Suburban Sprawl Quotes

Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine. First they were driving through countryside, then, imperceptibly, the occasional town became a low suburban sprawl, and the sprawl became the city.

Suburban sprawl has heavily damaged the balance of our cities, divorcing environmental context from design and removing the concept of scale from the creation of neighborhoods.

is a direct connection between suburban sprawl and the spiraling cost of government, and most Americans don’t see it yet, including many in government. Likewise,

Even the classic American main street, with its mixed-use buildings right up against the sidewalk, is now illegal in most municipalities. Somewhere along the way, through a series of small and well-intentioned steps, traditional towns became a crime in America.

the whole sprawling paraphernalia of suburban childhood.

There is currently more sprawl covering American soil than was ever intended by its inventors. While there are some people who truly enjoy living in this environment, there are many others who would prefer to walk to school, bicycle to work, or simply spend less time in the car.

We live today in cities and suburbs whose form and character we did not choose. They were imposed upon us, by federal policy, local zoning laws, and the demands of the automobile.

The immense new suburban sprawls of American cities have not come about by accident—and still less by the myth of free choice between cities and suburbs. Endless suburban sprawl was made practical (and for many families was made actually mandatory) through the creation of something the United States lacked until the mid-1930’s: a national mortgage market specifically calculated to encourage suburban home building.

Even at relatively low population densities, sprawl tends not to pay for itself financially and consumes land at an alarming rate, while producing insurmountable traffic problems and exacerbating social inequity and isolation.

Roadways. The fifth component of sprawl consists of the miles of pavement that are necessary to connect the other four disassociated components. Since each piece of suburbia serves only one type of activity, and since daily life involves a wide variety of activities, the residents of suburbia spend an unprecedented amount of time and money moving from one place to the next. Since most of this motion takes place in singly occupied automobiles, even a sparsely populated area can generate the traffic of a much larger traditional town.

The problem is that one cannot easily build Charleston anymore, because it is against the law. Similarly, Boston’s Beacon Hill, Nantucket, Santa Fe, Carmel—all of these well-known places, many of which have become tourist destinations, exist in direct violation of current zoning ordinances.

To get the man off her back, she finally looked out of her window. She thought she would find patchwork farmlands, but they were already above the suburban sprawl that surrounded the city. It was twilight—the sky was full of color, but she didn't look up. She could only look to the ground, where streetlights were already beginning to come on. To Lindsay, it looked like a grid of computer chips, stretching out for miles and miles. So many people, she thought. Lindsay could count on a single hand the people who really cared about her. And now, outside her 747 window, was a brutal reminder of how many people didn't.

The traditional neighborhood—represented by mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly communities of varied population, either standing free as villages or grouped into towns and cities—has proved to be a sustainable form of growth. It allowed us to settle the continent without bankrupting the country or destroying the countryside in the process.

The same economic relationship is at work underground, where low-density land-use patterns require greater lengths of pipe and conduit to distribute municipal services. This high ratio of public to private expenditure helps explain why suburban municipalities are finding that new growth fails to pay for itself at acceptable levels of taxation.

Moving is a well-established tradition in America, and _moving up_ constitutes a significant part of the American dream. Not only is working one's way to a bigger house central to our ethos but it makes sense functionally as families bring more children into the world. But why must the move to a larger or more luxurious house bring with it the abandonment of one's neighbors, community groups, and often even schoolmates? The suburban pod system causes people to move not just from house to house but form community to community. Only in a traditionally organized neighborhood of varied incomes can a family significantly alter its housing without going very far. In the new suburbs, you can't move up without moving out. (The same is true of moving down. Seniors seeking a smaller house are often forced to abandon their familiar community and start over someplace else.)

Dodo Conway was a Catholic who had gone to Barnard and then married an architect who had gone to Columbia and was also a Catholic. They had a big, rambling house up the street from us, set behind a morbid façade of pine trees, and surrounded by scooters, tricycles, doll carriages, toy fire trucks, baseball bat, badminton nets, croquet wickets, hamster cages and cocker spaniel puppies--the whole sprawling paraphernalia of suburban childhood.

And from mayors to average citizens, we have heard expressed a shared belief in a direct causal relationship between the character of the physical environment and the social health of families and the community at large. For all of the household conveniences, cars, and shopping malls, life seems less satisfying to most Americans, particularly in the ubiquitous middle-class suburbs, where a sprawling, repetitive, and forgettable landscape has supplanted the original promise of suburban life with a hollow imitation.

