“One of the joys of suburbia is taking care of your own lawn.” – Bill Owens’s Suburbia
The other day I bicycled through the suburbs, gazing at the housing developments with bizarre nostalgia: the ranch houses, the split-levels, the townhouses, the boxy Colonials, the houses which, from the front, appear to be three-car garages, the retro- Victorians with optional turrets and verandas, and the McMansions. And I realized, not without regret, that I will never have the experience of living in a suburb.
I am a lifetime town-and-city dweller, but I am enchanted by Bill Owens’s Suburbia (1973), an uncondescending book of photographs of suburbanites and their houses. In one photograph, a house is being built on a bare dirt tract, with a rubble of bricks spilled out on the ground and only a few tufts of grass. A sign says: “This home is being built expressly for Edwards.”
In another picture, a man and his wife and family are rolling out the lawn. They bought it in rolls, prepared the ground, and then spent a day rolling it out. And in yet another photo, a young man and woman lie in bed in a room with 26 mirrors. They say they enjoy watching themselves make love.
And of course there are photos of barbecues. And people standing in front of their cars, or in their garages. Women cleaning bathrooms. But suburban life has a price: isolation. The community activities take place elsewhere. All those SUVs and trucks driving miles and miles, to and fro, back and forth…
American suburbs began to mushroom in the U.S. after World War II, with the increasing construction of highways and the expansion of car culture. And in 1944 a builder named Bill Leavitt decided to build mass-produced houses on the outskirts of cities. Between 1944 and 1950, the number of new “housing starts” rose from 114,000 to 1.7 million.
When I was growing up, a wave of middle-class families began to build new houses on the outskirts of town. The women especially were dedicated to attention to details like picking out doorknobs and light fixtures. The Director of the Public Library said in an interview in the ‘90s that building her suburban house in the ‘60s prepared her to plan and build the new, much larger public library.
I never saw the appeal of those treeless suburban spaces. Enthusiasts refer to our town as Disneyland, and it was pleasant and pretty. We lived in a ranch house on a tree-lined street, with a willow tree, a pear tree, and two apple trees in the back yard. And then there was exotic Ardenia around the corner, a brick apartment house with the false front of a castle. Ardenia’s back yard extended narrowly between Howell St. and Marcy St. We climbed the fence and snuck around the grounds, though it didn’t live up to expectations. Ardenia has been demolished and replaced by condos, but everything changes, doesn’t it? Urban sprawl has trampled over the former farms and much agricultural land, and the town, with the burbs, has almost doubled in size.
Urban sprawl is nothing new: E. M. Forster deals with this problem in his great 1910 novel, Howards End. In many ways, Howards End is a redefinition of the meaning of home.
The plot depends on houses and housing, on Margaret Schlegel’s search for a suitable flat in London after the lease on their flat expires. She lives with her younger sister, Helen, and their adenoidal brother, a student, and they can’t find anything affordable or livable. Another home in jeopardy is Howards End, a centuries-old house in the country, which, with the advent of motorcars, is becoming suburban. The owner of the house, Mrs. Wilcox, takes a fancy to Margaret and leaves Howards End to Margaret in her will, so what can Mr. Wilcox, a bourgeois businessman who wants to hang on to the property, do but marry her? Margaret is reasonably contented, but there is a class tug-of-war over Howards End. And her impulsive younger sister, Helen, forces the Wilcoxes to confront the class issue, which has wide ramifications. Who and what will prevail in the uncomfortably fast-changing culture and the redefinitions of home and family?
In Forster’s essay, “The Challenge of Our Time” (Two Cheers for Democracy, 1939), he indignantly criticizes urban sprawl. He feels affection for his boyhood home and the not particularly beautiful agricultural county where he grew up. “Life went on there as usual until this spring. Then someone … was casually informed that … the whole area had been commandeered.” He learns that the officials of the Ministry of Town and County Planning are building a “satellite town” for 60,000 people.
He writes,
The people now living and working there are doomed; it is death and life there and they move in a nightmare. The best agricultural land has been taken, they assert; the poor land by the railway has been left; compensation is inadequate. Anyhow, the satellite town has finished them off as completely as it will obliterate the ancient and delicate scenery. Meteorite town would be a better name. It has fallen out of a blue sky.
The trouble with the suburbs is not only the destruction of nature, but the increase in emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels -that is, the long-distance driving.
It is economically and environmentally better to live in a city. I have lived in cities and towns with good mass transit systems and supermarkets and shops within walking or biking distance. It became more challenging with the death of downtown, when the last department store closed; now there are still restaurants, bars, and gift shops downtown, but little else. That’s the pattern, isn’t it? Well, there are buses to the super-mall, online shopping, and, may I just say, thank God for the presence of Target in the cities.