Local right wing columnist Patrick McIlheran gets his wires a bit crossed when it comes to what sprawl really and truly is ("Sprawl had the middle class living like lords"). So I dropped him a line:
(Public Contrition: I forwarded this to a friend - with a cc to McIlheran - and referred to "more McIlheran tripe" [as I am generally on the other side of the opinions he expresses in his column]. That was fairly uncalled for and I take it back. What's become of civil discourse nowadays?)
Hello Patrick,
I read your column with great interest today because I agree with the spirit of your headline if not the semantics.
Suburbs are not inherently "bad." In fact, I think suburbs can and should be excellent places to live - - they certainly were in the days when your in-laws' neighborhood was laid out. While there may be people out there (urbanists?) who characterize even the carefully planned and designed communities built in the 40s through the 60s (and even into the 70s) as "sprawl," I'm not one of them.
I'm with you: Suburbs were a boon to the middle class. I grew up in a wonderland. Walked to the drug store to buy comics, biked to the pool, spent long afternoons playing ball at the local diamond, skipped stones in the Wisconsin River, etc.
The old drug store is still there, but they don't sell comics anymore. They don't sell much of anything anymore, actually. The "local" Wal-Mart and Walgreen's get most of the prescription drug business now.
With that said: The bucolic environment you describe in your column is most assuredly not "sprawl" as we know it today. Your in-laws live in a post-Garden City commuter suburb that was built in a more thoughtful time, laid out to serve a community complete with amenities that modern developers don't bother with. You describe the ideal to which many anti-sprawl folks aspire!
But they don't build 'em like that anymore.
For one thing, the taxpayer revolt you regularly celebrate (spreading outward from Proposition 13) put an abrupt end to the developers' practice of creating parks, retention ponds and green spaces in the subdivisions they built. They would typically deed these crucial community amenities back to the municipalities, but local governments could no longer support them post-Prop 13; now they simply don't build them. To add insult to injury, a recent change to the way developers pay impact fees (they now pay for lots SOLD, not lots BUILT) means local municipalities are cutting back even further on community amenities. Whereas developers used to build neighborhoods and communities (as they did in the days that your in-laws' neighborhood was built), they now simply plop down groupings of houses on wide, curvy streets - no sidewalks - connected to a single over-burdened collector road.
You describe the sort of suburb that is disappearing: A walkable neighborhood, access to a commuter train(!), situated in a traditional street grid that creates the "inner" feel, old-growth trees planted a half-century ago by forward-thinking developers, etc. By all means, lets have MORE of those.
The modern reality, however, is sprawl. Subdivision "pods" are situated just off noisy collector roads (traffic-dispersing street grids are passe). Roads within subdivisions are built wide and curvy for maximum speed and noise (kids and other pedestrians be damned). Sidewalks? You must be joking. Parks and public spaces are an afterthought if included at all (every ball game means parents have to drive their kids to the diamond). The elderly, once they can no longer drive, are trapped in their homes or independent living facilities and no longer interact with younger people; young people must rely on mom and dad's car to get anywhere, and when they turn 16 are almost routinely given a car to drive (you are well aware of the tragic statistics for these new drivers).
Furthermore, arbitrarily scattered subdivisions here, there and everywhere make locating commercial development problematic (no one wants Target or Wal-Mart traffic further plugging their single-access collector road) so property taxes skyrocket. Consequently, suburbs eventually end up desperate, taking whatever commercial development is offered without careful integration into the existing community (ask the developer to take time to create a commercial site plan that works with the surrounding infrastructure and community and you are "anti-development"). Formerly public spaces where people used to linger and interact (and learn empathy and tolerance) while running errands and "getting things done" are now single-use entities flung out on the fringes, surrounded by huge seas of asphalt.
They sell comic books here. Sometimes.
You describe "a leafy, unattainably ritzy district" that your in-laws observed long ago with envy; happy ending - - hard work and the American Dream prevailed and they attained the same conditions eventually when they moved into their present neighborhood. How can you miss the irony of later describing your in-laws current suburban wonderland as something "I know I could never afford"? That would make it for you pretty much a "a leafy, unattainably ritzy district"; however, the American Dream circa 2007 evidently limits your choices to farther out in the exurbs, where you'll find vehicle-centric pod-subdivisions with big back yards, impressive square footage and little else.
