How Should We Define the Suburbs?

[Hamartia Antidote]

https://www.citylab.com/life/2019/06/suburbs-definition-census-data-way-of-life/591343/

Based on census boundaries, ways of life, and physical characteristics, respectively, three new definitions offer a composite portrait of American suburbia


Urbanists like to extoll the virtues of cities and urban living. But America remains a suburban nation, with the lion’s share of its residents residing in suburbs. Research shows that suburbanites are happier, reporting higher levels of subjective well-being than their urban counterparts. And as my CityLab colleague Amanda Kolson Hurley argues in her new book, U.S. suburbs defy Truman Show or Desperate Housewives stereotypes, and in fact come from a more diverse set of experiments than we give them credit for.

Given how many Americans live in suburbs and the importance of these communities to the mythology of the American Dream, it is amazing that we lack serious data-driven assessment of their types, dimensions, and characteristics. Most urban research focuses on cities and metropolitan areas; suburbia is a leftover category, or just a foil for cities.

The problem stems from the fact that U.S. statistical agencies (the Census Bureau and Office of Management and Budget) do not provide a systematic definition for suburbs. They offer classifications for metropolitan areas and micropolitan areas, a classification of urban and rural areas, and a category of principal cities, but nothing of the sort for suburbs.

Now a working paper by Whitney Airgood-Obrycki and Shannon Rieger of Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies does yeoman’s work in filling this gap. The researchers organize a wide variety of statistical data to provide a detailed portrait of America’s suburbs.

Airgood-Obrycki and Rieger identify and compare three academic approaches to defining suburbs “that are representative of attempts to understand suburban space.” First, the “census-convenient” definition basically classifies suburbs as all the places in a metropolitan area that aren’t a principal city and don’t have more than 100,0000 people.

A second definition, drawing on literature on suburban ways of life or “suburbanisms,” defines suburbs based on commuting patterns, homeownership rates, and the proportion of single-family homes, which generates a continuum of four types of urban and four types of suburban areas.

Finally, a third, “typology” sorts urban and suburban tracts based on their population density and the age of the housing stock, and differentiates between inner (denser and older) and outer (sparser and newer) suburbs.

Even though these methods differ, they yield broadly similar pictures of suburban America. Based on where they overlap, we can draw some general conclusions.

Most Americans live in suburbs.

This is true regardless of which definition is used. Under the “suburbanisms” definition, suburbs are home to roughly 60 percent of the U.S. population (about 164 million people); by the census definition, nearly 70 percent; and according to typology, close to 80 percent (215 million). Almost four in 10 Americans live in the most suburban communities (going by “suburbanisms”)—those with high levels of car commuting, homeownership, and single-family houses. According to the typology definition, just over half of Americans live in outer suburbs, and 25 percent live in inner suburbs.

The vast majority of suburbanites own single-family homes.

Roughly three-quarters of suburbanites (in all suburbs) own their own homes, compared to less than half of city-dwellers and 60 percent of those in inner suburbs, when broken out by typology. Single-family homes account for three-quarters of suburban housing, compared to just 40 or 50 percent of housing in urban areas. The average suburban home in America was built in the 1970s.

More than 90 percent of suburbanites commute by car.

More than nine in 10 suburbanites commute to work by car, across all three definitions. Not that urban residents are far off that: 75 to 85 percent of city-dwellers drive to work, depending on the definition used.

Suburbs are less dense than cities, but denser than you might think.

Suburban neighborhoods are less dense than urban ones by definition. But the analysis suggests that the median suburban neighborhood is fairly dense, housing approximately 1,800 to 2,000 people per square mile. That’s not far off the threshold for an urban area—2,213 households per square mile—proposed by housing economist Jed Kolko.

Still, it’s considerably less dense than the 5,000-to-8,000-person-per-square-mile range of U.S. urban areas. By the typology definition, U.S. inner suburbs have a fairly urban density of more than 4,000 people per square mile, while outer suburbs have a much lower density (just 890 people per square mile).

Despite rising suburban poverty, suburbs are quite affluent

Median income is higher in the suburbs than in cities: roughly $60,000, compared to $45,000. The highest median incomes, of more than $70,000, are in outer suburbs. Suburban poverty has risen sharply, but the suburban poverty rate is 10 percent—about half the rate of urban areas.

The suburbs are overwhelmingly white.

Although many observers have noted the increasing diversity of suburbs and the growth of their immigrant communities, America’s suburbs are still very white. Whites comprise roughly three-quarters of the suburban population: from 72 percent to 78 percent, depending on the definition used. Despite the recent surge of immigrants moving to suburbs in large, gateway metro areas, immigrants make up just 7 to 8 percent of the suburban population, which is roughly half the rate for the U.S. as a whole. By Airgood-Obrycki and Rieger’s typology definition, core cities are much less white (about 50 percent), as are inner suburbs (55 percent).

The suburbs don’t revolve around children.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is that only one-fifth of suburban households are married couples with children. This is a sharp contrast to the 1950s image of suburbs filled with nuclear families and young kids. The average suburban neighborhood now, according to the researchers, is “composed primarily of married households without kids and single-person households.”

The share of married-with-kids households is considerably higher in the suburbs than in urban areas. However, the percentage of households with kids under 18 is remarkably similar in both kinds of places—roughly 22 percent. Nearly one-quarter (22 to 24 percent) of suburbanites live alone, compared to one-third of urbanites.

None of the definitions is perfect, and the authors note benefits and drawbacks of each. For example, the census-convenient definition captures jurisdictional divides, but it misses the typological differences between, say, Phoenix and Boston, and does not address the role of smaller principal cities within a metro area. “Deciding which categorization to use depends largely on the type of study and the conceptualization of suburbia that is most meaningful,” Rieger and Airgood-Obrycki write. They conclude that the census-convenient definition would be easiest and best to standardize, and “standardization would increase understanding of how suburban studies relate to each other.”

