The Burbs
Okay, clearly, there’s an appetite for a discussion about an issue that I never thought of as an issue.
Bunker Auxiliary Sooey Says:
1) Suburbs are THE problem.
2) There is nothing inherently good about having kids.
3) Suburbanites, in my experience, share many of Kathy Shaidle’s opinions.
To address these points in order:
a) I guess suburbs are A problem, in some ways, according to Jane Jacobs and other New Urbanists. They’re also a solution, in some ways. But basically, they’re a pattern of human settlement like any other, a response to economic, social, geographic and political environments at a particular point in time.
2) Err…well, unless you believe in the survival of the species, no, I guess not.
3) I cannot speak for Sooey’s experience in this area. It doesn’t reflect my own experience: my immediate neighbours are an NDP Hindu widow, a fairly conservative white couple, and a very liberal Jewish couple. I associate Shaidle’s primitive nativism with rural areas (perhaps unfairly).
I moved to the burbs in 1990, and it suits me. I’d probably be just as happy downtown, but since my prime leisure activity is reading, I don’t much care.
So Sooey – why the dire take on the burbs??
I won’t dog anyone for living in the ‘burbs since I was raised in them, but the issue with them is that they were built because of abundant land and access to cheap oil. With Peak Oil staring at us in the face it will be much harder to sustain suburbia and the immense driving that goes along with it. Driving 45 minutes each way to work or longer from suburbia will not be cheap when oil inevitably hits $3-4 a liter or more. Now saying that, is we invest better in mass transit to and from suburban areas then they might become more sustainable – the only issue then is convincing most suburbanites that it is in their best interest to use it.
And I can’t speak for out east, but I do know that here in Saskatoon the suburbs just plain ugly. No character. Out of the way. And cookie board cut-outs of each other. Yuck.
No one can make you feel guilty. Now stop blaming others for your own feelings, feelings which no doubt stem from your “like lemmings to the sea” decision to take up more room than any decent human being in all good conscience should allow himself.
Unless you are adopting existing children, you are just another selfish person procreating because you want to, not because there is anything inherently good about doing so. The species is doing so well it’s threatening to destroy its habitat – nothing is gained by you adding to it, so stop patting yourself on the back and, even more egregious – expecting favouritism from government.
I stand by my experience living in an older suburb where people sprayed their lawns regularly with toxic chemicals, turned on their air conditioners in April and kept them on until October, owned at least two cars per 4-person family (and one of those cars was ALWAYS a van or somesuch unnecessarily large vehicle) and voted for Mike Harris/Stephen Harper because they wanted tax breaks to further subsidize their isolated and insulated lives.
Whooee! Yer hittin’ me where I live, Balbu. I reckon there’s a grain o’ truth in yer generalization. We ain’t as culturally diverse out here in small town and rural Ontariariario as they are in Trawna or Ottywa. Despite ol’ Bobby Dylan’s advice to the contrary, lotsa folks DO criticize what they can’t understand. I figger that goes fer suburban life, too.
I got some friends live in a cul-de-sac in a suburb of Hamilton. They been there fer about 12 or 15 years. Last year, they found out the cul-de-sac is a hotbed (literally) of swingers. (Are they still called “swingers”?) You got any spousal swap meets in yer burb, Balbu?
I reckon some folks figger us people with single family homes and bigass yards is makin’ bigger carbon footprints than city folks. That’s true enough, I s’pose. I try to make up fer that by walkin’ most places an’ not ownin’ a vehicle and plantin’ lotsa green things in the yard but I gotta admit that my son’s family of four in a Trawna condo usin’ public transit an’ squeezed into 800 square feet are doin’ less harm to ol’ Mother Earth than Ma an’ I in our drafty old shack.
What I don’t like to see is wedges gettin’ driven between Canajuns. This here rural-urban divide is somethin’ ol’ King Steve’s been hammerin’ on an’ I ain’t bitin’. I like goin’ to the city every couplafew months but I’m glad to get back home to the peace an’ quiet here in Sticksville, too.