We have to do better than that.
Long live the suburb -
John Michlig
(McIlheran's column is in the extended)
Sprawl had the middle class living like lords
Posted: May 29, 2007
Patrick McIlheran
For 23 years, my parents-in-law have lived in a park.
They have a roof and beds. I do not mean that they have been camping in a refrigerator crate.
But it struck me again the other day, as I had a beer on their deck, that their neighborhood looks like nothing so much as a park. Their acre or so of grass runs fencelessly into the neighbor's acre of grass. After a little road, the land dips down to a brook. Shrubs and trees dapple the grass with shade. Across the valley, treetops ascend, their dozen varieties showing the imprecision of simply saying "green." Birds sing. Children play. Lilacs bloom.
Scattered throughout are houses, modest, low-lying, 1960s houses of people who, by cosmic luck, manage to live in a park. The ones next door are obvious, but with increasing distance, the houses recede behind tree trunks, until you're left with the impression not of endless suburbia - and as they live near Chicago, that's close to being true - but of being amid a garden of trees.
This is sprawl, God bless it.
Sprawl is said to be ugly. The word brings to mind a telephoto image of gas stations and fast-food signs one atop the other. It's supposed to make your head ache.
There are such strips near my in-laws' place. There are such noisy, beauty-free strips in old neighborhoods, too, such as the utterly urban part of Chicago where my grandmother was born. There, buildings really are on top of each other, and back behind, the houses are packed, too. My in-laws' old walkable inner suburb has slightly larger yards - but it has ugly commercial strips, too.
The difference between all these neighborhoods is in the parts where people live. Near one dense place my in-laws once lived, there's a leafy, unattainably ritzy district. It had trees and big lawns and so stands out in their memory. When I saw it, it struck me as being like their present surroundings. Only they didn't have to be rich to get to where they are now. They just needed some sprawl.
Fundamentally, sprawl means that middle-class people can afford green space. For less than $100,000 two decades ago, my father-in-law, like millions of other sprawling middle-class Americans, found surroundings as bucolic as what you'd see in a movie adaptation of a Jane Austen novel, only with cars and without the sheep.
Critics say this comes at a terrible price: People must drive everywhere, greenhouse-gassing the world. I'm sure some do, though my in-laws' usual grocery store's about the same distance from their house as Pick 'n Save is from my Bay View house. They're a five-minute drive from the commuter train my father-in-law used to take to work before retirement.
Critics say this sprawl consumes land, though the land didn't go anywhere at all. It's still there. It just isn't a cornfield any longer. Turning it into yards no more consumes the land than turning prairie into cornfield did. Until the recent ethanol bubble, this nation was chronically oversupplied with corn and subsidized its farmers. We're not exactly running out of farmland, which stretches unbroken for hundreds of miles south of their place.
Instead, critics are presuming there's a rightness to a cornfield and a wrongness to using the land as a backyard for 22 grandchildren to play on. They persist even when you explain how near the commuter train is or that the yard is worth more than the $600 worth of corn that could have been raised on it. One begins to think that critics are underestimating how valuable it is to our society that middle-class people can afford space of their own, something the rich always had.
It's over now, in the case of my parents-in-law: They're moving to a stairless duplex in a retirement village. Their house will probably sell for a sum I know I couldn't afford; land regulations have limited the supply of such sprawl, just as a new road nearby is bringing in more buyers.
Best wishes to whomever buys it. Far from being soulless and demoralizing, as critics say, this stretch of sprawl brought joy to the couple who lived there and to their family and neighbors. It became beloved as home, a noble thing to happen to any place, and a pretty good second career for small bit of a former cornfield.
Patrick McIlheran is a Journal Sentinel editorial columnist. His e-mail address is [email protected]
Great information. Thanks
Posted by: Anderson | July 03, 2007 at 09:42 AM