Modern Suburbia Turns Being Fully Human Into A Luxury

Contact with other people is a basic need, not a special treat

There’s a critique of suburbia that goes like “Suburbanites are hoarding public resources in a cartel-like fashion.” Whether it’s NIMBY control of theoretically disinterested local land-use decisionmaking, home-price moats around the best schools, or access to things like rail stations from leafy neighborhoods, there’s an argument that suburbia is a way of effectively privatizing what should be public wealth.

There’s definitely something to this, to the extent that local NIMBYism holds back what would almost certainly be organic growth and densification in many places. These places are kept artificially exclusive and “nice”—if relatively sparsely built, spread-out places are in fact “nice” to you.

But they aren’t nice to everyone. Alongside these moral-economic critiques of suburbia is the important point that some people like urban living. Some people are perfectly willing to trade some personal space and privacy and quiet for closer proximity to people and things. There are people who deeply get that “being annoyed is the price you pay for community,” as software developer Divya Venn put it on Twitter in a great turn of phrase.

(By the way, that’s a very Strong Towns-esque insight; one of the first points I took away from Strong Towns, very early in my “discovery” of urbanism, is that suburbia is orderly and genuine urbanism is chaotic, but that order squeezes out a lot that we love, and chaos is twinned with a lot of delight and serendipity.)

So what’s my possibly inflammatory headline mean? That, kind of. Modern suburbs—the ones with winding roads, no walkability to any sort of civic or commercial stuff, where each attempt to do anything almost necessarily involves a car trip—yes, that might all come with things that are desirable. But it isn’t, in itself, desirable. I think a lot of people who think they like it might not like it, if they really think about it deep down.

I think there’s something very uncanny, and probably unhealthy, about the fact that leaving your house or going somewhere becomes an event, a thing you have to plan and choose to do. Each little bit of extra friction there is gives you a chance to not do the thing—I have to grab my car key, I have to shimmy past the bags of mulch in the garage and try to not scratch the car door on the weedwhacker handle, I have to sit at the light and make the u-turn because they widened the road and you can’t turn left anymore, etc. etc. etc.

And I wonder to what extent we sort of discern or abstract a false principle about reality from this daily experience.