The Dilemmas of Urban Life

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week, I asked readers for their thoughts on cities versus suburbs.

Lauren argues that cities remain sufficiently appealing to rural and suburban migrants. What’s needed are more affordable places to live within their borders:

I grew up in the 1970s and early 1980s in a classic middle-class suburb in the city of Calgary, Canada––big yards, quiet streets, pretty homogeneously middle-class and white. It was a five-minute walk to a bus stop, where a bus ran by every 30 minutes or so; a 10-minute walk to a 7-11; a 25-minute walk to a shopping mall; and later, a 30-minute walk to a new light-rail-transit station. That was it. There was nothing to do unless you drove.

As a result, although it was apparently safe, it encouraged teenage behaviors that were really risky. I used to go with a friend to the 7-11, hang around and wait for teenage guys with cars to show up, then hop in their vehicles to drive aimlessly and drink alcohol-infused Slurpees. Or meet guys in empty schoolyards to drink whatever alcohol we had.

I was not some teenage rebel; I was a straight-A student who played classical piano and worked part-time to pay for my planned university education. There was simply nothing else to do.

I hated the suburbs and their stultifying boredom and homogeneity with a passion. I got out as soon as I could and never went back. I now live in Toronto, which is large, diverse, and safe. My house is small by American standards—about 1,600 square feet—but I raised two kids in it comfortably and now it is bigger than I need. I can walk to a range of restaurants, retail, and services. I know my neighbors and the local shopkeepers. I am a five-minute walk away from a subway, and I use it all the time to go to restaurants, concerts, the theater, art galleries—you name it.

My kids had independence from an early age, because they could walk and subway everywhere, and they did. When they did summer camp at the museum, from age 10, I sent them on the subway. As teenagers, they went to board-game cafés, concerts, restaurants, and movies on their own. They could stay at school late for clubs and programs without asking me to come pick them up. They had way more fun than I did, and way more safely.

Cities will remain popular because they fulfill certain human needs that suburbs just don’t. There has certainly been a bump in social disorder in Toronto post-pandemic. I see it on the subway and in public places: more people with mental-health and addiction troubles, more homelessness, more suffering. But it remains an incredibly safe and functional city.

The big challenge is affordability, a challenge that shows no sign of abating. Young people will leave not because they prefer the suburbs but because the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment is a shocking $2,375. A one-bedroom condo is over $600,000.

Both my kids want to make their lives in the city. I don’t know what that looks like, unless housing prices come down. Perhaps it will necessitate a move to a smaller and more affordable Canadian city, like Halifax or Ottawa. To a significant degree, Toronto is a victim of its own success.

This is the real challenge to my mind: not to make city life appealing, because a good city is incredibly appealing, but to make it accessible and affordable for everyone who wants a piece of it. This issue is on the radar of our municipal, provincial, and federal governments. I sure hope they can solve it.

Lori makes a pitch for “the unique charms of the ‘inner-ring suburb.’” She writes:

Here in Cleveland, our suburbs surround the city like rings in a tree trunk. Ours is about a 15- minute drive from downtown. We have bus and rapid-transit options. Lake Erie is a couple blocks from our house. Our town is pedestrian-oriented. Congestion is not too hectic. And anything I truly need is available within about five blocks.

My husband and I are urban-oriented people. We desire a variety of good restaurant options, cultural activities, and museums. But we also enjoy nature walks. So, it’s a good thing we have many parks in our area as well as the lakefront. We wanted some suburban amenities for our daughter, such as a backyard for playing, a stable school system that offered a quality curriculum, easy access to grocery stores, drug stores, her pediatrician … and also programs for kids such as day camps, music lessons, playgrounds, city pools, and a good library. And our inner-ring suburb has it all.

We have a small backyard with a garden. But we are located five miles from the heart of the city. Our neighbors are friendly and welcoming, and there are many citywide events planned throughout the year. You get all the privacy and diversity of a large city (our suburb is home to immigrants from at least 50 different countries) but do not sacrifice the conveniences of life in the suburbs. I think that inner-ring suburbs are the way to go.  

Bob suggests that the place he lives began as a suburb but is now something different:

In the 1950s and 1960s, Orange County was characterized as a “bedroom community” to Los Angeles. In Fullerton, 30 miles south of downtown L.A., you could buy a home on a half acre of land for, in today’s dollars, around $300,000. Current market value: $2 million.

