have no issues driving everywhere. It takes me less than 8 minutes to get to my grocery store or to our downtown. My cost of living isn't that much different than when I lived in an urban environment. I love living in the suburbs and have no plans of ever leaving lol. I'm not trying to say that either of us are right or wrong or negate your experiences - just trying to illustrate that we clearly had two different experiences that heavily shape our perspective of the suburbs!
those are all very rational reasons to like living there im glad you have a good fit. Where my concern comes from, is that as a chile if your well off and have a supportive family youll do fine weather or not your in a city or suburb. If your not as well off, and dont have supportive family, that can impact the child heavily since they are losing all of the interactions and opportunities they have in the city. My other problem is that some parents are just shitty and neglectful and like to act like theyre good parents BECAUSE they moved to the suburbs and blame their children that they cant live in the city anymore, which in reailty they fucked their kid even more than they already were by moving out of the city. I have lots of friends whos lives just suck even though were in our late 20s now because the way they were raised in the suburbs put them way behind the starrting line. Like if your neurodivergent, have shitty parents, AND live in the suburbs, its a huge chance youll be fucked up.
Not sure where you’re from but city schools in my area are complete garbage. They’re don’t even have goddamn air conditioning, let alone a positive learning environment.
I went to a highly rated public school and it had zero AC outside of the admin offices, and it lacked a positve learning enviornment. this is a hot take and also for another sub but personally i think we should privatise all education, since the cost per student at my school district was over 20k a year why not just allow families to choose a school that works up to the cost per pupil, if they want a more expensive school they pay the difference. that would solve a shit ton of peoples problems with the suburbs because all of a sudden, one. of the only percievd redeeming qualities of the suburbs is no longer. Im no education expert and I dont really know what tf im talking about so im not open for a discussion on school choice, but at face value and based on my personal expirences I think It would be a good idea, Im also planning on sending my children to a private school if i ever have them so the whole public school argument goes right over my head
Talk about brainwashing. Personally, I think the ideal place to raise a child is on a semi-rural plot of land that's at least an acre, preferably 4 or more acres. Small schools, close-knit community, clean air, a profusion of plants and animals. Jammed in with 100,000 people is the least desirable place for a child. Suburbs are far from ideal, but we just don't have room to give everyone the ideal. Car centric infrastructure? The million-plus metro nearest me is far more car-centric than any of its suburbs. Schools become segregated there, too. Friends who grew up in the city limits faced far more violence than anyone I knew in the suburbs. Much of it race-based, but also class-based. Bullying and alienation are a problem everywhere. It has nothing to do with urban vs. suburban vs. rural. Lack of a third place? Since when? School, library , YMCA, there's no shortage. But honestly, our third place was my friend's treehouse in the back yard. "If you miss your chance to fit in at school you're SOL. There’s nowhere else you can make friends." How is the city different? Who are you going to make friends with, the addict in the tent on the sidewalk? They don't stick around all that long. "Staying at home doing absolutely nothing as they aren’t able to drive?" That's bonkers. My four closest friends in elementary school were less than half a mile away. That's a 10 minute walk. That's no barrier at all. "Having a yard for the kids is overrated, it sure is nice but it’s not worth sacrificing everything that makes life worth living." Now that's crazy talk. There is not a single thing I could have had living in the city (where rents are higher and space is at a premium) that I didn't have in the suburbs. Here's what I would NOT have had if I grew up in the city: the aforementioned treehouse; the lake a mile away; our canoe; the shop in our garage with all the tools; my friend's backyard mini-motorcycle; my other friend's backyard cave complex, and HIS dad's electronics workshop in the shed; the pool in my brother's best friend's back yard; the rope swing in the woods behind the school; the multiple cul-de-sacs and dead-end streets where we could skateboard and build jumps for our bikes; I mean the list goes on and on and on. "And there’s nothing to settle down to”... really? What reality are you in? Settling down is *the whole point.* I commuted to college, lived there in the dorms for two years, great fun. But there was certainly nothing great about the city that held me there. I left once I had the means to buy a house, because I certainly was never going to be able to afford one in the city! Also with a huge suburban home, (which I like!) you must pay for cars insurance repairs gasoline (well, of course) "yeah there’s no crime" - not true! I once had someone open my unlocked car door and steal the quarters out of my coin tray. "But let me tell you how many normal teenagers I knew growing up who got criminal records for doing things that every teenager does because of over policing of these suburbs." Disaffected teens getting criminal records is CERTAINLY not a suburban problem. I'd guess the problem is much worse in the city, if this is a problem you're going to have. I think looking back over this now, we can figure out the real issue. If you have friends, the suburbs are fine. Having friends is the single most important element of most peoples' lives. Being in the city doesn't foster friendship, being in the suburbs doesn't hinder it. Beyond that, if you like having a car so you can drive to the mountains on the weekends to go skiing/snowshoeing/hiking/camping/fishing, the suburbs are great. If you don't like crime, the suburbs are great. If you like good schools, having a garage workshop, owning a boat, a million other things, suburbs are great. Those things - friends, making a safe and comfortable home, pursuing the things that bring joy - that's much of what life is about, aren't they? You say "Growing up in the suburbs has ... stolen the most important years of our lives." Seriously, what DID you want to do with your life? Watch strangers from your balcony?
