Last year, when the skies cleared following a three-day blizzard that had dumped 22 inches of snow and had trapped me inside my suburban home, I quickly donned my boots, pushed open the front door, and squeezed outside. And all at once it hit me: There was nowhere to go. I was standing on a street that had no sidewalk at the end of a cul-de-sac; the closest tavern was four miles away, and only a dog sled could reach it. It was time to return to urban America. The suburbs, where I had been raised and to which I had retreated as an adult, had finally defeated me.
Anti-suburban sentiments like mine have spawned something of an industry these past few years. A growing movement called the New Urbanism, made up of architects, journalists, academics, and town planners, has dedicated itself to the proposition that the suburbanization of America has led to many of the country’s social, psychological, and spiritual problems. For, rather than forming a new American community far from the “lonely crowd” discerned by David Riesman and Nathan Glazer in the urban masses, the suburbs have proved to be unfriendly and increasingly untraversable landscapes that isolate people in what might be called a “lonely sprawl.”
What is striking about these new criticisms of suburbia is that they come not from the left of the political spectrum, where such arguments have long found a home, but from conservatives.
The New Urbanist credo is most pungently spelled out by James Howard Kunstler in his book The Geography of Nowhere and its recently published sequel Home from Nowhere. Kunstler decries America’s modern landscape — its “clogged highways, strip malls, tract houses, franchise fry pits, parking lots, junked cities and ravaged countryside” — as the source of social ills that are “bankrupting us economically, socially, ecologically, and spiritually.”
The disconnection from neighbors and the sense of suburban isolation is, Kunstler thinks, a breeding ground for dependence on government. A lively community can help people to develop a sense of self-sufficiency. The suburbs, though, have been anything but lively. Kunstler argues that the story of American suburbanization after the Second World War is one of governmental interference and manipulation through giant public-works projects and zoning.
According to Kunstler, before the war there had been a cultural consensus about how our towns and cities should be built. Sized to human scale rather than for automobiles, American towns and cities had stores within walking distance of housing, broad sidewalks with trees, and public transportation. The street was an orderly row of ornate facades, not a strip-mall purgatory of cheap boxy warehouses and parking lagoons. Our civic buildings, like the town courthouse and the local school, were designed with an eye toward their importance, their columns echoing with authority, as opposed to the unimposing shoeboxes of the 1960s and 1970s, which echo with nothing.
What happened? According to Kunstler, zoning and planning happened — rules intended to ensure the viability of towns and cities and prepare them fer economic development. To be sure, these rules originally had humane and understandable goals. It is true that Americans once lived in tight-knit, mixed-income urban communities with dance halls, corner taverns, and local churches. But they also lived dangerously close to the factories where they worked, and that meant living with and around industrial pollution. It seemed to make sense to separate the places people lived from the places they worked through rules and regulations that came to be known as zoning.
But in the postwar era, Kunstler writes, ideas about zoning and transportation were “taken to an absurd extreme. Zoning itself began to overshadow all the historic elements of civic art and civic life. . . . Shopping was declared an obnoxious industrial activity around which people shouldn’t be allowed to live. This tended to destroy age-old physical relationships between shopping and living, as embodied, say, in Main Street.”
After all, modern American suburbs are all planned communities to some extent, governed by land-use rules that determine how many square feet of lawn must front each house and precisely what size of house may be built. And they would have been unimaginable had it not been for government support — central planning, in other words — in the form of road projects, sewage projects, and school construction. The result, in many cases, was jury-rigged, committee-driven, politicized mediocrity. In 1961, the leftist social critic Lewis Mumford derided the ur-New York suburb called Levittown for being “a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances on uniform roads, . . . inhabited by people of the same class, the same incomes, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward way to a common mold manufactured in the same central metropolis.” Mumford concluded that “the ultimate effect of the suburban escape in our time is, ironically, a low-grade uniform environment from which escape is impossible.”
To leftist intellectuals in the 1950s and ’60s, the suburbs were a conformist nightmare, the center of the stifling bourgeois life created by a ravenous consumer culture. But to the generation that was exhausted from fighting the war, suburbs offered space to breathe, affordable housing, and the possibility of raising children free from the anxieties of urban life. The leftist prattle against the suburbs notwithstanding, they afforded middle- class Americans the chance of owning a home and making a new life for themselves. And it was an easier life: Since there weren’t yet many cars on the road, getting to and from work was a breeze, far more comfortable than a crowded subway or bus commute. When my parents first moved to the suburbs twenty miles from downtown Washington, my father could make it to work in his VW bug in thirty minutes. Now, however, the trip to town can take an hour and a half, and the Federal Highway Administration predicts that freeway congestion will quadruple in the next twenty years and double on smaller roads. (And this comes at a time when the United States spends almost $ 200 million per day on streets and roads.) An infrastructure built for a slower and less crowded time is no longer sufficient.
A life spent in traffic is a suggestive image for the true problem of suburban existence: The sense of alienation and isolation. In the suburbs, with their lack of common space, you can live down the street from someone for twenty years and never even lay eyes on him. Kids attend distant schools and make friends in disparate areas, which means they do not spend their time in and around the house, but commute for play as well as school. People live in houses in close proximity to one another, but in many cases they might as well be living on 1,000-acre farms.
All this speaks against a growing communitarian spirit among American conservatives. In the November/December 1996 issue of the American Enterprise, editor Karl Zinsmeister offers “A Conservative Case Against Suburbia” that casts a wide philosophical net: “The hurried life, the disappearance of family time, the weakening of generational links, our ignorance of history, our lack of local ties, an exaggerated focus on money, the anonymity of community life, the rise of radical feminism, the decline of civic action, the tyrannical dominance of TV and pop culture over leisure time — all of these problems have been fed, and in some cases instigated, by suburbanization, in ways that few people anticipated a generation ago when mass suburbs were first created.”
