Suburbia, noun, a vast prison of tasteless, homogenized villainy created to despoil the environment, enforce conformity with narrow minded norms while isolating the inmates from any sense of community empowerment to enrich their lives through commitment to any ideal other than property values.
For most of history, the suburbs were where the poor were banished from the core of civil life. In the Parisian banlieu is where you find disaffected immigrants and blocks of Soviet style apartment housing, not in le Cité or any of the fashionable arrondissements. To reach their low paying jobs in the city, they had to commute by foot, cart or rail while the rich were a convenient carriage ride away from the Ópera, the theatre, balls, gardens and other amenities of life at the center.
London, beginning with the Industrial Revolution, and the great cities of North America, foremost of them New York, drew in large populations of rural and foreign immigrants into warrens of poverty, filth, disease, crime and despair. The rise of a middle class in these circumstances can be thought of as a mass prison break from the miseries of the slums to neighborhoods that were modest, but tolerable.
The creation of a mass market for automobiles accelerated this process. A commute that averages 25-30 mph casts a far wider net of possible places to settle. Suburbs escaped their clustering around commuter rail stations and began to spread, with the help of real estate developers.
The Great Depression and World War II interrupted the natural development of this process. By 1946, the US population was less than half of today’s number, yet there was a deficit of 6 million housing units affecting 15%. Newlyweds lived in their parents’ attics and basements, shared apartments with friends, or found home in the RV of the day, a simple trailer. Not a mobile home, a trailer.
A madness was upon the country to create Boomers. As they began arriving in their millions, the deficit of housing became a deficit of neighborhoods, schools, playgrounds, butchers, bakers, filling stations, and the remaining panoply of the mid-century armamentarium of daily life.
In short, the suburb as we know it was created to absorb the Boomers.
Driving around suburban Sarasota, searching for a house in which to retire, I saw what would appear to the eyes of my 1955 version, a replay of the mushrooming of the San Fernando Valley. New shopping centers, standing as isolated islands among a sea of just developed or not yet ripe raw land. The varying stages of completion of tract houses, today called “communities.” The commercial grandsons of Alden Homes have learned the advantages of master planning and have the Boomers square in their sights for the second childhood.
Bright, shiny and new, yet comfortable, familiar and orderly, our roots call us to circle back to a place like childhood home, Babbitry and all.
What’s startling is how similar the profile of the neighborhood we went straight to without knowing anything more than the address of a plausible house matched the one we are leaving.