Dollar for dollar, no other society approaches the United States in terms of the number of square feet per person, the number of baths per bedroom, the number of appliances in the kitchen, the quality of the climate control, and the convenience of the garage. The American private realm is simply a superior product. The problem is that most suburban residents, the minute the leave this refuge, are confronted by a tawdry and stressful environment. They enter their cars and embark on a journey of banality and hostility that lasts until they arrive that interior of their next destination. Americans may have the finest private realm in the developed world, but our public realm is brutal.

My interest in comics was scribbled over with a revived, energized passion for clothes, records, and music. I'd wandered in late to the punk party in 1978, when it was already over and the Sex Pistols were history. I'd kept my distance during the first flush of the new paradigm, when the walls of the sixth-form common room shed their suburban-surreal Roger Dean Yes album covers and grew a fresh new skin of Sex Pistols pictures, Blondie pinups, Buzzcocks collages, Clash radical chic. As a committed outsider, I refused to jump on the bandwagon of this new musical fad, which I'd written off as some kind of Nazi thing after seeing a photograph of Sid Vicious sporting a swastika armband. I hated the boys who'd cut their long hair and binned their crappy prog albums in an attempt to join in. I hated pretty much everybody without discrimination, in one way or another, and punk rockers were just something else to add to the shit list. But as we all know, it's zealots who make the best converts. One Thursday night, I was sprawled on the settee with Top of the Pops on the telly when Poly Styrene and her band X-Ray Spex turned up to play their latest single: an exhilarating sherbet storm of raw punk psychedelia entitled "The Day the World Turned Day-Glo" By the time the last incandescent chorus played out, I was a punk. I had always been a punk. I would always be a punk. Punk brought it all together in one place for me: Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius novels were punk. Peter Barnes's The Ruling Class, Dennis Potter, and The Prisoner were punk too. A Clockwork Orange was punk. Lindsay Anderson's If ... was punk. Monty Python was punk. Photographer Bob Carlos Clarke's fetish girls were punk. Comics were punk. Even Richmal Crompton's William books were punk. In fact, as it turned out, pretty much everything I liked was punk. The world started to make sense for the first time since Mosspark Primary. New and glorious constellations aligned in my inner firmament. I felt born again. The do-your-own-thing ethos had returned with a spit and a sneer in all those amateurish records I bought and treasured-even though I had no record player. Singles by bands who could often barely play or sing but still wrote beautiful, furious songs and poured all their young hearts, experiences, and inspirations onto records they paid for with their dole money. If these glorious fuckups could do it, so could a fuckup like me. When Jilted John, the alter ego of actor and comedian Graham Fellows, made an appearance on Top of the Pops singing about bus stops, failed romance, and sexual identity crisis, I was enthralled by his shameless amateurism, his reduction of pop music's great themes to playground name calling, his deconstruction of the macho rock voice into the effeminate whimper of a softie from Sheffield. This music reflected my experience of teenage life as a series of brutal setbacks and disappointments that could in the end be redeemed into art and music with humor, intelligence, and a modicum of talent. This, for me, was the real punk, the genuine anticool, and I felt empowered. The losers, the rejected, and the formerly voiceless were being offered an opportunity to show what they could do to enliven a stagnant culture. History was on our side, and I had nothing to lose. I was eighteen and still hadn't kissed a girl, but perhaps I had potential. I knew I had a lot to say, and punk threw me the lifeline of a creed and a vocabulary-a soundtrack to my mission as a comic artist, a rough validation. Ugly kids, shy kids, weird kids: It was okay to be different. In fact, it was mandatory.

In new and sanitized suburban towns, a young generation thus dreamed of cures—of a death-free, disease-free existence. Lulled by the idea of the durability of life, they threw themselves into consuming durables: boat-size Studebakers, rayon leisure suits, televisions, radios, vacation homes, golf clubs, barbecue grills, washing machines. In Levittown, a sprawling suburban settlement built in a potato field on Long Island—a symbolic utopia—“illness” now ranked third in a list of “worries,” falling behind “finances” and “child-rearing.” In fact, rearing children was becoming a national preoccupation at an unprecedented level. Fertility rose steadily—by 1957, a baby was being born every seven seconds in America. The “affluent society,” as the economist John Galbraith described it, also imagined itself as eternally young, with an accompanying guarantee of eternal health—the invincible society.

I cried in the Chevron bathroom stall. I cried near the confederate jasmine vine on the left side of the mailbox. I cried in conditions of suburban sprawl. I cried on the couch, in the black bucket seat, near the diaper, halfway between the Little Free Library and a nearby house, in the funeral home parlor, in the late afternoon traffic which turned every light orange, in the mega-box store with low prices for milk. I cried in the grass and pressed my face into the driveway pavement.