Sprawl ain’t such a good thing. Even here in my little burg, we gotta keep the damper on unbridled growth. Even so, my little town’s gone from 1200 souls 30 years ago to 3000 today. The worst part, I reckon, is when prime farmland gets developed fer bigass subdivisions with monster homes inhabited by 2 people with 3 or 4 vehicles.
I ain’t gonna quibble with folks on accounta where they hang their hats. Freedom of choice includes freedom to live where you want — or where you can afford, maybe.
JB
Ugh. Rural people. Don’t get me started.
Sooey, you’ve never met me, never seen my modest little condo, have not a clue about my family, and seem determined nonetheless to define me, and insult me, on the basis of your own clichés and stereotypes. Enjoy, since that’s your taste – but don’t expect discussion.
“You got any spousal swap meets in yer burb, Balbu? ”
Not a clue, JB. We’re a very quiet couple – also fat and old. Not the kind of folks to get invited to an orgy.
Who do you figger puts them groceries in yer bigass city markets, SooGal? Rural folks work the farms an’ grow the food you eat every day. We work in the power plants, tend to the environment, deal with the megatonnes of trash the city folks haul out and dump in our backyards. We pay our taxes so’s the city folks can have things like public transit and art galleries and museums that we don’t get out in the sticks. We maintain the provincial parks so’s the city folks can come out every summer and toss their litter and experience nature.
But, like I said, this here urban-rural divide is somethin’ Harpoon wants to foster. Looks like Sooey’s bought the Con line. Ugh, sez I. Wedge-drivin’ is so-o-o-o ugly.
JB
Guys, more important things to do than worry what this sensationalist, ignorant swine Sooey has to say. Like ignorant people the world over she(?) is entitled to her opinion. Born rural, raised mostly northern, and as an adult having lived mostly an urban/suburban life (not including my prison time); I can safely say, it matters not where you’re from, where you’re living, or where you think you’re going… it only matters who you ARE.
Aw, Sooey’s fine. She’s okay. Usually not this crabby.
JimBobby, which cul-de-sex do your friends live at? Actually, I have heard that swingers tend to be conservative, church-going people who have their children in scouts or girl guides. On the outside, they are good wholesome people who happily vote for Harper federally and for their local conservative type party provincially. On the inside, they are sex maniacs. They are of all ages from 18+ and they like all body types. I have met some at a non-swinging party. I just haven’t participated in “wife swapping.” Dang! I did meet one man who hated “fags.” Guess who he liked in bed?
As for the burbs, I work there. It’s a nice place to raise a family, go shopping at the local supermarkets, get supplies at your neighbourhood Smart Centre which usually includes a Home Depot, Canadian Tire, Walmart, Staples-Business Depot, Best Buy, and other box stores. It’s easy to get into a Smart Centre parking lot. It’s a pain to get out! I think it’s done this way on purpose to keep you trapped at the Smart Centre so you can buy more crap at one of the box stores. Oh yeah, there is sometimes a Tim Hortons that has a drive through with ten cars waiting. Nevermind that one could park the car, walk inside, and get served in less than five minutes.
In terms of voting federally, there are only two political parties: the Liberal-Conservatives and the Conservative-Liberals. The people living in the new ethnic enclaves in the suburbs don’t vote differently from their Anglo-Saxon neighbours.
All the new schools that get built look like box-stores. They all look alike.
Tomorrow, I will be looking for the swingers. I’ll just have to go the white-bread parts of the suburbs. I did forget to mention that swingers are mostly white.
My, my. Methinks thou dost protest too much, ya’ll.
I’m rather surprised to see a debate on the merits of various urban designs flare up in a post about Kathy Shaidle. This used to be an issue that was close to my heart, given my training as an urban planner. Now, I’m not quite sure if I should be stepping into this argument, but let’s see.