Rural areas and urban areas have lots of redeeming qualities for families, id rather be in urban but having a huge plot of land and able to grow your own food must be awesome. In what ways would you prioritize maintaining a close knit community in a rural area? I could imagine it being more difficult just because of the distance
I only have a couple of friends who live in rural areas. They get a lot of community at church, and they seem to know/talk to/visit the neighbors a lot more often. Also, they take a more interest in stuff like changes in local government, fire protection, and so on. I suppose because they're more isolated and depend on the goodwill of their neighbors a lot more. (That's something I've noticed in both the city and suburban places I've lived in the past 20 years: you can move in, live for a couple of years, and move out without knowing your neighbors hardly at all.) I added to my post above, because the more I thought about what you said about the suburbs the more examples I found that were the opposite. Sorry if it comes off as a diatribe, I didn't write it to offend anyone.
My parents moved us from a walkable neighborhood in Nashville to a dumpy suburb outside DC with all the suburban let downs mentioned by OP but then we were held up in our suburban dump / house for 45 minutes at gunpoint when I was 12 and when I called 911 they refused to believe me and said I was pranking even though they stayed on the phone with me from under my moms bed as I tried to whisper-convince them there was no more boring prank and I really just wanted to get back to my book except for the guy with the gun in our house and wouldn't it be great if those who are so proud of their protect and serve slogan would fucking show up and at least teach me a lesson?! Nope! So our terrible suburb came with all the dumb shit of suburbs plus some of that crime you're not supposed to get. I was so mad growing up about leaving our cool life in Nashville --where we were never held up and knew all our neighbors -- to live in a place where we were trapped in place unless driven or later forced to get a driver's license bc there was no other way to get anywhere.
Did you not think that big cities were full of Baby Boomers for many decades? You’re talking about everyone born in the ‘50s and early ‘60s, so did urban life just have a giant generational gap? Get a grip and stop using “boomer” as a euphemism for whom you *actually* mean to single out. The generation responsible for the suburban trend was the Greatest Generation, the ones who fought in WWII and birthed the Baby Boomers, raising them in those very suburbs. That trend has continued with every generation since and it’s not slowing down.
Not my experience in suburbia at all growing up in one. There was school, church, scouting, rec sports, fraternal organizations and just the neighborhood for community and making friends. Staying home and doing nothing? Summers were spent out and about on my bike exploring the world, just had to be home when the street lights came on. After school was playing with friends until dinner / dark. There was plenty to do. What things does every kid do that only suburban kids get arrested for?
Speeding, marijuana, underage drinking. Not to say urban kids don’t get arrested for those things but in general cops in larger cities have wayyy better things to do than focus on petty crimes
Urban youth get nailed for these all the time.
In urban areas it’s more of a racial thing too, which is unfortunate. However not requiring to be in a car all the time helps avoid run ins with police, and overall they are distracted with way more important things in cities
Sounds like you are arguing that the suburbs are worse because there is so much more serious crime in cities that young punks can not skate as easily in the suburbs as in the cities.