Hopefully, this study will encourage more urbanists to study suburbs and dig even deeper into their many characteristics and differences. The suburbs are not only where most Americans live and where a great deal of economic activity happens, but as CityLab’s David Montgomery and I have written, they are the key battleground shaping our nation’s politics and its future.

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

https://www.citylab.com/life/2019/03/cities-economic-performance-data-suburbs-urban-research/584284/

The Persistent Economic Advantage of America’s Suburbs

The rise of the city and the decline of the suburbs has emerged as a common meme in recent years. The young, the educated, and the affluent have come streaming back to the urban core, driving up rents, driving out the poor, and giving rise to patterns of gentrification. The story goes that the suburbs have lost their long-held position as the premier location, being besieged by poverty, economic decline, and other problems once thought to be the province of the inner city.

The trouble is that this picture does not match reality—not by a long shot, according to a detailed new paper published in the journal Urban Studies. Authored by Whitney Airgood-Obrycki of Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, it looks at the change in the economic status of urban and suburban neighborhoods from 1970 to 2010, a period that overlaps with notions of the resurgence of America’s urban centers and the decline of its suburbs.

Airgood-Obrycki’s study classifies neighborhoods according to three categories—urban core, inner-ring suburbs, and outer-ring suburbs—based on their proximity to the urban center and their density. It further breaks out the suburbs into three additional categories based on when they were developed: prewar, postwar, and modern. Airgood-Obrycki defines the economic status of neighborhoods according to a series of key economic and demographic indicators, including income, college education, employment in professional occupations, home values, rents, vacancy rates, older households (60 years of age and over), and female-headed households.

Her data come from the U.S. Census Longitudinal Tract Database for the period 1970 to 2010, and cover roughly 40,000 census tracts across America’s 100 most populous metro areas.

In contrast to the idea of a Great Inversion—a shift of affluence back to the cities and poverty out to the suburbs—Airgood-Obrycki finds that suburban neighborhoods overwhelmingly outperformed their urban counterparts during the four-decade period spanning 1970 to 2010. Indeed, suburbs increased their economic advantage over urban areas during this time frame.

The share of suburbs making up the top ranks of all urban and suburban neighborhoods (measured as the top quartile) went from roughly two-thirds in 1970 to almost three-quarters by 2010. And the share of suburban neighborhoods in the top two status levels (that is, the upper two quartiles) increased from 56 percent in 1970 to 59 percent by 2010, while the share of urban neighborhoods in these top two levels fell from 41 percent to 36 percent.

Across the board, suburban neighborhoods have higher incomes, higher home values, higher shares of college grads, and higher shares of professionals.


The suburban advantage is clear. Across the board, suburban neighborhoods have higher incomes, higher home values, higher shares of college grads, and higher shares of professionalsthan urban neighborhoods. And suburbs do better than urban areas even when we compare neighborhoods in the same quartile of status.

Among America’s most advantaged neighborhoods (the top quartile), the median incomes of suburban neighborhoods are roughly $10,000 higher than those of their urban counterparts, a gap that has grown from $5,500 in 1970. Conversely, among the nation’s least advantaged neighborhoods (those in the bottom quartile), urban neighborhoods have incomes that are roughly $5,000 lower than in their suburban counterparts—$33,700 versus $38,600. Among declining neighborhoods, urban neighborhoods saw income losses twice as large as those of declining suburbs, $14,040 versus $7,570.

There were considerable shifts in the economic status of America’s neighborhoods over this period. More than half of all neighborhoods (53 percent) saw their status either improve (26 percent) or decline (27 percent). But the most common pattern of all was stability: 47 percent of neighborhoods saw no significant change in their economic status between 1970 and 2010, echoing the findings of Elizabeth Delmelle.

Here again, Airgood-Obrycki finds substantial differences between urban and suburban neighborhoods. Urban neighborhoods were far more likely to remain in lower levels of economic status. More than half of urban neighborhoods that remained in the same status quartile were those at lowest level, compared to less than a fifth of suburban neighborhoods.

High-status urban neighborhoods were actually more likely to see decline than their advantaged suburban counterparts. More than half of urban neighborhoods in the top two quartiles saw their economic status decline, compared to 40 percent of their suburban peers, and the decline in economic status tended to be much steeper for those urban neighborhoods.

But the suburbs are far from monolithic. Indeed, the lion’s share of the gains were confined to newly developed “modern suburbs,” nearly half of which saw gains in economic status between 1970 and 2010. “Modern suburbs saw the greatest gains in nearly every indicator,” the paper notes. By contrast, the oldest suburbs—prewar suburbs, developed before World War II—have consistently been the most troubled and disadvantaged, while immediate postwar suburbs have seen a significant drop in their economic status since 1970.

The reality of America’s urban and suburban neighborhoods is far more complicated than we typically allow. The old dichotomy of declining urban centers and wholly affluent suburbs no longer holds. Many urban centers have gentrified, and poverty and economic dislocation have spread into the suburbs. Despite all of this change, the most affluent places in America largely remain in its more recently developed suburbia.

The once cut-and-dried distinctions between city and suburb have blurred and no longer explain the actual places we live. “While the urban-suburban divide once served as a meaningful dichotomy, suburbs have greater economic inequities among them,” as Airgood-Obrycki puts it. America is becoming a veritable patchwork of economic advantage and disadvantage, spread across its cities and suburbs alike.