There were no smaller houses in their neighbourhood, so it would mean leaving everyone they knew behind and starting over somewhere else. Surely he couldn’t mean it. But instead of addressing these questions to the side of his head, she ignored the niggling thoughts and decided not to raise the subject again for a while since he’d seemed perfectly content with their sprawling suburban property

with its mixed-use buildings right up against the sidewalk, is now illegal in most municipalities. Somewhere along the way, through a series of small and well-intentioned steps, traditional towns became a crime in America. At

When in a Mississippi jungle, you feel as if you’re at the mercy of dark desires and ancient impulses. Despite unprecedented levels of pollution, cancerous suburban sprawl, and devastating natural disasters, the animals and insects still thrive in Mississippi. But not as much as the humans, the worst of all in Mississippi’s animal kingdom, who reproduce with as little forethought as the cicadas restlessly moaning for mates in the bayou. Mississippi

The empty prairie, crisscrossed by a grid of startlingly straight roads, rolled out like a vast wasteland in front of the hood ornament of the GTO. It was remarkable, Sarah thought, how quickly the suburban sprawl of Chicago gave way to the broad gray-and-white checkerboard of the heartland at its most bleak.

If these influences are reversed—and they can be—an environment designed around the true needs of individuals, conducive to the formation of community and preservation of the landscape, becomes possible.

The cities will be part of the country; I shall live 30 miles from my office in one direction, under a pine tree; my secretary will live 30 miles away from it too, in the other direction, under another pine tree. We shall both have our own car. We shall use up tires, wear out road surfaces and gears, consume oil and gasoline. All of which will necessitate a great deal of work … enough for all. —LE CORBUSIER, THE RADIANT CITY (1967)

These mortgages, which typically cost less per month than paying rent, were directed at new single-family suburban construction.c Intentionally or not, the FHA and VA programs discouraged the renovation of existing housing stock, while turning their back on the construction of row houses, mixed-use buildings, and other urban housing types. Simultaneously, a 41,000-mile interstate highway program, coupled with federal and local subsidies for road improvement and the neglect of mass transit, helped make automotive commuting affordable and convenient for the average citizen.

Life before the Internet sucked. My life as a kid growing up in suburban Michigan consisted of urban sprawl, shopping malls, and bad television (except 30 minutes of Seinfeld every Thursday). Adults told you that educated people followed the news, but most small towns had one mediocre newspaper, and local TV news had cats stuck in trees and house fires. (Thanks, adults.) To learn anything, you had to drive to a bookstore; subscribe to a stack of magazines; or schlep to a library, go through a card catalog, discover a book that someone had already checked out and was overdue, request the book back from that person or order it through interlibrary loan, and wait a few more weeks for the book to come while watching bad sitcoms (Seinfeld notwithstanding) with loud commercials. It was barbaric.

Suburban zoning and development codes grew so powerful and so entrenched by the end of the twentieth century that the people who financed and built most of suburbia had all but forgotten how to make anything but car-dependent sprawl.

The lack of affordable housing regulation allows rents to rise with little restriction, and Oregon law prohibits local governments from enacting almost all rent-control policies outside of special subsidized units. But regulation, like Portland’s famous urban growth boundary, has also enhanced the number of multi-unit buildings being constructed inside a limited zone to avoid suburban-like sprawl. Although Portland’s rental rates are not skyrocketing at the speed of San Francisco or even Seattle, the U.S. Census ranks Portland as having one of the tightest markets in the nation. Despite tax-abatement programs for luxury neighbors like the Pearl District and the South Waterfront supposedly tied to affordable-housing units, the city Housing Bureau says they won’t even meet 2003 goals, much less expand and continue programs. Meanwhile, the average condo price rose 41 percent last year and the average apartment rental has climbed at a steady pace of six percent in 2012 and again in 2013.

In the minds of many hunters , especially those who subscribe to the alarmist reckonings of the National Rifle Association, the primary threat to hunting is not suburban sprawl or wilderness destruction or the poisoning of our air and water. Rather, they believe that the primary threat to hunting lies within the government’s desire to take all the guns away. Animals will be running around everywhere, elk and bears will be banging down our doors, and there won’t be a thing we can do about it because of those damn liberals with their gun-control laws.

Rule #1: Don’t experiment on the poor; they have no choice. Experiment on the rich, who can always move out.

Hey! Pal! How do I get to town from here? And he ssid: Well, just take a right where they're gonna build that new shopping mall, go straight past where they're gonna put in the freeway, take a left at what's gonna be the new sports center, and keep going until you hit the place where they´re thiinking of building that drive-in bank. You can't miss it. And I said: This must be the place.

Hey! Pal! How do I get to town from here? And he said: Well, just take a right where they're gonna build that new shopping mall, go straight past where they're gonna put in the freeway, take a left at what's gonna be the new sports center, and keep going until you hit the place where they´re thinking of building that drive-in bank. You can't miss it. And I said: This must be the place.