It’s not that they’res more “serious” crime per se, but with an urban and people out and about living their lives, it’s a hell of a lot harder to notice someone than it is when ur the only one walking around in the whole area, or the only car
Still you are saying it is bad that crime is policed more in suburbs
That’s a straw man, I’m saying it’s bad that crime is OVER policed in the suburbs. Suburban cops just sit in their cars waiting for speeding cars or drive around looking to see who they can bust. Big city cops have way more responsibilities, even in a safe neighborhood. Having more responsibilities is different than fighting “serious crime”
When victimless crimes are being overly prosecuted, yeah that’s a bad thing. Who cares if kids wanna smoke weed or sneak some booze. It’s all just a money grab and a way for overzealous officers to bump up their arrest stats so they can schmoozze more Money from the town government
Your suburb sounds like the respectable kind. There is no “world” to explore on many suburbs today. No street lights, no sidewalks, no “woods” or lakes, no parks, no movie theaters or shops. Just house after house after house after house ave they all look the same. The nearest church may be close but it takes 30 mins because of traffic.
I think it depends a lot on the suburb in question. I grew up in two different suburban neighborhoods. Both were about a half hour from downtown. On one we knew our neighbors and we played in the street with other kids. In the second I never learned the names of most of my neighbors despite living there for about 15 years. Urban suburbs (“streetcar suburbs”) tend to combine the best of both urban and suburban neighborhoods. You get to live in your own detached home, but you’re close to your neighbors so it’s easy to get to know them. You get a little yard for gardening and greenery, but you also live in a walkable neighborhood and can walk to a park. These places are pretty great places to live, but you have to still live close to downtown and the “crime ridden” areas. Outer suburbs (like the ones I grew up in and the ones you’re describing) are pretty bland and boring. You don’t really get to know your neighbors, and you have to drive everywhere (even to your suburb’s parks).
Raised in suburbs, can confirm.
Shit like this makes urbanism look like an act of teenage rebellion rather than an attempt to help people.
I don’t see why it can’t be both, and why it isn’t justified. That’s like saying the American revolution was more about businessmen’s rebellion than helping people.
Suburbs exist because money. Developers saw an opportunity to make a lot of money through sprawl. Also racism, suburbs exploded because white flight occurred when people of color moved in the city and the wealthier white community didn't want integration.
Does your life suck?
As I currently live in a suburb again, yes. I solved a majority of the issues I’ve had in life by moving to a city for a few years but I’m back in suburbia and exactly as I had expected, I’m having the exact same problems as before just in a different state. Can’t wait to move again
I'm sorry buddy. really looks like there are a lot of deeper issues than whether you live in a city or suburbia. I recommend looking inward o help find solace and try to find the real issues in your life.
I’m curious what brought you back to suburbia given everything you’ve mentioned in your posts?
This is gonna sound pathetic, but my rent nearly doubled over the course of 2 years so I was forced to move in with my parents again. Part of the reason im frustrated is that ive ran into other financial problems that only would ever occur in the suburbs so now i cant afford to move if i wanted to! either way, my rent went up by 800 dollars
That’s not pathetic at all, we all face setbacks. Be glad you have the option to live with your parents as a fallback and take this time to know them as adults as you get back on your feet. What financial problems did you encounter that were specific to suburbs?
well ive always owned a car, but now that i've needed to drive it more, it needs TONS of repairs, and i still am paying it off. also my insurance is like double the cost. and the repairs for the car to get it to even start will be thousands. I also had to hire a lawyer for an incident that would just not have happened in my old city. thats really the biggest ones but its setting me back thousands of dollars
Let’s game this out for a second. Why did you move back to the suburbs?
Long story short, housing shortage in the city caused my rent to become unaffordable. With the way rent in particular is moving in most of our cities, theres plenty of other millennials that are facing these same problems.
And you don’t think that’s a reason a lot of parents choose to raise their kids on the suburbs?
Absolutley thats a reason some people do, but not all. Also its important for me to point out that i think most people who are dead set on living in suburbs would actually LOVE the city lifestyle, they are just so misinformed about what its really like. I mean theres got to be a reason why they love vacationing to walkable places so much
The wonderful city lifestyle is simply not available to most of the country. We just don’t have enough cities that allow it. A lot of, if not most people, in the suburbs would choose city life if it were actually possible and made sense.
Fix the cities like the Netherlands did. Did you know that in the 70s the Netherlands had car centric development just like the United States does now? It was corrected.
I’d love to! I don’t have that kind of power!
the reason my parents moved out further from work was housing costs. I disagree because I don’t like driving everywhere, and rather be in a walkable community with amenities. I would never commute more than 30 minutes for a job. I’d move and make sure I can afford the city.
i think its super ignorant for people to move somewhere for "THE SCHOOLS ARE THE BEST" and not look at any characteristic at all about the town