 

[Elvin]

You can also argue that suburbia is a double edged sword because most cases of depression, suicide, etc. occur in suburban areas. Most people living there are isolated in their homes and in their cars, there is a lack of community feel because everyone is in their car and you need to drive everywhere, only seeing people leaving their cars and walking to stores or work and then back into their cars. Humans were not made for this type of living they need a "village" to support them and their mental health.

 

[Yankee-stani]

Suburbs in France are known to be negative term,Where I live I would not call it but a suburb or urban or mix of both

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

You can also argue that suburbia is a double edged sword because most cases of depression, suicide, etc. occur in suburban areas. Most people living there are isolated in their homes and in their cars, there is a lack of community feel because everyone is in their car and you need to drive everywhere, only seeing people leaving their cars and walking to stores or work and then back into their cars. Humans were not made for this type of living they need a "village" to support them and their mental health.

It depends upon the situation and the suburb. Plus there is always this "grass is always greener" mentality of people in cities wanting to move to the suburbs and people in suburbs wanting to move to the city.

Having spent more than half of my life walking the streets of Boston and then moving to the suburbs I am lucky enough to see both sides of the coin.

My biggest gripe with city living was that it has turned into a sea of non-caring transient renters. Your complaint of lack of community in the suburbs applies even more to the city where your neighbors are constantly changing. Your kids make some new friends...well two years later they are gone.

Unfortunately with transient renters you get people who simply don't care. They'll beep their horn at 2am to pick up somebody. They'll heave a broken trash bag halfway on the street/sidewalk. Leave beer bottles in random places or toss some pizza box in the gutter. In general because they are renters their income tends to be lower. This can lead to people tempted by criminal activity. They then have kids who see criminal activity as the norm and are tempted to be delinquents themselves. They tend to use the “five finger discount” at local stores. The school systems then suffer with kids who look at it as daycare and end up being troublemakers. The landlords jam as many of them into a unit to maximize profits and they aren't knocking themselves out keeping up the properties.

Now if you move to a nice city suburb (not a town completely in the middle of nowhere) where the vast majority of the people are NOT renters the difference is immediate. It's night and day. Your neighbors are going to stay longer, their incomes are higher, and they care about the neighborhood.

The only type of "trouble" they cause is when they put in a heated driveway and everybody in the neighborhood feels obligated to do it too. Your kids can leave their bikes out all night on the sidewalk. The big fuss in school of the week is when some kid said “damn” in class. You don’t have an ugly chain link fence on three (or four) sides of your property (they may even be banned where I live). You are surrounded by smiling neighbors with lawns, flower gardens, and nicely kept homes.

I have two siblings and we have all moved to the suburbs but my parents still live in Boston in their very large home (~7500sq feet). When my brother bought his house (in a “Leave it to Beaver” type neighborhood) he told my sister and I that we can have the Boston home when our parents died because he isn’t interested in city living anymore. When I moved to the suburbs I told my sister the same thing. When she moved to the suburbs she lamented that we are going to end up as landlords doing the very thing we complained about which drove us away.

 

[dalvash]

Is American Sprawl Already Bankrupt?

GREENBELT, Md.—As urbanist and activist Charles Marohn spoke here last month, expounding on the “spooky wisdom” in his Strong Towns book, the setting itself made for an interesting coincidence.

Marohn addressed a mostly older crowd in Old Greenbelt’s community center, an impressive art deco building that dates to the city’s founding under a landmark New Deal program. Greenbelt was an early planned community and a public works project, so it’s an interesting place to talk about Marohn’s advocacy of incremental development, and humanity’s coevolution with the traditional city. As such projects go Greenbelt has been quite successful, though it struggles with a once-shiny, now-degraded stretch of sprawl along its major thoroughfare, sometimes dubbed “New Greenbelt.”

Perhaps it is fitting that Greenbelt was platted and built during the Depression, however, because it is the post-Depression era—not the later post-war era—that Marohn identifies as the point when we abandoned the traditional, time-honed approach to building our places. And when it comes to the poster child of urban failure, Detroit, he notes that there is at least one area of agreement: “Detroit is some very different place from anywhere in North America,” he says to laughs. Detroit, however, weathered the Depression better than most American cities, and so, mistaking correlation for causation—and no doubt with encouragement from Detroit’s primary industry—virtually all urban and suburban development henceforth copied the Motor City’s sprawling, automobile-dependent pattern (which, ironically, was itself adopted after the core city was already affluent and famous).

Greenbelt Community Center (Wikimedia Commons)
Marohn’s core contention is that, at a high level, that development pattern was itself what bankrupted Detroit and intensified its poverty and decline. Furthermore, because nearly every post-Depression place is built on the Detroit blueprint, America writ large can look forward in 20 or 30 years to the same fate. It’s quite a claim, but it’s based on what appear to be hard and inarguable numbers. We’ve simply built too much stuff per person, far more than tax revenues or even reasonable debt loads can ever maintain. It doesn’t help that we build so much at once—entire neighborhoods built to a “finished state”—so that the cost of maintenance all comes due at once in a tidal wave of decline.

There’s more to Marohn’s idiosyncratic “Strong Towns approach” than municipal finance, however. There’s a fascinating mediation on the traditional city as a sort of complex, adaptive organism that has co-evolved with human civilization; an emergent system with its own rules, not a fragile monoculture. There is deep, time-honed, iterative wisdom embedded in the physical forms of places as built until the 1930s. Every pre-Depression city in the world “charted the same iterative course,” starting with a dirt street and some wooden shacks, and ending, if it got that far, in magnificent architecture and bustling, well-paved thoroughfares. These cities were not created, you might say; they evolved. To Marohn, building a mature city, all at once and to a finished state, is something like trying to turn a bud into a flower. There is something about the architecture of human society that militates against it. “Why is it like this?” Marohn asks. “I don’t know. It’s complex and it’s spooky.”