Today I live in Irvine, California, where homes are crammed onto tiny lots 10 feet apart. Your private space is very small, but there is a lot of well-planned shared community space. You will not find the smallest of homes for anything close to $300,000. Throughout the county, multistory apartment and condominium buildings are rising in the “downtown” areas of various cities. I feel as if I am in one of the nicer and safer neighborhoods in a very large city.

Orange County, population 3-plus million, has most of the economic and cultural opportunities of nearby Los Angeles. It has smaller urban centers all over for entertainment, dining, and shopping. It also has many city governments. And it’s a lot easier to affect local government in a city of 150,000 than one the size of L.A. It seems more democratic. Orange County is probably not unique in America. Maybe we need a new term: city-burb.

Ryan disputes the stereotypes of suburbs:

The notion of the suburbs as homogenous (read: racist, dull, and shut down by 9 p.m.) is badly outdated. In my metro area, there are inner-ring and outer-ring suburbs, and three times as many people live in the suburbs than the city. These suburbs are not all the same; you can identify at least six distinct sociopolitical cultures in the suburbs overlapping with the area’s peculiar geography. The suburbs have diversified racially in the past 25 years and now have the majority of the metro area’s Hispanic and South Asian populations. And restaurateurs and cultural entrepreneurs are increasingly choosing the suburbs for their new ventures. COVID accelerated these trends, but I suspect it’ll be much longer until our culture drops the “boring sameness” connotation of suburbia.

Having tried the suburbs and the city, Lindsey chose neither:

I was raised in the wild of the Texas Hill Country, on a beautiful free-range cattle ranch where I hiked and biked the rocky landscape, ate wild pecans, and climbed my favorite live oak nearly every day of my childhood after school. While I loved that experience for myself, I always envisioned living in a built-in community, like the kids at school who grew up with default neighborhood friend groups.

When my husband and I decided to purchase our first home, we really fell for the slick marketing behind “custom” homes in new suburbs. We picked a location in the sprawling Austin metropolis, not far from where I grew up. The particular suburb we bought into had pitched us a map that showed not only the expected neighborhood amenities like sidewalks, playgrounds, and pools, but expansion plans that called for trail systems, fairgrounds, and even river access. We swallowed up the $600 annual HOA fees and waited for our “investment” to pay off.

The expansion plans disappeared, of course, and we learned a great lesson in managing expectations. The house itself was perfectly fine. Our attempts at built-in community turned into a barrage of MLM sales pitches and invitations to “like” every social-media page of a neighbor or their business. The HOA charged us exorbitant daily fees for atrocities like leaving a visible weed in the front flower beds or putting the trash out too soon on the night before trash day. We also couldn’t park in the street overnight, for reasons that were hotly debated in the Facebook group.

During our first year in the community, a tornado knocked down two homes under construction down the street from us. The second year, we had 100 days above 100 degrees. Once, a neighbor drove her car in front of me onto the sidewalk where I was walking my dog and pushing my infant in a stroller because she thought my Facebook comment was condescending. (She was probably right about that part.)

Vehicles were burglarized and vandalized occasionally. One neighbor’s dog was killed by a venomous snake in their backyard, which shared a fence with ours. They never found the snake so they don’t know for sure. I didn’t know what to do, so I baked her a cake.

We began dreaming about picking up our pretty new home and moving it to somewhere far, far away, with mountains and snow. So we cut our losses, sold the home for a bit less than we paid for it, and moved to a rural neighborhood near Spokane, Washington.

Today, I’ve seen a porcupine, deer, chipmunks, turkeys, and robins in my yard. I can hike in the pine forest any day I want. And we have lovely neighbors just up and down the street! We can see a couple of their roofs from here. We have no HOA restrictions or fees, although we aren’t allowed to cut down our share of the forest. We’re able to build an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) someday, if we ever wanted a small second home for family or to offer for rent.

I’ve quit social media. I like these neighbors too much to learn about their political views. When our own dog died, we buried her in the yard, where we’ll plant a flowering tree for her. In a lot of ways, we were nudged North and West by both climate change and politics. I was born in this part of America, so I feel like I’ve come full circle, geographically. I have learned that community is what you make of it. And you can’t change things where you live, but you can change where you live.

We also lived in the city—downtown Spokane—for a few months before finally moving into our current home just as the first pandemic restrictions were announced. In the city, parking was an expensive nightmare. Our vehicles were each hit with rocks. The front door to our building was broken into. Many passive-aggressive notes were left in the laundry room. The neighbor below us filed a noise complaint about my toddler’s footsteps. We couldn’t possibly imagine moving back.