As in everything, nothing about sociology is absolute. You should not draw blanket conclusions about the type of people who choose to live where they live based on where they live. I had that argument back in 1993, and I received an education in that very quickly. Though we might call the suburbs in general to be more conservative, more “white” or “elite” than the “rough and tumble” inner city, this isn’t always the case, as one can easily see from the multicultural character that the suburbs of the GTA and Vancouver are taking on, or the fact that Mississauga is becoming as Liberal as Toronto, or the fact that the NDP continues to count on over a thousand supporters per suburban riding, typically.
Suburban design has also matured since the modernist school became dominant in the late 1940s. New neighbourhoods that are designed with pedestrians more in mind are becoming more common and popular. In the Greater Toronto Area and in Vancouver, there is a better understanding now that more money and time needs to be invested in making transit convenient, or else our road networks are simply going to choke. Ottawa seemed to have this understanding, although things have hit a speed bump since Larry O’Brien was elected.
Toronto has even defied the “American” pattern of suburban development at the expense decay in the inner city. Toronto’s downtown remains vibrant — to the point where there are concerns that it is pushing the lower-middle class out, and signs of urban decay are showing up in the inner suburbs, that used to be _the_ places to relocate to when they were built in the 1950s.
The thing you can generally say about the suburbs, as they were built in the 50s, 60s and 70s is that they’re unsustainable. The low densities involved make them expensive to service. Public transit vehicles have to travel farther to serve fewer people, making them unprofitable. Similar expansion of costs are seen in sewer and water infrastructure and roads. The suburbs we’ve built up to the 1990s were largely subsidized by cheap oil and development charges. As the price of oil gets more expensive, and the cost of replacing aging infrastructure comes due (something municipalities have _not_ budgeted for), they will produce a reckoning for certain suburban neighbourhoods. They’re already doing this across the United States where many hopes lie vacant, or have been taken over by homeless squatters.
There is nothing to be said against an individual who enjoys driving. Even as a transit advocate, I say that I _love_ driving. I think it’s a wonderful luxury. However, if we have built neighbourhoods where the only feasible means of getting around is to drive, we’ve turned a luxury into a necessity, and is that really a good thing? What if you find yourself unable to drive, as my wife did back when she was afflicted with trigeminal neuralgia? To assess the walkability of your neighbourhood, you need to ask yourself where your nearest grocery store is, where your school is, where your gym is, et cetera, and see how inconvenient things would be if your car is no longer available to you. Does your neighbourhood pass the eight-year-old and her lollipop test — which is to say, can your eight-year-old walk to a corner store and get herself a lolli-pop without crossing a very busy street?
If that’s the case, you may not need to worry.
Excellent overview of the issue, James. I’d actually be curious to get your take on what’s been happening in Milton, which was a smallish town of 30,000 essentially preserved in aspic since the 1970s until the Big Pipe came in ‘01 and the place exploded to 75,000 and growing.
Of all the problems that have arisen from this explosion of development, possibly the worst has been the slow death of our downtown. When I first moved here 15 years ago, we only had one car which usually spent the day parked at the GO station from where my husband rode the train to work every day. Our son was 2, and I would put him in a stroller and walk with him to the grocery store, the drug store, the office supply store, the post office, the bank, the park, and later to day care and to school. All these things were within 4-5 blocks of my house.
Now, the independent grocery store has been driven out of business thanks to a massive hike in their Hydro bill and some poorly timed construction on Main St. The next closest was the Loblaws at the Mall (maybe 8 blocks away), which also closed after the Supercentre opened a couple of kilometres away. The drug store is still there, but probably won’t last long now that they’ve built a bigger, 24 hour one further away. After two generations in the same family, Harris Stationary is on its last legs thanks to the Staples at the Power Centre. There used to be 4 bank branches on Main St. – now there are two, and one might be moving soon.