We have traded the stability of the slow, incremental urban form for the quick growth of suburban sprawl, but we are not really creating wealth. Instead, we are embedding massive and unpayable expenses in the future when all those sparsely populated places need to be maintained and rebuilt. “We become poorer the more that we grow,” says Marohn. “Our cities today are like an emaciated child. There’s no meat on the bones.” The “bones” are all the visible and invisible infrastructure Marohn rattles off several times throughout his talk—roads, sidewalks, sewer lines, power lines, pipes, pumps, meters.

Part of how we got here is our strong preference for order and efficiency over chaos in a highly developed, affluent society. There is a “modest level of chaos” in more traditional built environments, but ironically, over the long term, these are much more stable places. In Marohn’s view, we have to learn to be “slightly more comfortable with a little more bottom-up chaos.” In America today, poorer neighborhoods in traditionally built but neglected places are a good example of this. “When I look at poor neighborhoods,” says Marohn, “what I see are some of the most entrepreneurial” places in America.

He suggests that it’s time to stop building, and to make better use of what we’ve already built; to break the cycle of building disposable rings of suburbs and abandoning them every couple of generations. Inner-ring suburbs and as-yet-ungentrified urban cores—places that are often in the most advanced state of decline—have the bones to be restored more than far-flung exurbs. Marohn points to a downtown that revived its businesses by replacing a vacant lot with garden sheds—incubator businesses. The streetscape was restored and entrepreneurs were given a place to test out ideas with very low risk.

I think this experiment can be found arising organically too: a lot of decayed sprawl is in fact serving this very purpose, as well as it is able to. In the D.C. metro area and beyond, the second and third lives of once-shiny strip malls are more likely to be as lively ethnic and immigrant-run businesses than as vacant lots. This dynamic, in which cheap, aging commercial space becomes an entrepreneurial resource for marginal residents, complicates the notion that the best thing we can do with old sprawl is to abandon it or level and upzone it. We are still learning whether places originally built as sprawl can, Strong Towns-like, be incrementally turned into real and more traditional urban fabrics.

Marohn’s politics, such as they are discernible, are deeply syncretic and unorthodox. His focus on profit, return, and fiscal conservatism irks some on the Left, while his focus on co-evolution, the wiring of human nature, and systems thinking can sound rather Marxian or deterministic to libertarians and mainstream conservatives. Some urbanists also find his emphasis on incrementalism and “small bets” to be insufficient. Like that famously perfect compromise, Marohn is likely to leave everyone a little bit unsatisfied. It is clear that his philosophy is an important player in the urbanist space, bringing many unique insights and ways of thinking. In particular, he presents a lot of urbanist ideas that are conventionally understood as left-leaning, and codes them in language that libertarians and conservatives can understand and accept. This is very valuable.

But is it true? Sure, numbers don’t lie. But is it really true? Is the entire American built environment really a massive liability that will have to be largely abandoned in another generation? Is each new thriving faux-downtown greenfield development really a disposable white elephant?

One criticism of the Strong Towns approach is that it traffics in “architectural determinism,” or the idea that the built environment is the primary factor in human behavior; often cited is a controversial piece on the built environment of Ferguson, Missouri in the wake of the Michael Brown shooting. But this is not really determinism, nor is it a way to pretend that race or other factors are non-issues. It is, rather, a more abstract point that should nonetheless be obvious: part of the context of everything that happens is the physical setting in which it happens. For too long we have embraced the polar opposite of architectural determinism, acting as though our national affairs take place in a disembodied Platonic realm.

As our understanding of neuroscience progresses, there is an increasingly strong case to be made that our built environment is turning us towards depression and desperation, and that any number of social and political problems may–unpredictably and indirectly—lie downstream of the physical settings of American life. If Marohn sometimes veers towards determinism, it is only because he is overcompensating for a mainstream discourse that has long treated the built environment as immaterial to anything at all.

Others, however, object to Marohn’s entire framing—his slight but very important jump from the mere observation that future liabilities exceed expected revenues to the extrapolation that virtually every American municipality is insolvent and faces something like collapse in the near future. From this extrapolation he describes growth as a Ponzi scheme, in which the insolvency problem, presenting itself as a cash flow problem, is temporarily alleviated and simultaneously compounded by new construction.

There is a pungent Korean idiom which labels this dynamic “peeing on your frozen feet”; the idea being that such a course of action temporarily relieves frostbite while worsening the frostbite that will follow. It denotes actions which simultaneously ease symptoms while worsening the ultimate prognosis. Of course, if there is always more water to drink, this might be continued indefinitely. The real problem is that our frostbitten municipalities are running out of water—which is to say, resources, greenfield land, and the ability to take on new debt.

Marohn sees a similar endpoint as James Howard Kunstler’s “long emergency”: the idea that modern industrial society faces a long period of contraction and unwinding (Kunstler ultimately blames peak oil, while Marohn sticks to auto-oriented development). Yet in 1993, Kunstler wrote, as Marohn suggests in 2019, that “the great suburban build-out is over.” Perhaps this is just alarmism; perhaps, while the facts today undoubtedly point in an ominous direction, there is some unforeseen escape hatch. If there is a 95 percent chance, for example, of a long emergency, perhaps our salvation is in that 5 percent.

There is another possibility, however, that is both more alarming and more likely: that the long emergency thesis is no longer a thesis, but a fact. I write this from the wealthiest cluster of counties in the United States, and even here our first-ring suburbs display some of the inevitable, inexorable decay that Kunstler and Marohn talk about. Outside this bubble of government-backed largesse, the decay is much more severe and widespread. Everything from trade deals to economic concentration to racism has made these problems worse, but the auto-oriented development pattern is an intensifier; it both hastens decline and complicates renewal. Most of America’s built places are not “strong, resilient, and adaptable.” It is dismal to consider that perhaps the easiest way out of this morass is total demolition. If we have built our habitats like bits of consumer junk, then perhaps it is only fitting that we dispose of them in the same way. That does not feel like very much of an answer.