So I know you said to opine about urban and suburban life, but rural life is my favorite. This summer, I’m going to grow strawberries and watch the mountain bluebirds make their nests. I’m going to raise my children to love the Earth and to take care of her, and I’m happily going to live closer to nature to make that easier to accomplish.

Zoe argues that the city is a good teacher:

I live in New York City, and it is the best choice for our two children, for two reasons. The first is exposure to all kinds of people. While my kids might be missing out on some nature education, I can make this up easily with a few trips to big parks every year, whereas the kind of daily interactions they get with people from all walks of life is not something I could foster in the suburbs. That is because of reason two: public transit and a walkable city! The isolation that the car-dependent suburbs create reduces the range of people one comes across, and that is not something I want for my children. Walking everywhere also means my toddler has a great sense of orientation, and is developing early independence.

Fabrice makes the case for commuting:

I’m writing this from the 15th floor of an office building on Third and Market in San Francisco, but I commute on rail to work each day from Fremont (recently voted the “happiest” suburb in the U.S., for whatever reason). After work today I’m going to walk across the street to a favorite local bar. It’s a place of interesting conversations that happen between random strangers talking about everything and nothing. After that, if I wanted, I could go stop by a Detroit-style pizza joint and grab a square, or grab a high-quality bowl of noodles, or head to the urban food court at the mall for some fairly high-quality mall-food options before heading home. What I can’t do is wander too far past that mall, because Hyde and Taylor is an open-air drug market and I’d be carrying my work laptop.

When I get back? There’s good Indian and Chinese food in Fremont, but nothing’s open past 9 p.m. besides fast food, and the late-night drinking options are few and very far between. All I can really do is go home, settle in, and go to bed for a quiet night’s sleep in a quiet and safe neighborhood without any nearby open-air drug dealing.

I get the feeling that strong advocates for urban life versus suburban life have specific positives and negatives in this narrative that they value more than others. All I’ll say is that living in the city wasn’t something I found particularly enjoyable after someone overdosed on the sidewalk outside my step, and working from home in the suburbs introduced me to the idea of quiet desperation. I chose my current day-to-day in the attempt to get the best of both worlds, and I think I’m relatively successful; pitting cities and suburbia against each other is a false choice.

Based on my own travels, I don’t think there’s a way to conjure all the desirable cultural qualities of a dense city without at least some of the attendant ills (or turning into Singapore), though S.F. in particular is doing a terrible job of mitigating those ills.

And Bernie counsels patience and faith in the future:

Cities are the best. But they are like the people who live within them. That is to say, they have their good years and their bad years. I showed up in Los Angeles in 1986 and saw the long, slow slide down to near-oblivion; there were riots, poverty, gang wars, strife.

In 1995, my wife and I bought a house in Hollywood and everybody we knew tried to talk us out of it. We borrowed $190,000 for a charming (albeit rundown) three-bedroom craftsman with a 48-inch solid-oak front door and an enormous yard. There were loud Harleys, police helicopters, and sex workers who would throw their used condoms out onto my front yard (I had to go out and pick them up every morning because my twin toddler daughters thought that they were “balloons”).

In 1999, we swapped that house out for a more family-friendly house in South Pasadena and rolled all of our fast-growing equity into our new place. Zillow says that our old Hollywood house is now worth a cool $1.7 million. Also, our “forever” house in South Pas (recently paid off :)) is worth nearly the same. We were young and we had faith in Los Angeles. We watched with awe and delight as things got better and better (and, to be fair, worse and worse; gentrification is a very tough nut to crack, although I cannot deny that it benefited me).

Now things are sliding again. Homelessness is the new gang problem. It seems intractable, but so did the gang problem in the early 1990s. Now that the sprawling tent cities have risen to the top of everybody’s “crisis” list, they will indeed be solved, slowly, year after year, brick by brick. But by the time that the homelessness crisis has become too small to notice, there will be a brand new crisis. Because: This is Los Angeles!

In that future time, people will hew and cry, “This time, it really is the end of the Southern California Dream!” But it won’t be. It will just be Los Angeles having a few bad years in a row. Again.

Meanwhile, I’ll be picking fresh oranges off of my tree and thanking my lucky stars that I get to call Southern California my home. L.A. will go on and on. One hundred generations from now, there will be a place called Los Angeles, and the citizens of that time will experience a crisis or two. And eventually, they will get through it, just like we did.