The post office is still there, although it’s twice as busy now that it’s serving all the surrounding villages that have lost their local post offices. The parks and schools remain. The day care is still there, although I hear the waiting list for spaces is several years long. There are more and more empty store fronts on Main Street every month, and those that are rented usually become professional offices because nobody else can afford to do business there. If I ever need a lawyer or a financial advisor, I won’t have far to go.
Meanwhile, the many seniors who live in the heart of ‘Olde Milton’ suddenly find themselves in the middle of a food and service-less desert, frequently unable to drive, reliant on a completely inadequate bus system or on expensive (and pretty sketchy) local cabs.
Sorry to ramble. It just drives me mad that our Town Council makes all these pretty words about ’sustainable development’ and ’smart growth’, and yet seem utterly unable or unwilling to prevent the hollowing out of our town.
The growth I’m seeing in Milton doesn’t look sustainable. I’m seeing big box stores and instant towns (”just add water!”) stretching along the 401 to meet Mississauga, and I shudder to think of what this has done to the traffic on Dixon Road. I’m not surprised that the decision has come back to haunt the town.
On the other hand, just down Highway 25, Oakville appears to have managed its growth better. Its downtown seems stronger, and the suburban neighbourhoods more walkable.
James make my points from the previous post with far more clarity and poise. Sorry, but I was…and am…mightily pissed at being told I am even remotely akin to LaShaidle because of where I choose to and can afford to live.
And nobody gets away with insulting my children. Nobody. Even someone whom I would normally agree with. The kind of sweeping generalizations I saw was simply pig ignorant urban core elitism of the highest order.
Methinks a mea culpa for the sweeping generalizations and pretending that it is somehow our fault that we are insulted because we were compared to Shaidle – whom, I believe, lives in downtown Toronto.
Didn’t Garth Turner write a book about urban sprawl, or suburban sprawl as it were, called “Greater Fool”? I seem to remember hearing about it on CKNW while driving.
@Raphael – Yes, Raph, although that’s really about the credit crunch, the subprime crisis, and real estate speculation (i.e. the economic issues), and not about the sociology of the suburban sprawl.
Let me put one thing to rest, Shaidle doesn’t live in downtown Toronto – but I do. In fact, she lives in Etobicoke and grew up in Hamilton which really explains a great deal if you knew Hamilton in the 70’s. And she was a hard core leftie for years.
I have also grown up in remote rural areas as well as large cities. I don’t find people necessarily from the burbs or rural areas more bigoted or more biased – just the opposite in many ways but I do find people from the cities are frequently much louder and more vocal about their opinions. In small places one has to be far more circumspect towards one’s neighbors as you can’t avoid them as easily as one can in a large city. There’s always the chance you will run into them in the bank, the grocery store or the post office, but again, this is a generality.
I have lived in the centre of downtown Toronto since ’95 and the biggest issue besides the garbage, is the mentally ill. Speaking as a Conservative, I would put my decoder ring away in a second if I started to hear a political party was going to address their needs by implementing a massive funding/infrastruture program to care for the mentally ill and invest in such things as co-operative assisted living arrangements.
I don’t think I could live in the burbs, in my experience (limited as it is) the lifestyle seems to include being a little to closed and a little to wrapped up in self for my liking – I hasten to add that there are notable exceptions such as yourself b, but generally speaking my experience has been……
I hear the burbinites at the office talking about how they won’t ride public transit because you never know who you’ll end up sitting beside and b*tching about a portion of their taxes going to fund city wading pools and libraries for the poor and working poor who really should have their own high speed Internet connections and at least an above ground in the back yard.
Whether those who live in the suburbs choose to acknowledge it or not there is more than a small measure of elitism out there, I see it every time I ride through them….. and that’s re enforced by some of the people I know who have had (what they consider to be) the unfortunate circumstance of finding themselves enveloped by suburbia as this city grew.
We all make lifestyle choices. I choose to have long hair, tattoos, wear jeans, sleeveless t-shirts, and combat boots, use dark glasses, and ride a motorcycle – when I ride through downtown or a small town in the country I’m not worth much more than a quick glance, when I ride through suburbia I’ve seem mothers hold their kids closer and shorten the leash on their poodles.