Still, one does not have to accept the likely prognosis in order to accept that the disease exists. Maybe Marohn and Kunstler are wrong that the “long emergency” is already baked into the cake. But that does not make the lives of Latino immigrants or poor African Americans in decaying first-ring suburbs any better, nor does it repair rusted pipes or crumbling sidewalks, nor does it balance ailing city budgets. These problems, little attention as they may get, are matters of indisputable, observable fact. Where those facts take us is still up for debate—if we start building strong towns yesterday.

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

Living In The Hood VS The Suburbs | My Experiences In Both Places, Which Place Is Better?

 

[Mista]

My biggest gripe with city living was that it has turned into a sea of non-caring transient renters.

Unfortunately with transient renters you get people who simply don't care.

It's human nature, people don't care what they don't own. It's the same in Singapore before our independence where most people live in rental flats:

Most Singaporeans in the 1960s were first generation immigrants who had moved to Singapore in search of a better life, and who did not feel a strong sense of belonging to the newly independent Singapore. Therefore, the government sought to establish a population that had a firm stake in the country that would vote responsibly and contribute to political stability, identify with the country’s long-term interests, and be willing to defend it. Providing home ownership was seen as a way to achieve this nation-building goal.

In the words of then Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew:

"My primary preoccupation was to give every citizen a stake in the country and its future. I wanted a home-owning society. I had seen the contrast between the blocks of low-cost rental apartments, badly misused and poorly maintained, and those of houseproud owners, and was convinced that if every family owned its home, the country would be more stable... I had seen how voters in capital cities always tended to vote against the government of the day and was determined that our householders should become homeowners; otherwise we would not have political stability. My other important motive was to give all parents whose sons would have to do national service a stake in the Singapore their sons had to defend. If the soldier’s family did not own their home, he would soon conclude he would be fighting to protect the properties of the wealthy. I believed this sense of ownership was vital for our new society which had no deep roots in a common historical experience."

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

It's human nature, people don't care what they don't own. It's the same in Singapore before our independence where most people live in rental flats:

Most Singaporeans in the 1960s were first generation immigrants who had moved to Singapore in search of a better life, and who did not feel a strong sense of belonging to the newly independent Singapore. Therefore, the government sought to establish a population that had a firm stake in the country that would vote responsibly and contribute to political stability, identify with the country’s long-term interests, and be willing to defend it. Providing home ownership was seen as a way to achieve this nation-building goal.

In the words of then Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew:

"My primary preoccupation was to give every citizen a stake in the country and its future. I wanted a home-owning society. I had seen the contrast between the blocks of low-cost rental apartments, badly misused and poorly maintained, and those of houseproud owners, and was convinced that if every family owned its home, the country would be more stable... I had seen how voters in capital cities always tended to vote against the government of the day and was determined that our householders should become homeowners; otherwise we would not have political stability. My other important motive was to give all parents whose sons would have to do national service a stake in the Singapore their sons had to defend. If the soldier’s family did not own their home, he would soon conclude he would be fighting to protect the properties of the wealthy. I believed this sense of ownership was vital for our new society which had no deep roots in a common historical experience."

While giving people a home is a good idea the core problem is it isn't going to stop people from realizing a home in a particular spot is more valuable as rental property than living in it yourself. It may be different in Singapore where size sort of keeps things relatively even

I could easily get $7000/mo ($84K/yr) renting out my parent's home to 8 twentysomethings with mediocre low skill service jobs or entry level white-collar jobs (like the tv show "Friends").

You may be "Friends" but I bet your home owning neighbors saw you as uncaring transients.

Individually they have no chance of affording a > $1M home in that area. Collectively they are a gold mine to some landlord. This is pretty much what is happening. The home sale prices jump as the rental aspect becomes apparent and it turns into a vicious cycle of higher rents and even more people per unit to cover the expense of purchasing the home. There is one slight benefit though as gentrification creeps into the inner-city areas; however landlords do the absolute minimum in upkeep so it isn't as much of a benefit as you'd expect.

To get around this many communities around Boston have added laws that say you can jam as many people as you want into a unit BUT no more than 2 family names.

 

[Mista]

While giving people a home is a good idea the core problem is it isn't going to stop people from realizing a home in a particular spot is more valuable as rental property than living in it yourself. It may be different in Singapore where size sort of keeps things relatively even

I could easily get $7000/mo ($84K/yr) renting out my parent's home to 8 twentysomethings with mediocre low skill service jobs or entry level white-collar jobs (like the tv show "Friends").
View attachment 591385
You may be "Friends" but I bet your home owning neighbors saw you as uncaring transients.

Individually they have no chance of affording a > $1M home in that area. Collectively they are a gold mine to some landlord. This is pretty much what is happening. The home sale prices jump as the rental aspect becomes apparent and it turns into a vicious cycle of higher rents and even more people per unit to cover the expense of purchasing the home. There is one slight benefit though as gentrification creeps into the inner-city areas; however landlords do the absolute minimum in upkeep so it isn't as much of a benefit as you'd expect.

To get around this many communities around Boston have added laws that say you can jam as many people as you want into a unit BUT no more than 2 family names.

Yeah, it's a capitalistic society we're living in. It's a growing problem in many mature economies in the world, or even in 'socialist' China where opportunities are still growing, and frankly I'm not exactly optimistic about it.

