An Escort in Every Garage

Much is being made of a new study about squeeze put on "working" families—those making $20,000 to $50,000 annually—by the high cost of transportation and the high cost of housing. As they are priced out of downtown living quarters, lower earners are finding the even the furthest suburbs are no relief: what they save in rent or mortgage they give right back in commuting. "A Heavy Load," by the Center for Housing Policy, "found that the costs of one-way commutes of as little as 12 to 15 miles … cancel any savings on lower-priced outer-suburban homes," wrote The Washington Post.

Fascinating but not surprising is how reactions to the study immediately bumped the problem up to the middle class. "It doesn't just apply to those earning between $20,000 and $50,000," Business Week's Douglas McMillen assured readers. Except for the rich, says McMillen, "moving from the city to the country no longer makes as much sense financially as it used to." The Washington Post article included a case study of a commuting couple in Sterling, Va., where the average income is $89,000.

Other outlets used the study to whomp the burbs over the head about improving their relatively poor public transportation, which theoretically would not only take pressure off the working class's wallets, but lighten traffic as well. DCist has suggestions about "backbone" and "feeder" systems that certainly make sense—as long as we can predict where the commuters are headed.

Since as many workers are now shuttling from suburb to suburb when they go from home to job and back, building traditional burb-to-town transportation lines may end up wasting money. Buses are more adaptable, but still require more density than the outer suburbs provide to be efficient. Perhaps these realities are why, besides stopping the flow of jobs to the suburbs and connecting existing sprawl, the new study's recommendations include reducing the cost of owning a car.

Reaching Equilibrium on the Commuter Rails

The New York Times reports in this morning's edition that the New York City commuter line Metro-North no longer carries mostly Manhattan-bound working stiffs. With jobs moving to the suburbs and suburban roads increasingly clogged, the train system that connects Connecticut, suburban Westchester County and upstate New York to Grand Central Station in Manhattan only half of its riders now go to work in the city in the morning and travel back home at night. "Metro-North’s ridership is higher than it has ever been in the system’s 23-year history," says the Times, citing Metropolitan Transit Authority numbers. "But [non-traditional] categories of riders have grown at a much higher rate, including reverse commuters traveling to jobs north of the city, riders traveling between suburbs and day-trippers on shopping or sightseeing trips."

Blue in the Burbs

Four suburban counties in Pennsylvania will dictate the fate of three congressmen in next month's elections, and perhaps the course of the next Congress. "If you see Democrats taking two of those three House seats, you’re looking at a Democratic House,"
 Democratic strategist Paul Begala told Bloomberg News this week.

Think that's pure spin? Consider that in the past two weeks, the national Republicans, Democrats and interest groups like the National Rifle Association and the League of Conservation Voters have poured $6.4 million—almost one-sixth of their national spending—on those three races alone. In Florida, Illinois (reg.req.) and others locales, suburban voters will largely determine the makeup of congressional delegations and state legislators.

Early in this midterm election cycle, the suburbs were targeted as the key to winning the House. The GOP led the charge with their Suburban Agenda—a sort of Contract for America aimed at school- and safety-minded suburbanites—but the agenda never gained much traction, and late surges show Democrats edging Republicans in a number of traditionally "red" suburbs.

Going into the elections, Republican worries had to do with the flow of Democratic-leaning African-Americans and Hispanics out of cities into the suburbs the GOP had dominated for a generation and more. But polling since the campaigns heated up show that the Republicans are beset by their conservative positions on abortion and stem-cell research. Suburbanites are "leaning Republican on economic issues, but liberal on social issues," says Michael Hagen, director of the Institute for Public Affairs at Temple University in Philadelphia.

With the GOP's success at revving up the base in 2004 with ballot initiatives on gay marriage, Democrats have answered this year with ballot initiatives on stem-cells and the minimum wage, the latter a historic African-American cause, to bait blue suburbanites to the ballot box.

Spare the Suburbs, Spoil the Culture

Over the weekend NPR used the new film "Little Children" to examine why the suburbs come out so badly in popular culture, and to suggest that "Desperate Housewives"-syndrome may have reached its peak. "There's a real packaged contempt for the suburbs," says Todd Fields, director of the movie, one that represents a certain kind of laziness on the part of artists. Fields believes, according to the story, that "using a suburban setting as a shorthand for alienation and repression reveals the smugly provincial limits of a culture industry centered in cities."

NPR reporter Neda Ulaby bathes in a few suburban clichés, citing the G.I. Bill utopias versus the dystopia of "uniformity, alcoholism, and adultery" of the mid-century burbs, and referring to "The Sopranos" as a "post-Enron" view of the suburbs—we're still working that one out—and "Little Children" as a corresponding "post-9/11" view. Culturally, neither 9/11 nor Enron belongs to the suburbs, of course, but to the country as a whole (and, if anything, to our cities). Tom Perrotta, who wrote the screenplay for "Little Children" as well as the novel on which it is based, calls the movie "less a suburban story than an American story," and suggests that "Maybe they are one and the same. The suburbs are the central American place."

Mammon for Us, God for Them

The new owners of Lord & Taylor, the venerable department store whose Fifth Avenue flagship is a New York landmark, said they intend to close many downtown locations to concentrate on suburban shoppers. Some of the Manhattan store's 650,000 square feet will be turned into offices and apartments; Philadelphia's Lord & Taylor is already a Macy's, and the Watertower Place store near Chicago's Miracle Mile will soon be closed. The company, NRDC Equity Partners, says it prefers to focus on "residential neighborhoods in upscale lifestyle centers." Shoppers there, a spokesman said, are looking for an alternative to Nieman Marcus on the high end and Kohl's on the low.

Meanwhile a suburban Chicago institution is sending God downtown. The Willow Creek Community Church—a megachurch that is a landmark in its own, uh, rite in South Barrington, Ill.—has opened a downtown branch in Chicago's historic Auditorium Theater, holding its debut service last Sunday.