Now that’s no more fair a generalization than a bunch of downtown keyboard warriors talking about their perception about life in the burbs and what the people who live there are like, but it is what it is, and it will probably remain that way until more suburban moderates step up to the plate and begin to dis spell those myths;-)
Sooey, what JB said
I am envious of the rural life however (at least at this point) too cowardly to reattempt it, but I know where my food comes from and I’ve got a hell of a lot of respect for them that are so much more self sufficient than us city dwellers are and who make it possible for me eat and live the way I do. Were I you I wouldn’t burn too many bridges, when the sh*t hits the fan (as it ultimately will) friends in the country are gonna be very good to have if you want to be much more than food yourself.
I can tell you this with absolute certainty, in a time of need the last place you’ll find me is on Elgin Street looking for safety, or the steps of the Parliament buildings looking for the government to do something – because I’ll be a hundred miles away from the city helping to carry water, split the winter wood, and harvest the garden so I can be warm and fed.
What are you gonna do?
Who do you figger puts them groceries in yer bigass city markets
Migrant workers in California’s Centry Valley? Chilean campesinos.
My biggest beef with suburbia (apart from the fact that it produces poor-socialised people and, as Kunstler has often said, has been the most wasteful allocation of resources in history) is that it been ruinous for the tax bases of denser, older cities. People living around the GTA would never live there if Toronto didn’t exist. They also make use of the public infrastructure they never pay for.
It didn’t have to be that way. They should have forced the development of newer suburbs around the periphery of older towns and banned strip development outright.
Whooee! I think I may have touched on this before. Often, when Ma and I are out walkin’ the dogs, we speculate on how we’d survive if there were some aporkolyptic collapse of the socio-economic order; or, some natural catastrophe; or, some terrist attack; or a nuke plant meltdown.
Here, in my tiny town, we got plenty of fresh, filterable water down at the mill pond. I got a hand-powered water purification unit that is designed to filter piss and make it drinkable. Thankfully, I won’t need to do that. I got an ice auger in case the pond is froze up. There are plenty of carp and bass and sunfish in that pond, btw.
We got rabbits and squirrels by the dozen roamin’ the backyards. If I walk two blocks from home, I’m in a beanfield bordered by woods. Deer, groundhogs and other edible creatures populate the scrub along the old railway line. My book on edible plants is handy on the shelf. The cupboards is stocked with a few weeks worth of non-perishables.
If a disaster hits, my biggest fears are for my son and his family in Toronto. I only hope they and other urbanites can make their way to the country where they’ll have a chance at survival. I don’t reckon I’ll be givin’ Sooey directions to my shack. My next biggest fear is that desperate city dwellers will descend on us — probably on motorcycles, tattooed, pierced and wearing dark glasses.
The other JB (James Bow) made a cogent point about rural and small town folks keeping our politics and opinions to ourselves. I know all my immediate neighbours and a good number of my fellow townsfolk by name and by occupation. Some of us are a little bolder than others wrt wearing our politics on our sleeve. Right now, I’m workin’ to stop Bruce Power from building a new nuke plant in Nanticoke. I’ve got a bright yellow “No Nukes” sign on my lawn. Many of my neighbours are on the same side of the issue as me but few are willing to go public. They’ve got no problem signing the anti-nuke petition in private, though.
This whole city mouse / country mouse thing has been going on since Aesop was fabulous. The suburban mouse is a bit more recent.