 

[Elvin]

It depends upon the situation and the suburb. Plus there is always this "grass is always greener" mentality of people in cities wanting to move to the suburbs and people in suburbs wanting to move to the city.

Having spent more than half of my life walking the streets of Boston and then moving to the suburbs I am lucky enough to see both sides of the coin.

My biggest gripe with city living was that it has turned into a sea of non-caring transient renters. Your complaint of lack of community in the suburbs applies even more to the city where your neighbors are constantly changing. Your kids make some new friends...well two years later they are gone.

Unfortunately with transient renters you get people who simply don't care. They'll beep their horn at 2am to pick up somebody. They'll heave a broken trash bag halfway on the street/sidewalk. Leave beer bottles in random places or toss some pizza box in the gutter. In general because they are renters their income tends to be lower. This can lead to people tempted by criminal activity. They then have kids who see criminal activity as the norm and are tempted to be delinquents themselves. They tend to use the “five finger discount” at local stores. The school systems then suffer with kids who look at it as daycare and end up being troublemakers. The landlords jam as many of them into a unit to maximize profits and they aren't knocking themselves out keeping up the properties.

Now if you move to a nice city suburb (not a town completely in the middle of nowhere) where the vast majority of the people are NOT renters the difference is immediate. It's night and day. Your neighbors are going to stay longer, their incomes are higher, and they care about the neighborhood.

The only type of "trouble" they cause is when they put in a heated driveway and everybody in the neighborhood feels obligated to do it too. Your kids can leave their bikes out all night on the sidewalk. The big fuss in school of the week is when some kid said “damn” in class. You don’t have an ugly chain link fence on three (or four) sides of your property (they may even be banned where I live). You are surrounded by smiling neighbors with lawns, flower gardens, and nicely kept homes.

I have two siblings and we have all moved to the suburbs but my parents still live in Boston in their very large home (~7500sq feet). When my brother bought his house (in a “Leave it to Beaver” type neighborhood) he told my sister and I that we can have the Boston home when our parents died because he isn’t interested in city living anymore. When I moved to the suburbs I told my sister the same thing. When she moved to the suburbs she lamented that we are going to end up as landlords doing the very thing we complained about which drove us away.

Understood, you can argue that suburban sprawl and poor urban planning are the root of all these problems you mentioned you observed in Boston. this appears to be an American problem because city living is preferable in most countries across the world. If you look at a city in Europe you'll find pedestrian friendly infrastructure (which most American cities lack), a mix of rich, middle class and poor living in close proximity (which doesn't discriminate to poor and therefore create a segregation in society). For example, I lived in Germany for a little while and in my street we had lawyers living in apartments next to your factory workers across the street. People were mixed up and the poor were not put into ghettos and forgotten about.

I think all of this goes back to the terrible zoning laws the US incorporated in the 20th century and the "Single Family Home" approach to have every American family own their home and a car. These policies led to the growth of massive suburban sprawls that grow outward with poor pedestrian infrastructure and public transport options. This made the rich and the middle class move out of the cities which left less money for schools and infrastructure and the cities crumbled. Less jobs make people desperate which leads to violence which led to higher cime and police presence in the cities.

Separating people and destroying the chance for social connection and community makes people more stressed, humans are inherently social creatures and if you try to take that away from them it makes for a tumultuous society. You can often see suburban neighborhood close to a shopping center, but it is not accessible because itis either blocked off by a barrier of sort or there is no sidewalk. Also, there is a stigma towards people who use sidewalks or ride bikes and is seen as poor. Humans need accessible elements for their habitat, so what's the solution?

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

Understood, you can argue that suburban sprawl and poor urban planning are the root of all these problems you mentioned you observed in Boston. this appears to be an American problem because city living is preferable in most countries across the world. If you look at a city in Europe you'll find pedestrian friendly infrastructure (which most American cities lack), a mix of rich, middle class and poor living in close proximity (which doesn't discriminate to poor and therefore create a segregation in society). For example, I lived in Germany for a little while and in my street we had lawyers living in apartments next to your factory workers across the street. People were mixed up and the poor were not put into ghettos and forgotten about.

I think all of this goes back to the terrible zoning laws the US incorporated in the 20th century and the "Single Family Home" approach to have every American family own their home and a car. These policies led to the growth of massive suburban sprawls that grow outward with poor pedestrian infrastructure and public transport options. This made the rich and the middle class move out of the cities which left less money for schools and infrastructure and the cities crumbled. Less jobs make people desperate which leads to violence which led to higher cime and police presence in the cities.

Separating people and destroying the chance for social connection and community makes people more stressed, humans are inherently social creatures and if you try to take that away from them it makes for a tumultuous society. You can often see suburban neighborhood close to a shopping center, but it is not accessible because itis either blocked off by a barrier of sort or there is no sidewalk. Also, there is a stigma towards people who use sidewalks or ride bikes and is seen as poor. Humans need accessible elements for their habitat, so what's the solution?

I’m not sure I agree with you because I was hesitant to say “capitalism” in my last response as a root cause but since @Mista has come to the same conclusion (and brought it out into the open) I’ll lean on that more than anything the government is supposedly doing. As I said governments tend to intervene when capitalism starts throwing things into an extreme (ie limiting renter families in units).

If you have high paid lawyers living across the street from factory workers in a city in Germany a couple of questions must be asked. Assuming the units are the same and there is no government intervention why has another lawyer (who I would assume makes more money) snatched up the unit from the factory worker? Are landlords not driven by market forces and realize they could get more money from lawyers?

