Too Good to Be True: Debunking Suburban Legends

The Washington Post published an article over the weekend that has no place on a blog: sane, optimistic—even relaxing—and truly counterintuitive, at least about the suburbs. In "5 Myths About Suburbia and Our Car-Happy Culture," Ted Balaker and Sam Staley, both contributors to the libertarian magazine Reason, argue that if we really want to solve the global warming crisis, driving less isn't the place to start. This isn't the place to debate their scientific claims, and anyway, we think driving less is a life-affirming goal apart from what it might do for the planet. (So, it seems, do they.)

But along the way, Balaker and Staley put to rest some anti-suburban truisms that are ripe for debunking. To wit: "Americans aren't addicted to their cars any more than office workers are addicted to their computers," they write. "Both items are merely tools that allow people to accomplish tasks faster and more conveniently." It isn't as much fun to talk about the suburbs without this cliché, but it sure is refreshing.

Suburbanites don't even depend on cars more than other Americans, the two point out. Cars are the dominant form of transportation for all types of communities, and have been for a long time. In the 1930s, when suburbia in the modern sense had yet to occur, three of four households owned a car.

Balaker and Staley betray their libertarian worldview when they argue that, while herding people in cities might be more efficient use of land, "single-family houses, malls and shops would have to make way for a stacked-up style of living that most don't want." The implication being that suburbia is not a deleterious side-effect of freeway building and developers' greed: people live in suburbs because they like to.

An Architect Dies, Leaving Modernism Alive and Well

After a more than three decades of neglect, Modernist homes have become collectors' items. Philip Johnson's masterpiece, the Glass House in New Canaan, Conn., is opening as a museum this Spring, even as other classic Modernist homes in that high-priced suburb are looking for deep-pocketed buyers to care for them for the next half-century. In several cities societies dedicated to celebrating and preserving Modernist buildings have cropped up, and in Southern California, houses designed by the likes of the mid-century master Richard Neutra have become movie stars in their own right.

Despite their rebirth as national treasures, the supply of Modernism may be too deep, at least in the West, for mid-century homes to be hoarded like rare gems. This is thanks in no small measure to Dan Saxon Palmer, who died a month ago in Los Angeles. With his longtime partner, William Krisel, Palmer designed the first subdivisions in the San Fernando Valley (above), most of them built by the developer George Alexander. "They took on one of the great problems of Modernism, which was to create good, decent contemporary housing that was affordable for the masses," architectural historian Alan Hess told the Los Angeles Times this week.

Krisel has described the partners' early L.A.-area work as "transitional" modernism, since sales-minded developers didn't cotton at first to the severe lines and butterfly rooves that later became a Palmer & Krisel signature. Only after the pair had transformed the desert around Palm Springs with some 2,500 inventive and very successful tract homes could they have their way in L.A. "After Palm Springs, we could do those kinds of houses here. Because you've got to understand," said Krisel, "a tract builder is like a sheep. He follows."

Obama Unbored by the Suburbs

The country is playing catch-up with Barack Obama, getting to know the charismatic U.S. senator from Illinois now that he is already considered the male to beat for the '08 Democratic presidential nomination. In a long profile (here on login-free The Seattle Times site) that ran on Sunday's front page, The New York Times officially introduced him to Northeast elite voters. Characterizing Obama as "modest and careful" in dealing with the media, reporter Jodi Kantor unearthed "a rare slip" during his early '90s tenure as president of Harvard's prestigious law review journal. "He told The Associated Press," notes Kantor, "'I'm not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me.'"

It may be that Obama is now playing catch-up with the suburbs. On Martin Luther King Day, Obama pulled off a "minor coup," according to the Daily Southtown, when he traveled to Chicago's south suburbs to speak at St. Mark Missionary Baptist Church, an African-American megachurch in Harvey. Harvey isn't the affluent consumer-culture haven the Times imagined when it coined the phrase "suburban populism" elsewhere in Sunday's paper. Harvey struggles with crime and poverty, and a mayor who has been the subject of several Southtown articles about town-hall corruption. Obama felt their pain while showing that the close-in burbs are on his national agenda. "Obama suggested the money sent to rebuild Iraq should be spent to rebuild towns such as Harvey," wrote Southtown reporter Guy Tridgell.

The trip to Harvey was unexpected both because St. Mark pastor Bishop William Jordan has supported Republican candidates in the past (though he backed Obama in his senatorial campaign), and because downtrodden Harvey didn't seem a large enough stage for a man ramping up to run for the White House. "If I recall Dr. King, he wasn't hanging out in Manhattan. Dr. King was not in Beverly Hills," Obama told the crowd at St. Mark. "Folks said, 'Why are you going to Harvey? Harvey has got a lot of problems.' I said, 'That's why I'm going to Harvey.'"

What Drives in the Suburbs Stays in the Suburbs

Last year, the Washington, D.C. blog DCist took satisfaction in a report that said suburbanites in Virginia and Maryland had the longest commutes in the nation, and were quick to give the news an anti-suburban spin. "When local media … discuss our countless transportation and traffic problems, it is often to be described as D.C.-Metro or Washington-area congestion," DCist wrote. "However, statistics indicate that something along the lines of Va./Md.-Metro area congestion might be a more appropriate description." They are right, of course: suburban drivers are clogging theirs. "The extreme commutes of Prince George's and Montgomery residents suggest that many of them are traveling to jobs in other suburbs rather than in the District," says a Washington Post piece cited by DCist.

But this doesn't mean traffic problems are restricted to the suburbs. (Memo to DCist: Hell hath nothing on a summer Friday afternoon rush hour in Washington, D.C. proper.) Nor do suburbanites cause all traffic woes. A recent study of traffic congestion in New York City showed that most of the cars in the urbanites' path, it turns out, belong to other urbanites. According to regional traffic experts, "more than half the drivers who crowd into Manhattan each workday come from the five boroughs," the New York Times reported last week, graciously registering their shock that suburbanites are not to blame. "'There’s a lot of myths, and when you look at the data, the myths go pop, pop, pop, one by one,' said Bruce Schaller, a transportation consultant."