Zinsmeister, who has done careful work as a social scientist that challenged the feminist enthusiasm for day care, believes that Betty Friedan’s 1963 ur-feminist work The Feminine Mystique was an “anguished cry” from suburban Westchester County for a sense of place where there really was none. “Americans who would prefer that their wives and daughters not follow Friedan down the path to NOW-style feminism,” Zinsmeister warns, ” would do well to think hard about how the current structure of our suburban communities feeds this problem.” He quotes urban experts like Kunstler and Jane Jacobs, whose seminal 1961 work The Death and Life of Great American Cities was the first to note that traditional city neighborhoods, even if inhabited by the poor, have a thriving social life and a natural crime deterrent in the people who populate the pedestrian-friendly streets.
Zinsmeister also puts a stake in the heart of the idea that suburbanization is simply the result of the natural flow of the free market. It was the government, after all, that offered incentives for new families to move to the suburbs in the form of low-interest mortgages and road-building programs. Such moves, Zinsmeister notes, guaranteed that “new thoroughfares . . . wrecked many existing communities, city neighborhoods were slashed by elevated highways, and outlying towns had the life snuffed out of them by beltways and controlled-access interstates.”
Zinsmeister’s words do represent an odd cultural inversion, as does the fact that the entire issue of the American Enterprise in which his piece appeared is dedicated to the New Urbanist movement. As his citation of Betty Friedan indicates, conservative dissatisfaction with suburbia has strange ideological roots. But of such ironies is intellectual history made — and another signal irony is that some very interesting ideas about how to help solve some of the social problems of suburbia are coming under attack these days from the left.
Kunstler and Zinsmeister are not writing in a vacuum; their ideas are finding actual physical expression in the work of architects like Andres Duany and Leon Krier. “The congested, unsatisfying suburban sprawl and disintegrating city centers of today are not the product of laissez-faire or mindless greed,” Duany, whose family fled Castro’s Cuba in 1960, once wrote. They are instead the “direct result of zoning and building ordinances zealously administered by planning departments.”
These designers are trying to bring the New Urbanism to suburbia, with a series of developments across the country that feature layouts based to some degree on 19th-century villages — sidewalks, houses close together, village greens, stores in walking distance. The most famous are Kentlands, outside of Washington, D.C., and Celebration, an entire town under construction right outside Disney World that will eventually be home to 20,000.
Only 400 people are living in Celebration right now, but it has already come under attack for being a Disney theme-park version of a small town sandblasted of the conflict and culture of real democracy. In an oddly angry piece in the October 1996 issue of Harper’s, Russ Rymer seemed to be wishing a horrible civic accident on Celebration to let its residents know that they can’t hide from the messiness of real democracy. “Twenty-thousand people have a way of getting out of hand,” Rymer sneered, evoking images of Freddy Kruger amidst the town’s Mayberry charms. And in the Washington Post, Caroline E. Mayer described a trip she took to the sparsely populated Celebration and found it already suffused with “the worst of smalltown living. ” It seems two couples unhappy with life in the new town were afraid to talk about it publicly, Mayer said, because they feared being “ostracized by the rest of the community.”
It would be foolish to deny that neighbors and neighborliness can be stifling; throughout American history there has been a deep tension between the individualism many of us crave and the community the society as a whole needs. The New Urbanists are acutely conscious of this.
But at least when your neighbors stifle you, you are not having the rules of your life imposed on you from above by zoning officials and planners. For what is oppressive in neighborliness is also enveloping — and it is the very spirit of envelopment, of engrossment in the lives of others, that is lost in the suburbs. The late Christopher Lasch once noted that when people live close by each other, they hear an “inner voice that asks what the guys would think.” Lasch claimed that this voice “can serve as a powerful agency of what used to be called social control (when this term referred to self-imposed community sanctions rather than to the authority imposed by experts in behavior modification and other alien specialists).”
Critics insist that the New Urbanists are engaged in an effort to revive the small town when what is needed is the reinvigoration of cities. The imputation is clear: The critics believe the New Urbanists want to banish the poor, the black, the Hispanic, and once everything is made lily-white, to impose a kind of moral zoning on everyone else.
The question is whether there might be a new amalgam, a way of bringing together the social benefits of a cohesive community with the convenience and services of a big city and the affordability of suburbia. Kunstler thinks there is, and that the answer lies in dezoning, deregulating, and giving up on ideas whose failure has led to a steep and entirely unnecessary increase in the cost of housing.
“Our affordable housing crisis is entirely of our own making,” Kunstler writes. “We think the government must step in and solve this problem by going into the house-building business. In other societies . . . the government gives a special tax break to anyone who puts in an accessory apartment on their property,” something that most modern zoning prohibits. “We could create a vast supply of decent housing practically overnight, without bureaucracy or public funds. To make it slum-proof, stipulate that [the house with the accessory apartment] must be owner occupied. Let the landlord be the policeman.”
It is perhaps the most interesting irony of all that these neo-Jeffersonian New Urbanists now see the ideal of civic virtue in the very cities Jefferson himself believed made civic virtue impossible. But there is a logic to their vision, a logic that says it may be unnecessary to reinvent suburbia. For with their large and crumbling stock of housing and their remarkable infrastructure, America’s rusting, decaying cities do have the potential in the first few decades of the 21st century to become the vibrant places they were in the first few decades of the 20th.
Mark Gauvreau Judge, a writer for Insight, is the author of Wasted: Tales of a GenX Drunk, forthcoming from Hazelden.