Are home sellers not determined to get the best price when the sell and so wouldn’t a lawyer outbid a factory worker for a unit? Wouldn’t a successful landlord with tons of income then outbid the lawyer? Is there really a high percentage of sellers out there motivated by social equality over money in their pocket and would take the financial hit of selling to a blue collar family no matter what the others bid? I doubt it. Unfortunately capitalism can be the great "unequalizer" given enough time (say 120 years of buying/selling). That is more likely the cause of many of the problems.

In the “desirable” suburbs of Boston (and I assume many other American cities) there tends to be more professionals than factory workers. Now this is not 100% always the case for the suburbs as we all know of plenty of suburbs with mostly working class people.

You are correct that zoning laws do intentionally exclude people..but most likely from the suburbs. Many towns have large lot sizes and if you need to spend $1M just on the property nevermind the house then yes they have definitely taken a “we only want rich people here” attitude. However that is far from common. Another tactic is to forbid overnight parking on the street. If a unit only has 1 or 2 spaces and some landlord wants to jam 4 unrelated people into it they are going to have problems getting tenants who would forgo a car. So if suburban zoning laws interfere with a landlord's ability to maximize profit then it won't be a desirable place for them to buy so MORE families will be homeowners...a far far far higher percentage than the city where capitalism has run amock. That is generally the situation in many of the desirable suburbs. BTW plenty of suburbs have sidewalks.

Not all cities suffer from inadequate transportation. I had everything I needed within 5 minutes of my Boston home and if I had to go anywhere I could take a bus or subway/trolley. A major bus route was 200 yards from my front door. Many young teens move around this way. Generally for me transportation wasn't much of an issue.

However I think a key thing to understand about most Americans (maybe it’s a white people thing) is that we are impatient people and don’t like being surrounded by incompetent people. So for many moving to a quiet suburb to get away from the masses is sort of an inherent trait that shouldn't be lightly written off (as opposed to most Asians who feel the absolute opposite). We can’t take a 5 mile bus/trolley ride when it stops every 300 feet to pick up somebody or let somebody off...so we just drive. So doing the same in the suburbs isn't a big change. I had a big mall and a major supermarket about 1.5 miles down the road from my house in Boston on a bus route that ran every 12 minutes with a fare of less than a dollar. When I got a car I never took that bus again...too much trouble.

Maybe the suburban living can be summed up as "waiting in line behind 5 people who know what they are doing instead of 100 who don't".

 

[Elvin]

I’m not sure I agree with you because I was hesitant to say “capitalism” in my last response as a root cause but since @Mista has come to the same conclusion (and brought it out into the open) I’ll lean on that more than anything the government is supposedly doing. As I said governments tend to intervene when capitalism starts throwing things into an extreme (ie limiting renter families in units).

If you have high paid lawyers living across the street from factory workers in a city in Germany a couple of questions must be asked. Assuming the units are the same and there is no government intervention why has another lawyer (who I would assume makes more money) snatched up the unit from the factory worker? Are landlords not driven by market forces and realize they could get more money from lawyers?

Are home sellers not determined to get the best price when the sell and so wouldn’t a lawyer outbid a factory worker for a unit? Wouldn’t a successful landlord with tons of income then outbid the lawyer? Is there really a high percentage of sellers out there motivated by social equality over money in their pocket and would take the financial hit of selling to a blue collar family no matter what the others bid? I doubt it. Unfortunately capitalism can be the great "unequalizer" given enough time (say 120 years of buying/selling). That is more likely the cause of many of the problems.

In the “desirable” suburbs of Boston (and I assume many other American cities) there tends to be more professionals than factory workers. Now this is not 100% always the case for the suburbs as we all know of plenty of suburbs with mostly working class people.

You are correct that zoning laws do intentionally exclude people..but most likely from the suburbs. Many towns have large lot sizes and if you need to spend $1M just on the property nevermind the house then yes they have definitely taken a “we only want rich people here” attitude. However that is far from common. Another tactic is to forbid overnight parking on the street. If a unit only has 1 or 2 spaces and some landlord wants to jam 4 unrelated people into it they are going to have problems getting tenants who would forgo a car. So if suburban zoning laws interfere with a landlord's ability to maximize profit then it won't be a desirable place for them to buy so MORE families will be homeowners...a far far far higher percentage than the city where capitalism has run amock. That is generally the situation in many of the desirable suburbs. BTW plenty of suburbs have sidewalks.

Not all cities suffer from inadequate transportation. I had everything I needed within 5 minutes of my Boston home and if I had to go anywhere I could take a bus or subway/trolley. A major bus route was 200 yards from my front door. Many young teens move around this way. Generally for me transportation wasn't much of an issue.

However I think a key thing to understand about most Americans (maybe it’s a white people thing) is that we are impatient people and don’t like being surrounded by incompetent people. So for many moving to a quiet suburb to get away from the masses is sort of an inherent trait that shouldn't be lightly written off (as opposed to most Asians who feel the absolute opposite). We can’t take a 5 mile bus/trolley ride when it stops every 300 feet to pick up somebody or let somebody off...so we just drive. So doing the same in the suburbs isn't a big change. I had a big mall and a major supermarket about 1.5 miles down the road from my house in Boston on a bus route that ran every 12 minutes with a fare of less than a dollar. When I got a car I never took that bus again...too much trouble.

Maybe the suburban living can be summed up as "waiting in line behind 5 people who know what they are doing instead of 100 who don't".

Why would you assume the units are the same? I mentioned the units were on the same street and not in the same building. However, I am sure the units the higher income workers were living in most likely had their perks. The point isn’t about cost, but location. Even in the old days the Kings and Barons lived in the same communities as the poor and they contributed to society. Less zoning laws have been equated to lower housing costs, look at Houston, America’s biggest city without zoning laws. Houston’s average dwelling price was 126K compared to $496K in New York City with strict zoning laws.


