My two maternal cousins live the "American Dream" of supposedly unlimited physical space, unlimited privacy, and unlimited mobility. It's a treat to visit their lovely homes, in exclusive residential neighborhoods in the hills east of the San Francisco Bay. I myself live in a one-bedroom apartment in a mildly scruffy neighborhood in Oakland's urban core.
I would not trade living situations with either of my cousins for all the tea in China. I also don't particularly envy their children, growing up in those pretty, sanitized enclaves.
The reasons why not, strike at the heart of what it is about the automobile culture, and the dynamics of suburbia, that have destroyed communities, so isolating and demoralizing Americans in the decades since World War II, that the ubiquity of the car may indeed have helped pave the way for demagoguery and neoconservatism in this country.
Yes, some people shun cities for suburbs for reasons I'd find it hard to argue with. The relative health of public education, in city and suburb, comes to mind. There are also many examples of vibrant civic engagement and community life in "bedroom communities." My paean to city living, then, consists of generalizations, supported by first-hand experience. With that disclaimer...
Compact urban living is less resource-intensive and more ecologically sustainable than life in the suburban fringes. Unlike either of my cousins, I have cause to walk from my property frequently. They have to drive virtually anytime they leave the front yard; I am outside, on the sidewalk near my home, exercising or running some little errand or other, virtually every day. Owing to my work, I'm not ready to give up my car just yet. But this summer, when I've not been working, I've made an experiment of getting in the car just as little as possible. I went a whole month, from mid-June to mid-July, without driving once. There's a mid-sized, thriving commercial district, a five-minute walk from me. For this reason, I have been able to buy food conveniently enough that I've thought nothing of leaving a pot simmering on the stove as I ran to the store, when I realized in the middle of cooking dinner that I was short an ingredient.
American neoconservatism, since at least Reagan and probably before, has fed on an individual sense of alienation: the problem in your life is not your lack of healthcare, your job insecurity, or the disintegration of your community; your problem is brown-skinned immigrants, it's the Cadillac-driving welfare queens, it's them. As has been well-documented all over the nation, people in suburbs, on average, vote more conservatively than people in cities. I believe this is because the sense of alienation that has traditionally swelled Republican and neoconservative participation, can't as easily be whipped-up in a healthy urban neighborhood; it tends to break down here.
My close neighbors, within 1-2 blocks, live almost entirely in apartments. Their buildings range from drab, to stately and well-kept, with residents falling everywhere on the socioeconomic spectrum and representing every known race, creed, national origin, and walk-of-life. I see young immigrant mothers in the laundromat, folding, as their children dart around. I see colorful, intimate shrines, lovingly spread with fresh oranges and red sticks of incense, in the sills of neighborhood businesses. The other day, as I was turning the corner near the supermarket, I saw one middle-aged panhandler gesture towards another, as he asked me, "Could you help out this old man--I mean, young man--with some change today?"
I chuckled, shook my head, and hurried on.
Besides the supermarket where I shop, the commercial district in the heart of my neighborhood boasts a drugstore and pharmacy, two cafés (but NO Starbuck's), a bakery, video rentals, banks, assorted taverns, a movie theater that's a prominent local venue for independent films, dry cleaners, a small hardware store, medical offices, and scores of eateries, to name a few. My cousins live in neighborhoods that have sprung up in the wake of the '50s car-boom, but my neighborhood has developed organically from a much earlier stage of city life. Not only is the neighborhood walkable, it hasn't had the soul gentrified out of it. The streets were platted and zoned in a time before cars were widespread, and businesses in the earliest days were more than tourist-traps, were run to sustain the lives of locals. They had to be within walking distance of homes--or at least on a direct trolley-line. That utilitarian legacy shapes community life to this day.
There's occasional graffiti and trash where I live, the sidewalks are cracked and grimy. There's also a bit of crime. Actually, I checked the police statistics for the neighborhood before first signing the rental agreement on my apartment. Despite some poverty in my immediate area, the official records say crime is low here, relative to the rest of Oakland's flat-lands. I wonder if Jane Jacobs and the other city planners are right, that the locally depressed crime rate would have to do with the proximity of homes to a thriving business district and a popular network of city parks, so that people are used to walking around; the sidewalks always carry lots of traffic.
Since World War II, real-estate developers, the oil industry, and the politicians in their thrall, have touted crime as "the price you pay" for living in the inner city. It's the reason the middle-class whites left in droves for the suburbs in the '50s and '60s, taking their tax-base with them, and the reason the up-and-coming young African-American families are moving out today.
But I wonder if the touted "safety" of the suburbs, relative to that of the city core, isn't exaggerated. Yes, we have regular shootings and homicides in our more troubled city neighborhoods; we don't generally have that in the suburbs--that's not necessarily the comparison I'm making. I'm speculatively comparing the incidence of stranger-on-stranger crime like child-abduction and rape, in the most attractive driving-dependent neighborhoods--like those where my cousins live--to the incidence in fairly vital urban neighborhoods like mine. I suspect my walkable neighborhood, where people mind the street, would come out ahead.
Before moving back to Oakland in 1999, I myself lived for two years in an affluent east-bay hill suburb I won't name, renting an in-law studio associated with a family's home. I was a considerable distance from stores, public transportation, or any public amenities to speak of. It's fortunate gasoline was much cheaper in the '90s than it is today, because I drove a lot back then. So did everybody around me.
There was no graffiti or trash in my old neighborhood. But many front yards were oddly unkempt, because most adults worked, full-time and more, to pay oppressive mortgages, commuting to expensive homes they ended up not spending much time in. I was very aware of something else in the zeitgeist of that community--in a lovely, pastoral setting--a simmering tension, maybe a desperation, among residents. This undiscussed dis-ease fed addictions, depression, marital discord, and, at times, broke forth in shocking displays of selfishness and incivility.
The vacant, dour expressions of a gaggle of 8-10 pierced, tattooed teenagers, perennially loitering at one cul-de-sac in town, haunt me to this day. I recall the urge I had, whenever I saw them, to stand in front of them and shout, "You're RICH!! Your parents have MADE IT, living here, damn it!! Why aren't you
HAPPIER??"
One dog we had when I was growing up had a very thick coat not particularly well-suited to the climate we lived in. I can still remember this dog, panting and shifting, in clear distress, in the full afternoon sun. But it somehow didn't occur to her to move to the shade nearby, or go indoors.
"It takes her a while to figure out what hurts," my father commented. Eventually, a human would have to guide her out of the sunshine.
I don't mean to imply more compact and walkable neighborhoods are the answer to every individual, family, and social ill. But in our political climate, and in our personal moods, I wonder how often we, like the hot dog of my childhood, ignore the obvious? How many a prescription for Prozac gets written before the living circumstances, beyond the home, are really probed?