JB
What I find interesting about these debates on the suburbs is how nobody wants to say anything positive about them beyond bare functionality, even though they’re the lifestyle of choice for many, if not most. Places like Rockliffe and Forest Hill may house the snobs and capitalist exploiters, but while we’re waiting for the revolution to start we can be grateful they at least have taste. Rural folks may appear at first blush to be locked into a boring predicatability and fixated on the weather, but underneath we just know they have some mystical, organic place in the circle of life and, besides, they make cool crafty thing. Urban life is idealized by the Jacobs/Crombie crowd as a rich texture of diverse communities interacting, interelating, inter-whatevering and containing a salubrious synthesis of commerce, friendship, neighbourhood pride and cultural enhancement. But the burbs are always described as being populated by one-dimensional uptight characters whose lives are made up entirely of soccer practices, shopfests at WalMart, yet another damn neighbourhood barbeque and agitating against immigrants. I’ve actually lived in them all (except Rockclife–damn!) and I don’t recognize any of these stereotypes.
The reason why folks have flocked to the suburbs since cars became affordable is that is where they go to nest. They want to own a ground-level home with a patch of land where their kids will meet other kids, the choice of activities is good and the schools are safe and well-equipped. Affordability does play a part, but they don’t flee the moment thay can afford to–in fact, most seem to leave only after the kids are grown and they can no longer manage a property by themselves. Of course, if you think kids are a blight, you may have a little problem with all this.
Overdevelopment, traffic, servicing etc. are all real issues, but they don’t necessarily require a full-frontal assault on suburban living to address. For example, the ugly sprawl you see in Orleans, Markham, etc. is largely a function of 35 ft. frontages with their jutting garages and one-foot separations, as well as unimaginative architecture. Here in Quebec we have 55 ft. lots, more diverse architecture, recessed garages and ten feet beteen each house. Makes one hell of a difference aesthetically.
I can name at least a dozen local farmers who haul their produce and meat to Toronto from Norfolk County. There are lots more who I don’t know personally. There’s a movement afoot that you may not have heard about called the 100 Mile Diet. It is aimed at reducing CO2 from transportation of food and at making our communities (city and country) more self-sufficient. When the price of oil goes through the roof, as it will, produce from Chile or California will be unaffordable.
Factory farming methods and long distance transportation are responsible for H1N1, the salmonella problems with Mexican and Californian produce and a lack of local self-sufficiency, not to mention the exploitation of farm workers and peasants.
Globalization, IMF and World Bank policies have forced countries like Kenya to stop growing food for their local population and instead grow things like flowers for the world market. When speculators and transportation costs pushed commodity prices to record highs last spring, Kenyan flower growers couldn’t sell their goods to Europe and couldn’t afford to buy the food they no longer produce. The result: mass starvation and political instability.
The chickens are coming home to roost and there won’t be one in every pot. Buy local produce. Support your local farmers and food industry. Or perish.
“They should have forced…” Ah, yes. They are the problem. “They” always are. Take some responsibility. We are the “they”. Or, at least, we give “them” the power to do what they do.
JB
Suburbs are often ugly, poorly designed with residences of questionable construction. But to generalize “most” or “all” of the people who choose to live in them with any number of stereotypes is lazy and silly.
We are all just trying to carve out our own little piece of the world. Some choose urban while others favour suburban or rural. Chacun a son gout
“Chacun a son gout.”
I take allopurinol for mine.
@balbulican – Try cutting down on red wine too…
And bacon. And beer. And lentils. And red meat. And stress. And seafood. Sigh…one of the downsides of having a biologist for a wife…
Lentils? Are you sure you live in the suburbs?
Dude, you should see our kitchen cabinets. Five hundred years ago we would have been burned as witches. Yards of weird dry stuff in big jars.
Yards of weird dry stuff in big jars.
Well, there goes the neighbourhood. Are you sure we can’t persuade you to move into a third floor flat in the Glebe? You could throw a big dinner party with all that junk and talk all night about opera and evolution and the know-nothings who live in the suburbs.
Hearing about it is one thing Peter, but I’ve been there, and actually seen it – some of it moves on its’ own….. whatever is in the tall greenish jar gave me nightmares for the better part of a week.
I cut my political debating teeth on Usenet, particularly the newsgroups alt.planning.urban and misc.transport.urban-transit, and you’d be surprised at the level of passion you’d see in the arguments that could take place in these forums.
