Matt Yglesias and Ross Douthat are fighting about cities and suburbs. Interesting discussion worth checking out. (I’m in a rush this morning, so I’m just quickly going wade in here.)
Middle class families leave the city for a lot of reasons, not just the schools. Affordable housing. Appliances (All you childless hipsters might mock appliances. But I saved hours and hours of drudgery time by having appliances out here in the suburbs. Kids generate a lot of dirty sippy cups. They also puke on their comforters at 4 in the morning.) The kids can play unsupervised in the backyard. No alternative side of the street parking. I can go and on. My life is MUCH easier out here. I wouldn’t be able to work, if we stayed in the city.
I just don’t think that any of those problems with cities will be fixed any time soon and middle class families will continue to vacate to the suburbs.
However, I do think that suburbs are going to change. The ex-urbanites are bringing their preferences to the suburbs. Suddenly, the homes directly around the town center are increasing in value. They are being renovated by finicky young professionals who don’t really care about big lawns, but like to walk to town for a coffee. Developers are putting up high-end apartment buildings right next to the train station in town. Trains are increasing their traffic to the city.
That’s happening here in my town and we’re one of those finicky families in the downtown area. My husband walks to the bus or the train, which takes him to Times Square. My kids take a bus to school. I drive to the supermarket and my job. Our town is increasing the train stops. They are putting a light rail system into my parent’s town. We walk into town for bagels and coffee. And at the same time, I have an herb garden, my kids ride their bicycle in the street, and I have time to work.
I think we can take many of the positives of urban life – the walkability, the diversity, the mass transportation, the community – and transplant them to the suburbs. We need to create a hybrid. I think it’s developing on its own, but a little nudge might help.
Apt. 11d 
I’m a current suburbanite (albeit living within walking distance of plenty of amenities) and former urbanite. I can testify to the fact that appliances are a biggie! And I don’t even have the excuse of being a mom – it’s just me and the cats, though I am a foodie who generates quite a lot of dirty dishes, pots and pans.
Cleaning up after cooking is a ton easier when one has a dishwasher. Doing laundry is so much easier when one doesn’t have to schlep to the laundromat, especially in crummy weather. I can do my laundry whenever it’s convenient, and can also leave said laundry unattended, thanks to my in-condo washer and dryer.
There are also other little things – I save on heating bills because my present condo is better made than my former city apartments. And there are plenty of three-prong outlets – no more extension cords and cheater plugs! City apartments can be unbelievably spartan when it comes to those little conveniences that make life so much easier.
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Maybe it’s because I live in a smaller city (Baltimore) and not NYC, but aren’t some of these differences the ones between apartments and houses, no matter where you are? I’m in my second city house and we’ve had washer/dryers in both, and could have had a dishwasher if we had wanted. Perhaps this also ties into your affordable housing point– though we bought our first city house for $70K, we are still no NYC, and that house is worth almost twice that now.
I do love walkability, but our city is not nearly as good about public transportation as some others. Still, I’d rather live here than in the suburbs, where I spent a lot of my childhood/adolescence.
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I think we can take many of the positives of urban life – the walkability, the diversity, the mass transportation, the community – and transplant them to the suburbs. We need to create a hybrid.
Isn’t that called a small town?
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It can also be neighborhoods in a bigger town. Laura, you’re comparing NYC to the suburbs. NYC is the only city like it in the US (and my familiarity is only with Manhattan, so I suspect that even in NYC, something calmer than the lifestyle you’ve described might be possible).
There are plenty of cities where you can still have a house & appliances. True, some of these cities have suburbs inside them (my in-city area is pretty suburban). But, we still share the city with the apartment dwellers and the high rise dwellers and the folks who live in small houses in walking distance of coffee shops. We get diversity (but, appliances, too).
bj
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I think there is a big difference between living in a first-generation suburb, and a place that was built yesterday. I’m envious that your town is adding train stops–wish ours would. I can’t wait until my son goes to elementary school in a year, and I can start taking the train to work again–right now, his daycare is too far.
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We now live in a small city/burb outside a mid-sized city. I love it because it has a center and lots of things you can walk to. Pre-kids we lived in an urban 3-story walkup (BAD rental appliances and a washer/dryer all the way down in a scary, unsafe basement.) Even with our little dog it was difficult. With kids, I can’t imagine the work to live there. Carrying groceries up was an interesting experience in itself. I loved the area, but your comments about kids and appliances are very appropriate for that location! The burbs have worked out for us. I still like to walk places, so living in a must-drive-everywhere burb wouldn’t work for me.
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I lived in San Francisco, and being a starving-artist type lived in cheapo shared flats. This might not be representative of all city living, but it seemed to me, from my own experience and that of others who DID live in more expensive apartments – they were all spartan, spartan, spartan. No appliances, cost a ton to heat because of leaky windows and poor insulation, etc. Because of the number of people vying to live in SF (and also perhaps rent control) there is very little incentive for landlords to provide more than habitability, let alone appliances.
