McMansion Lit

The New York Times' Janet Maslin reviews two "comic novels that take aim at the same monstrosity: the McMansion." One, Roger Rosenblatt's "Lapham Rising" is really a satire of Hamptons society. But Debra Galant's "Rattled,set in a New Jersey exurb, puts the self-righteous householders on the barbecue: "Out of their S.U.V. and into Galapagos Estates come Kevin and Heather Peters and their problem child, a boy who requires the services of a "$175-an-hour 'worry doctor'," writes Maslin. The couple's life melts down when it is discovered that their home has been built in the middle of a protected rattlesnake habitat.

Maslin goes easy on her former colleague Galant, who wrote a Times column on suburban living for five years. Other reviewers, however, have noted that Galant's novel has all the depth of the architectural style in which it is set. Says the U.K. review site Monsters and Critics. "For the most part, [Galant] paints the semi-fictional Hebron Township in strokes broad enough to cover the side of a newly renovated multimillion-dollar barn/loft. "

Real Estate Crash Delayed Again

The much-prognosticated real estate downturn failed to show again this month as the nation set a new record for housing starts for January. Noting that the Northeast and Midwest had the greatest increases over January 2005, economists blamed warm weather in those regions. They cautioned that the strong numbers were a blip, noting that major homebuilders like Toll Brothers and KB Homes have reported a drop in orders even as new construction rages.

Fake Flower Fan to Design Postmodern Park

California has four “great parks,” all surrounded by city. Griffith in L.A., Presidio and Golden Gate in San Francisco, and Balboa in San Diego. Now there’s going to be a fifth, sited in the city of Irvine, deep in suburban Orange County on 1,300 acres of the former El Toro Marine airbase. Landscape designer Ken Smith has been chosen as master designer after submitting a design that anchors the new park with an artificial canyon. (The remaining 3,700 acres of El Toro will be developed by the homebuilder Lennar Corporation.)

Some observers hoped the first major suburban park would serve as prospective laboratory for 21st century public space, the way Frederick Law Olmstead's Central Park did for the 20th. They worry that Smith’s canyon will amount to hiking trails and a predictable nature center. But Smith, who once implanted a roof garden at New York’s Museum of Modern Art with spinning plastic daisies, may not disappoint. He is an admirer of Olmstead's who sees the Manhattan masterpiece as a brilliant work of art."

Will the Suburbs Get Theirs?

For decades, the suburbs were givers. Sure, they drained their parent cities of people and, eventually, industry, but the suburbs returned much of that energy in cold cash. It was these "first-ring" communities that nursed the cities through their great economic declines of the '60s and '70s via taxes paid to their states. Now those prosperous places are asking for a little payback.

As Bruce Katz and Robert Puentes point out in an op-ed in last Sunday's Newsday (Long Island, N.Y.), the oldest suburbs are about to become net takers. With crumbling infrastructure, tight housing and an increasing number of foreign born residents--the same problems the cities faced in their dark days--the first-ring suburbs around New York, Newark, Seattle, Pittsburgh and other cities are appealing for aid. Many of these communities, however, have a hard sell ahead of them. Located in some of the richest counties in the nation, many look far too tony on paper to deserve help; most are too small to qualify for available block grants and other federal programs. But Katz and Puentes, authors of a forthcoming Brookings Institution report on suburban policy in a time of stagnation, say leaders at all levels have to do more to understand their own needs, and form national alliances to see that they are met.

Why Burb?

“We need a new set of clichés,” Nicholas Lemann once wrote about the suburbs. They are here. New “smarter” communities are spreading on the desert floor outside Phoenix, in fields near Princeton, N.J., and across former dairy land in Florida, bearing the promise of a new “nation of villages,” in the words of New York Times columnist David Brooks. The new suburbanites are pioneers of community living, full of an optimism driven by sheer necessity: 70 million new Americans will be added to our population by 2028, most of whom are expected to gravitate to suburban environments. In response, social and architectural innovation will need to be for the coming century what technology was for the last.

These are new clichés, but they are still clichés. Those Americans who live in the suburbs—and that is more than two-thirds of us--know that if the suburbs have taken the lead in the culture, they have also inherited plenty of the familiar problems of the cities. Poverty moved to the suburbs decades ago. The suburbs have become the frontline of immigrant assimilation. Those new suburbs in the desert are out ahead in dealing with water and energy concerns that will eventually visit every place in the country. The old ring of first suburbs, having fired American prosperity for a generation, are now exhausted, searching for ways to grow without developing their last open spaces. Their politicians, more comfortable in the proverbial smoke-filled room, have become blue-sky environmentalists.

The suburbs, in short, are the American mainstream. Our major writers, dating back to Updike and Cheever, have focused on decoding suburban life, and today Richard Ford, Chang Rae Lee, Rick Moody and others continue that work. Suburban megachurches are the engine of American Protestantism. Eminem is a suburban boy, and a suburban phenomenon, as are the “soccer moms” and “soccer dads” fought over in the last few elections.

Yet for those who live there, the suburbs can be a bewildering place. Urbanites who have moved out for more space and better schools gaze out the kitchen window into their new garden paradise and ask, “Now what?” Children of the suburbs return to find their sleepy burbs utterly transformed by commercialization. Those on rural routes watch in dismay as farms and tiny towns are supplanted by mass developments and strip malls. All of these people have common problems and solutions, from commuting to child care to what to put on the side of a house. Burb is for all of them.

We talk about “the suburbs” as an state of mind, but only now have real connections begun to be made among the suburbs of even a single city, never mind nationally. Burb is proposed as a place where mutual recognition and the single purpose that comes from it might be achieved.