Okay, maybe not surprised, per se. But in the early days of the Internet, there was a lot more signal than noise, and the trolls who invaded our discussions would at least take the time to bait us with relevant trollish comments rather than spam.
There are advocates for car drivers on these forums, and there are advocates for suburban developments. A number of these people constantly derided the cores of our inner cities, citing them all to be, without exception, crime infested traps. They argued that higher densities meant increased poverty and that everyone had a right to obtain a half acre on which to live, and indeed almost an obligation to support that. Planners who wanted to build denser were, in their opinion, communists out to thwart the American way of life, and advocates for public transit were merely seeking to export inner city crime to the suburbs.
And there were people who took debates more seriously, and we actually had some interesting discussions. One point that came up and is worth commenting on here is that, when we were debating (okay, shouting, really) about which type of lifestyle “most people” chose to live, we typically fell into suburban and centre-city camps, but one person came up with actual surveys which said that we were both wrong.
The most popular lifestyle desired by people looking for places to live is, in fact, small town living. Which is not a surprise, if you think about it. What people are wanting there is the perception of safe streets, low traffic and clean air that is the perception one has of the rural lifestyle, while at the same time having walkable or transit-able access to entertainment amenities, shops, libraries, schools, et cetera that is the perception one has of the centre city lifestyle.
What intrigued me, however, is that the suburban lifestyle was originally supposed to be the compromise between urban and rural. It had the amenities (although you had to drive to them) and it had fewer people pressing in on your business and the cleaner environment. So I was surprised that the suburban way of life had metamorphosed in the minds of certain advocates away from the rural-urban compromise into an ideal in its own right that was now at loggerheads with the urban viewpoint.
I find it difficult to imagine how stageleft thinks living in the suburbs will be the bomb shelter of the 50s when “the shit hits the fan” – which it never will – with suburbanites supporting themselves on what they hew and sew. But, of course, I’m a humanist, not a libertarian. In any case, since we pay taxes, Armegeddon or not, it’d be nice if our governments would urban plan a little better in order that the land we DO grow food on doesn’t just eventually become another suburb.
P.S. I also find it difficult to see through Peter’s eyes the children playing in the streets of suburbs far and wide, since even the staunchest defenders of the ‘burbs in my old stomping grounds would admit that it was a rare thing indeed to see a suburban child playing outside.
When I was born we lived in a part of the Big Smoke that had been suburbs when my grandparents grew up and then we moved a little further out to what had been suburbs when my parents grew up and then we moved out a little farther to the suburbs where I grew up.
Moms stayed at home in those days sooey and we played outside until the streetlights came on.
It was like living in a small community because it had been planned that way.
As kids we had access to nature because we were at the edge of the city and we also had good schools with good (strict but fair) teachers, good community facilities and good neighbours.
Quite an awakening for me when I moved out to a trailer park for migrant workers in the Caribbean.
@doug newton – What days were those, Doug?
I’m over 50 and both my mom and dad worked outside of the home and that wasn’t exactly so unusual among my peer group either.
Although we did play outside until the streetlights came on and I admit we never lived in the suburbs as a family. The ‘child of the suburbs’ thing is foreign to me. Grew up in both a big-city urban and small, remote milltown situation.
I’m 61 Frank but baby brother is 52 and it was much the same for him.
It was a good time and place to be a kid – except for the fear of being incinerated in a nuclear exchange that is.
I’m a humanist, not a libertarian
With humanists like you, sooey, who needs misanthropes?
Well, I was a mother at home in the suburbs.
@doug newton – Thanks, Doug. As I fully admit the suburban experience is completely foreign to me. Partly why the discussion has held my interest.
So was I sooey, they called me Mr. Mom. My kids played outside until the streetlights came on when we lived in a suburban area that had been built in the 50’s.
That was until Jamestown was built up the road, after which your kid was likely to be beaten up and have his bike stolen. We moved after a neighbour had his car stolen at gunpoint.