As far as surrounding the “area,” someone wanna tell me where that area actually begins? Cities weren’t cities anymore, you know, they just grew out into this suburban sprawl. Mrs. Ruiz, one of our medics, called it “in-fill.” She was in real estate before the war and explained that the hottest properties were always the land between two existing cities. Freakin’ “in-fill,” we all learned to hate that term. For us, it meant clearing block after block of burbland before we could even think of establishing a quarantine perimeter. Fast-food joints, shopping centers, endless miles of cheap, cookie-cutter housing.

One: Mankind’s activities are causing the disintegration (a word chosen carefully) of natural ecosystems at a cataclysmic rate. We all know the rough outlines of that problem. By way of logging, road building, slash-and-burn agriculture, hunting and eating of wild animals (when Africans do that we call it “bushmeat” and impute a negative onus, though in America it’s merely “game”), clearing forest to create cattle pasture, mineral extraction, urban settlement, suburban sprawl, chemical pollution, nutrient runoff to the oceans, mining the oceans unsustainably for seafood, climate change, international marketing of the exported goods whose production requires any of the above, and other “civilizing” incursions upon natural landscape—by all such means, we are tearing ecosystems apart. This much isn’t new. Humans have been practicing most of those activities, using simple tools, for a very long time. But now, with 7 billion people alive and modern technology in their hands, the cumulative impacts are becoming critical. Tropical forests aren’t the only jeopardized ecosystems, but they’re the richest and most intricately structured. Within such ecosystems live millions of kinds of creatures, most of them unknown to science, unclassified into a species, or else barely identified and poorly understood.

Patterns of urban wildlife seem to lend credence to the antiurbanism of many environmentalists. Yet cities occupy just 3 percent of the world’s surface and house half of the human population. This intensification is efficient. The average citizen of New York releases less than one third of the US national average amount of carbon dioxide. Unlike those sprawling cities like Atlanta or Phoenix, New York’s carbon emissions from transportation have not risen in the last 30 years. Denver, despite its profligate lawns, water one quarter of Colorado’s population with 2 percent of the state’s water supply. Therefore, the high biodiversity of the countryside exists only because of the city. If all the world’s urban dwellers were to move to the country, native birds and plants would not fare well. Forests would fall, streams would become silted, and carbon dioxide concentrations would spike. This is no thought experiment. These outcomes are manifest in the cleared forests and such from suburban peripheries. Instead of lamenting a worldwide pattern of biological diminishment in urban areas, we might view statistics on bird and plant diversity as signs of augmented rural biological diversity, made possible by the compact city.

In postwar America, mass production of automobiles and tract housing signaled the beginning of urban decline and suburban sprawl.

dignified living, and need to spread out. The Western suburbs to which so many aspire are healthier than their detractors say. The modern Stepfords are no longer white monocultures, but that is progress. For every Ferguson there are many American suburbs that have quietly become black, Hispanic or Asian, or a blend of everyone. Picaresque accounts of decay overlook the fact that America’s suburbs are half as criminal and a little more than half as poor as central cities. Even as urban centres revive, more Americans move from city centre to suburb than go the other way. But the West has also made mistakes, from which the rest of the world can learn. The first lesson is that suburban sprawl imposes costs on everyone. Suburbanites tend to use more

desperate housewives. Ferguson, Missouri, torched by its residents following the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager, epitomises the failure of many American suburbs. Mayors like boasting about their downtown trams or metrosexual loft dwellers not their suburbs. But the planet as a whole is fast becoming suburban. In the emerging world almost every metropolis is growing in size faster than in population. Having bought their Gucci handbags and Volkswagens, the new Asian middle class is buying living space, resulting in colossal sprawl. Many of the new suburbs are high-rise, though still car-oriented; others are straight clones of American suburbs (take a look at Orange County, outside Beijing). What should governments do about it?

The space race Until a decade or two ago, the centres of many Western cities were emptying while their edges were spreading. This was not for the reasons normally cited. Neither the car nor the motorway caused suburban sprawl, although they sped it up: cities were spreading before either came along. Nor was the flight to the suburbs caused by racism. Whites fled inner-city neighbourhoods that were becoming black, but they also fled ones that were not. Planning and zoning rules encouraged sprawl, as did tax breaks for home ownership—but cities spread regardless of these. The real cause was mass affluence. As people grew richer, they demanded more privacy and space. Only a few could afford that in city centres; the rest moved out.

The cataclysmic use of money for suburban sprawl, and the concomitant starvation of all those parts of cities that planning orthodoxy stamped as slums, was what our wise men wanted for us; they put in a lot of effort, one way and another, to get it. We got it.