Out of Town Scoreboard

Sports in the suburbs is no longer limited to municipal swards filled with soccer players. Professional sports, from minor-league baseball and soccer to International League basketball and even NASCAR, is exploding in the burbs, even in locales where a major-league team is on tap downtown. "As you look around the country, it's very hard to find a major city without some sort of minor league presence in the suburbs," Matt McLaughlin, director of media relations with the Schaumburg, Ill., Flyers told a local paper, the Daily Herald. Minor-league parks are a bargain compared to a night at the Bigs, but draw enough dollars to make suburban towns anxious to capture out-of-town fans. They also provide wholesome family entertainment for residents. In California, the independent Golden Baseball League is targeting suburban venues all over the West in their expansion plans, and in Metairie, next to Katrina-damaged New Orleans, the Zephyrs baseball team's season opener was hailed as a sign of hope even as the city's pro teams' loyalty was still uncertain.

The next step seems to be the return of major-league sports to the suburbs. Major League Baseball's Miami-based Florida Marlins and the Minnesota Vikings of the NFL are both considering the suburbs as sites for their planned stadiums.

The Fight for Suburban Votes

The Republicans have decided to make their stand in the suburbs in this November's midterm elections. Earlier this month, congressional leaders introduced their "Suburban Agenda," targeting crime, education and the economy in a slate of bills they hope will rally the suburban voters they've won with in the past. Their raft of proposals, some smacking of an urban relief initiative from the 1970s, are designed to help suburbanites (voters formerly known as Soccer Moms and Dads) curb gang violence, conserve land, save for college and mandate background checks for teachers.

The Democrats' strategy seems to be to fight the GOP's foray on the local level. In House Speaker Dennis Hastert's home state of Illinois, local Democrats are holding press conferences to complain that the GOP's agenda needlessly replicates state and county laws already on the books. They also call federal involvement in local issues plain cumbersome. "A one-size-fits-all or one-suburb-fits-all approach to dealing with local issues has some severe shortcomings," said State Sen. Susan Garrett, who represents the Chicago suburb of Lake Forest.

Planes to the Burbs

The cowboys and small-craft pilots have something in common. Suburban expansion is also crowding in and pushing out the rural airports around Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times reports. The airports' neighbors don't like the noise and their beancounters prefer the revenue generated by residential development. California aviation officials are on a campaign to inform locals of the economic benefits of the small runways, most of whose flights are businesspeople shuttling to the area.

Suburbs that close their small airports may be even more short sighted than the pilots think: in India, civil aviation authorities are eyeing small planes for commuter hops between, say, New Delhi and its suburb of Meerut, a distance of less than 40 miles. "Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel says he wants to see 80-seater planes, planes with even smaller capacity and turbo prop aircraft flying virtually like public utility buses in the skies" says a story that originally ran in the Hindustan Times.

That sounds like the perfect solution for this man, who recently won the Midas Muffler Longest Commute contest.

Cowboys and Suburbanites

The New York Times does it's stiff-necked best today to tell a story of suburban development swamping a great American tradition—the rodeo. In traditional hotspots in California like Clovis and Hayward, cowboys are getting penned in by tracts of estate homes. The juxtaposition makes for some patented sneers about the "Peet's-Coffee-and-pinot-noir culture of the Bay Area" giving way to "the Jack Daniel's salute" (a whiskey bottle held aloft). But the Times doesn't convince us it's truly broken up about either the sprawl or the cowpokes' loss of territory. Nor does rodeo itself seem particularly threatened: fans who have long since moved off the ranch get their fix from stadium-sized shows, which are televised on ESPN. The old-timers who run the remaining small-town rodeos even seem to get a kick out of the suburban dudes. "This was big-time cowboy country," says one saddle-bronc rider. "Today, the newcomers don't know what-all."

Black Coaches Sidelined in Texas

When the University of Texas won college football's national championship, much was made of the school's 1969 team, whose every member, from coaches to waterboys, was white. Today in the suburbs of Dallas, notes a piece in the Dallas Morning News, the percentage of African-Americans on high school football teams often outstrips the percentage of African-Americans among students. But on the sidelines, blacks are underrepresented. Of 72 top suburban high schools, the DMN points out, only three have black head coaches. A kind of secondary racial separation, not discrimination, is to blame, according to the article. One coach, says the article, supposes there are "potentially good coaches, minority and otherwise, whom he hasn't hired because he doesn't know them that well."

Suburban Snob Control

In the June issue of its magazine, the American Enterprise Institute takes on snobs and particularly anti-suburban snobs, who break down into Anti-Sprawl Snobs and Anti-WalMart snobs. Architectural historian Robert Bruegmann leads the charge against the former category with an essay adapted from his new book, "Sprawl." The concern about suburban sprawl, he argues, amounts to class bias. "Sprawl" means subdivisions and shopping centers for middle-and lower-middle-class families," he writes, and implies that anti-sprawl activism is fed by the well-to-do exurbanites who don't want those families as neighbors. If history is any guide, the houses that make up today's ugly sprawl will become the fashionable, collectible homes of tomorrow. "The now-treeless subdivisions of look-alike stucco boxes at the edge of suburban Las Vegas," he predicts, "… will likely be candidates for historic landmark designation."