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I think the future will be different from the past: the cost of energy and manufactured goods will be far higher relative to incomes. There’s a lot of almost-theological discussion of whether oil production has peaked, will peak in the next couple of years, or will peak in ten – but no one thinks there is a lot of cheap and easy-to-pump oil out there.
At the same time – fifteen years ago there were maybe 30 million Indians living middle class lives, with cars and air conditioning. Maybe 80 million Chinese. Both countries are up around 200 million middle-class people now. Europe has not changed much, in number of middle-class energy consumers. So, maybe we are in the ball park that there were 500 million middle-class energy consumers fifteen years ago, are somewhere not far under a billion now, and will be somewhere well over a billion in ten years. When you buy a gallon of gas in ten years you will have to pay what it takes to outbid that number of people for it. I expect this will make far-outer-suburb houses very costly to run and supply, close-in houses like yours more desirable, and city living the least expensive way to provide services. A lot of things we have taken for granted and done easily will become much more relatively expensive.
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I live in Amsterdam, and I found that the apartment living here is pretty much a standard way of life. While as an expat, I am charged a ridiculous amount of rent – locals have the luxury of paying very low amounts. Energy costs are somewhat reasonable and appliances don’t seem to be a problem. I don’t have kids but of all the people that live in our building (8) the ones with kids make do. Women with kids carry strollers up and down stairs, the elderly seem to make out just fine with getting to and from the grocery store…it’s really quite amazing. It just seems that everyone here is conditioned to live in a densely populated area and in relatively small places.
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If I’d lived here before I had kids and had time to investigate neighborhoods and learn the city’s ins and outs, I think we might have lived in the city. However, we moved here when the kids were already in school and we hadn’t met anyone else who lived in the city who could help us figure things out. I like where we’ve ended up–a suburb that’s over 300 years old (technically not really a suburb until 100 years ago, but hey) and is about 80,000 people. We’re two blocks off the town center and within walking distance of a lot. My big beef is public transportation. I’d really like to see it expanded more in this area. We have an L with limited stops and the bus line, but we’re off the main light rail line. I hope things get better, but I think there’s great potential to move in the right direction.
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Thanks. I’ve really enjoyed your comments. I’ve lived in Chicago and NYC, but I haven’t really checked out other cities like Baltimore. I think that this discussion is so much more sophisticated than any of the city v. suburb debates I’ve seen elsewhere. Basically, cities and suburbs are so different from each other that it makes this big general debates impossible. It’s funny how this debate is also so informed by nostalgia.
re: appliances. There’s a chapter in the Feminine Mystique where Friedan makes fun of the houswife’s love of appliances. I think that they were a major boon for feminism.
re: cities in Europe. Whenever I go to Europe , I have great apartment envy. People live so much more efficiently there. We have one friend of the family who lives with her nine children in an apartment in Madrid. Of course, she has a maid to help her and the kids are in school from 9 to 5 from the age of three.
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I live in the city of Chicago, where in my opinion we have good city living without many of the down sides you mention. Things are walkable, you can take pub trans to work, we have small yards and herb gardens.
One thing I think is huge in Chicago is the vibrant park district. Parks all over the place, very inexpensive programs for kids, generally clean and safe during daylight hours. It’s a great resource and a big deal for families. Also our older housing stock still contains quite a few apartments large enough for entire families, that can support the kind of apartment living people have mentioned here. It doesn’t hurt to have lots of recent immigrants who are used to apartment living and know how to do it well.
You can actually tell the people who are in the city now but who will end up in the suburbs. They live in giant new construction houses, where they’ve built over their yard in order to get a family room, so they can leave their formal living room unoccupied except for when they open Christmas presents. (An American tradition.) To really live in the city long-term you have to be OK with less living space. Your kids might have to share bedrooms; you might have to wait in line to take a shower; your car might need to stay on the street every night. This is a surprisingly difficult adjustment for many native-borns.
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Laura’s point is a good one about suburbia being attractive to newcomers to the area. I lived in my city for 6 years prior to having kids. We built a great support system, know which elementary schools are good, know how to get into the magnet schools, etc. Newcomers almost always flock to the suburbs because they feel much more comfortable in those public schools.
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There are also differences in how well apartments and houses are built — I am currently living in a SF apartment building, from the 1970s, in Chinatown, and it’s amazingly pleasant to live in. It was clearly built for people who expected to live their whole lives here, raise families, etc.; good sound and impact insulation between apartments, efficient and privacy-providing space layout, etc.
All the other apartments I’ve lived in were US-designed in the assumption that no-one would ever actually want to live there, and indeed, I didn’t.
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Oh! and there are schools and kid-only parks scattered all through Chinatown, and a washer-dryer on each floor (adequate to demand so far, and less effort than getting up and down from a traditional basement). I would like a dishwasher; there is just room to install one in the kitchen, if we owned the unit. (Possibly relevant that this is mostly a condo building.)
I do wish, daily, looking over the sea of roofs, that we could use all that flat space for garden allotments.
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