rivkat | Nonfiction: the suburbs (Reply)

Leigh Gallagher, The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream is Moving: People with money increasingly want to be close in to cities, where they have access to lots of activities and stores without needing to drive for hours each day. This leaves lots of faraway suburbs in a bind—they might even end up abandoned or demolished—and also poses problems for people without money; poverty is increasing in the suburbs and it’s harder to get services there, as well as harder to commute to a job. This book doesn’t have much I haven’t seen elsewhere about the sadness of suburbia, though I was really happy to be reminded that Kenneth Jackson cited a clay tablet from 539 BCE “on which a resident of the then booming Mesopotamian city-state of Ur, whose residents had started settling in the countryside, marveled to the king of Persia about how his property was ‘so close to Babylon that we enjoy all the advantages of the city, and yet we come home we are away from all the noise and dust.’” I also didn’t know that children are four times as likely to walk to schools built before 1983, and that obesity rates go down with the age of the neighborhood. Still, even though the book starts by acknowledging all the government policies, from mortgage lending (and mandatory segregation) to highway building, that encouraged suburbanization, it ends by saying that many people freely choose suburbs, as if their choices were made in a vacuum.