Boston is perhaps a bad representation of American suburbs in general, I am talking about mostly mid-west, south-east and south-west areas of the country with cities such as Phoenix, Charlotte, Atlanta, Orlando, Tampa, Jacksonville, Richmond, Dallas, etc. where you NEED a car to get around in the suburbs, the sidewalks are inadequate, and sometimes just end in the middle of the passage without explanation. It is also uncommon to see people walking around in the suburbs or riding their bikes. If you do see someone your immediate thought is that they are poor or struggling.

When I say zoning laws, I don’t mean parking, but more so the single-family home concept which has been codified into law (zoning). This reduces the ability for mixed used projects and therefore kills most small businesses. If you drive around most suburbs in America you won’t see many family owned restaurants, and instead it will mostly be chained restaurants and fast food places this is because mixed use development is high restricted and starting a business in the Suburbs is financially out of reach for the average person. The investments are too great for an average person to do and therefore we don’t have a lot of variety. I also don’t think parking has a correlation with home ownership, sure it is annoying but not the reason people chose not to buy a home.

I don’t think there is a correlation between race and running away from the masses. Look at Europe and their cities and suburbs, look at Canada and Australia as well. This is uniquely an American design that is driven by capitalism and a consumer-based society. Buy a car, live in more space than what you need, spend on average more on car repairs because you drive everywhere all the time, spend more on fuel, eat out through the drive throughs (god forbid people interact, but get your food and eat it in your car). All of this is not healthy and going back to my original point could be related to the higher than average depression and suicide rates in the US ( more on average than in other developed countries).

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

Why would you assume the units are the same? I mentioned the units were on the same street and not in the same building. However, I am sure the units the higher income workers were living in most likely had their perks. The point isn’t about cost, but location. Even in the old days the Kings and Barons lived in the same communities as the poor and they contributed to society. Less zoning laws have been equated to lower housing costs, look at Houston, America’s biggest city without zoning laws. Houston’s average dwelling price was 126K compared to $496K in New York City with strict zoning laws.


Boston is perhaps a bad representation of American suburbs in general, I am talking about mostly mid-west, south-east and south-west areas of the country with cities such as Phoenix, Charlotte, Atlanta, Orlando, Tampa, Jacksonville, Richmond, Dallas, etc. where you NEED a car to get around in the suburbs, the sidewalks are inadequate, and sometimes just end in the middle of the passage without explanation. It is also uncommon to see people walking around in the suburbs or riding their bikes. If you do see someone your immediate thought is that they are poor or struggling.

When I say zoning laws, I don’t mean parking, but more so the single-family home concept which has been codified into law (zoning). This reduces the ability for mixed used projects and therefore kills most small businesses. If you drive around most suburbs in America you won’t see many family owned restaurants, and instead it will mostly be chained restaurants and fast food places this is because mixed use development is high restricted and starting a business in the Suburbs is financially out of reach for the average person. The investments are too great for an average person to do and therefore we don’t have a lot of variety. I also don’t think parking has a correlation with home ownership, sure it is annoying but not the reason people chose not to buy a home.

I don’t think there is a correlation between race and running away from the masses. Look at Europe and their cities and suburbs, look at Canada and Australia as well. This is uniquely an American design that is driven by capitalism and a consumer-based society. Buy a car, live in more space than what you need, spend on average more on car repairs because you drive everywhere all the time, spend more on fuel, eat out through the drive throughs (god forbid people interact, but get your food and eat it in your car). All of this is not healthy and going back to my original point could be related to the higher than average depression and suicide rates in the US ( more on average than in other developed countries).

Remember I'm in "Taxachusetts" where many states laugh at us for taxing residents for things like nice services and schools ( ). BTW we have the 3rd lowest suicide rate in the country and that is with our “major city” being just 90sq miles and only about 700,000 people.

Zoning laws are different from place to place. It must be far worse in the areas you are talking about. While I grew up in a large home (which had servant sections BTW) there were the notorious “triple deckers” maybe 200 meters away. (For the uninitiated Triple deckers are synonymous with landlord owned “slum housing” while “the projects” are government run “slum housing”)

From wikipedia

300 meters away was a multilevel ~50 unit apartment building. So there was quite a mix of living styles and incomes. It isn’t as socially friendly as you think. During a discussion one day a co-worker realized he lived only 5 houses down from me for 2 years. I never noticed him.

Many suburbs (but not the majority here) do have single-family zoning laws to keep out apartment complexes. I already touched upon it. One town “Weston” pays a fine every year to the state instead of building the state-law-required low income housing just to keep out the “riff-raff”.

The majority also do restrict businesses to the “main road” through town area instead of the neighborhoods. So if you are far from it you’ll have to commute some way and yes if you are a mom&pop you’ll probably be paying premium rent.

Again the bike stuff is also regional. We have dedicated bike trails and bike lanes in both the cities and suburbs that get plenty of use.

There's even a 12 mile dedicated bike path leading through some of the wealthiest suburbs into Boston.

We even have those rent-a-bike things in the suburbs.

Still this is a minimal factor in the city vs suburb choice.

Around here there are plenty of mom&pop places in the suburbs. For instance I don’t even go out to dinner in Boston because the selection out here is so nice. There isn’t any zoning that I have ever heard of that favors chains. If anything it is the opposite here. Lots of towns refuse chains like McDonalds and Dunkin Donuts.

Hmm...now I know why there are fast food chains in Pakistan that don’t have any presence In Massachusetts. @OsmanAli98 ( https://defence.pk/pdf/threads/why-isnt-white-castle-a-fast-food-giant.643445/#post-11899395 )

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

An "inner suburb" of Boston (ie just outside the city line, houses still relatively close togethrr)