Why Suburbia Sucks

It does not necessarily mean that these are "good" things just because someone thinks that they are good things either though.

1. "My neighbourhood isn't like that at all!"

My criticism was directed at the specific type of vacuous sprawl commonly seen in new Sun Belt development. That's a mouthful to put in an article title, so I tried to make the distinction clear in the article by referring repeatedly to "older" and "traditional" neighbourhoods. I suspect this may be why the term "sprawl" came about, i.e. to more accurately capture the sort of thing I'm referring to.

I would be the first to agree that a lot of the more dense suburban neighbourhoods found in the Northeast and around the older industrial cities of America are more livable than what I'm describing. And certainly, not all kids that grow up in suburban neighbourhoods, in cul-de-sacs or otherwise, have a miserable and isolated experience. At the same time, an awful lot of the USA looks like what I described.

By the same token, rural != suburban to my mind, even though some of the same drawbacks are present in rural layouts. As I see it, suburbia is precisely that which offers none of the advantages of either urban living or the countryside, but the downsides of both.

2. "If you don't like suburbs, don't live there. To each his own."

Yes, but 90%+ of the US looks like this, to varying degrees.

There is a widely disseminated idea out there that this is the organic outcome of widespread social preference, a democratic coming-together of the citizenry in a consensus on how they want to live in the land of the free. As evidence, boosters of the phenomenon point to the fact that the majority of new building embodies the paradigm I lambast.

It's just not true, though. In my experience, a large percentage of Americans simply aren't familiar with what the alternatives would look like. More importantly, there is enormous accumulated evidence that sprawl is an engineered policy outcome to some degree. One need not be a kooky conspiracy theorist to see that it's astronomically easier to get additional road-building approved (and subsidised with matching federal funds) and that there are lots of perverse legal and economic incentives for greenfield cookie-cutter subdivision development versus urban infill.

Does that mean that everyone really clamours to live in urban settings deep down inside? Of course not. Some people genuinely like suburbia as I've described it--one can find abundant evidence of that in this discussion thread. However, I do not at all buy into the notion that there is such an overwhelming consensus in favour of that mode of life that almost all inhabited areas of the US are built to suit. For the most part, there just aren't many alternatives; it's amazing what humans can adapt to and put up with. Zoning committees, planners and government agencies have made sprawl an easy inertial default for a variety of historical reasons.

That's how this has turned into a broad quality of life issue that merits broad, nationally scoped criticism. If suburban sprawl were confined to a relative niche of enthusiasts, I wouldn't have a problem with it.

3. "You're comparing ordinary towns with exceptionally beautiful and historic European capitals!"

No, I'm not. My experience has been, however, that on their worst day, profoundly second and third-tier European cities and towns are infinitely more navigable and livable than the vast majority of the US.

4. I would never dispute that European cities bring their own problems and developmental antipatterns.

5. For those who say I don't understand because I'm too young or don't have kids: I'm 30 and have a 4 year-old, a 3 year-old, and a newborn.

It's a density issue, at heart. Any US "city" (if it should be called that) of 100K-500K occupies 10x-20x the surface area that it would in most parts of the world, removing much of the cohesion that leads us to call places cities or towns in the first place.

Unless you're citing studies that explicitly show suburbia results in better outcomes for children than being raised in urban environments ceteris paribus, it seems like the only argument you're producing here is your own lack of perspective and being unable to venture outside of personal anecdotal experience.

Suburbs are extremely exclusionary (to the point of being outright xenophobic), inefficient, and in most cases outright ugly, populated by cheap, run of the mill outdated construction from the pre 1977 era, when people burned tons of oil to heat the cardboard boxes that are most of the American 'burbs.