Bruegmann doesn't pause to consider that it's precisely the creation of exurbs deplete interest in restoring these close-in "vintage" neighborhoods. Nor does he quite close the gap between his seeming affection for the architecture of first-ring burbs and his support for teardowns. But his article is part of a larger defense of suburban development that says the suburbs, like the cities, are organic, dynamic communities in their own right, and not social laboratories awaiting the next urban planning experiment in correcting their ills. " Tear up and start over at your own risk," he warns.

Also in the issue is an interesting interview with urban design chronicler Witold Rybczynski.

Generation Burb?

The young seem to be moving into older houses, younger. When Douglas Coupland published "Generation X," the 1991 novel that coined the term, he defined the generation's endemic maladies: "homeowner envy"—a jealousy prompted by gruesome housing statistics—and "architectural indigestion"— the obsession wih "cool" living environments. But Gen Y, the larger group coming behind them, is even more home obsessed. Thirteen percent of all Gen Ys, still under the age of 25, own a home, compared with eight percent of Gen Xers, and the average age of a first-time home buyer, currently 32, is thought to be dropping. Together, the two groups have been dubbed "Generation Nest."

The trend makes sense, since Gen Y have come of age in a time of cheap debt and rising house prices. But real-estate insiders say Gen Y is also more likely to renovate or improve a home, data that is being interpreted to mean that Gen Y is moving into first-ring burbs with older housing stock that, not coincidentally, is closer to urban jobs, nightlife and pals.

Pretty in Green

The sheer number of houses being built in New Jersey has been a political issue in the state since the late '90s. Now the state's new governor, Jon Corzine, wants to count how much energy each new house uses. Officials from New Jersey's housing codes divisions, public utilities, mortgage agency and its Department of Environmental Protection are organizing a push to make all new homes the greenest they can be. "We have no choice but to do this," Community Affairs Commissioner Susan Bass Levin told The Philadelphia Inquirer. "New Jersey is the most crowded, congested state, very dependent on foreign oil. Long-term, it brings down the cost of utilities."

If Levin is right, why hasn't the real-estate market not shepherded buyers toward low energy living already? Studies, like this one from the University of Michigan, show that over a house's lifetime, a more energy efficient box costs the same as a leaky one, even though environmentally correct homes are almost $23,000 more expensive on average to build. (That upfront cost may come down, the U of M study implies, if demand for green homes picks up, introducing economies of scale to the supply of green materials.) The current low demand, in turn, is due in part to a lack of incentive for builders to offer green homes. New Jersey's initiative may change that, and, following the study's logic, topple green dominos beyond the Garden State.

Already, New Jersey isn't alone in its interest in green shelter. As soon as the governor can be scheduled for the photo op, the Maine State Housing Authority will make public the winners of their Green Home Design Contest. Such contests, which are already popular abroad suggest there's something besides regulatory oomph that's damped the market for energy efficient homes. In a report on Australia's avid green-home effort, one assessor noted, "The aesthetics of the Green Home have been the subject of a fair amount of critical comment."

Ed Burns's 'Love Letter'

Director Ed Burns first, who first hit it big with “The Brothers McMullen,” his family-financed flick shot in and around his childhood haunts in Long Island’s Valley Stream, calls his most recent film “a love letter to the suburbs.” Specifically, “The Groomsmen” which played at the Tribeca Film Festival this week, is a paean to those beachy South Shore neighborhoods where he spent summers—“the kind of place where you cross the street into your best friend's house.” Burns tells Newsday. “It's more of a family than a neighborhood."

The new movie, which Burns wrote, directed and appears in, also stars Jay Mohr, who hails from Verona, across the river in northern New Jersey. Mohr’s character, he says in an interview, was a familiar suburban type. “I just knew who he was. You don't get to do that very often, play someone that you've actually met in the flesh. You can put your imagination on hold for a while, and just imitate someone you grew up with. A review of "The Groomsmen" appears here.

Smackdown in the Middle

In Long Island’s Suffolk County, at the eastern edge of New York’s suburbs, three towns are squaring off over their plans for four new shopping centers to be built within a mile of each other’s borders. If completed, the projects crowding six square miles of Babylon, Smithtown and Islip will include a Wall-Mart, a Home Depot, a 14-screen cineplex, and hundreds of other stores—in all, 2 million feet of retail space, 3 million feet of office space, and apartments for 9,000 people. The traffic numbers have not been fully crunched, but planners for just one of the new malls—and not the one with 9,000 residents—expect 4,000 additional Saturday car trips.

Traditionally towns clash when no regional body exists to notify localities of competing developments and play traffic cop. In this case, county officials’ warnings were ignored or overridden by town governments anxious to draw their share of revenue from the last undeveloped turf in their area, much of it a retired state psychiatric hospital. "We're kind of toothless in that all the zoning powers rest with the local towns," the county executive Steve Levy told Newsday. As local resistance to the plans grow, however, Levy has called a summit to discuss how to reduce the wallop of the simultaneous developments.