Chris Dovi and Scott Bass have written a fine piece called “Rethinking Suburbia” for Style Weekly in Richmond, Virginia. In it, they chronicle the change in suburban communities “that once held the suburban dreams of many have become havens for crime and the all-too-familiar problems of the inner city.”

“I’m worried about many of our older, kind of modest neighborhoods built in the ’60s and ’70s. We’ve got to work to prevent blight and insidious decline in these areas,” says Tom Jacobson, Chesterfield County’s director of community revitalization.

“I agree that the challenge of these areas in the future may be more than the challenge in city neighborhoods,” he says. “The houses are not cute, in many respects. The neighborhood infrastructure is basic: no sidewalks, no curb and gutter, no neighborhood parks, not close to a lot of services that you have in city neighborhoods.”

It’s difficult for many to fathom that the old suburbs, even in their grimiest state, could somehow foster the kind of crime and dereliction that plagues the inner city… But it’s already started.

Little Forest Hills in Dallas, profiled in Subdivided, was in a similarly poor state when I grew up there in the 1970’s. What I hope the film shows, however, is that through a strong community network and the leadership of a core group, the whole thing can be turned around. Without that leadership - the caring and the love of place - neighborhoods spiral downward.

(one) … reason older suburbs are worse off is a housing trend that would seem to defy conventional wisdom: The older the housing, the higher the quality… Older homes in the city are sturdier structurally and more significant architecturally than their later counterparts. Through the years, as the cookie-cutter suburbs took hold, new-home construction became geared toward speed and mass production.

In fact, the country’s biggest developers modeled their production of houses after automobile manufacturers. One of the biggest, Levitt and Sons, in the 1950s pushed the standardization of home building much like an assembly line, envisioning communities where homeowners traded in their houses for new ones every year, much the same way people trade in their cars. Resembling the mail-order houses manufactured by Sears & Roebuck, Levitt and Sons took the approach and applied it to communities with hundreds and hundreds of houses.

Dolores Hayden, quoted in this piece and also featured in Subdivided, has an excellent book on this topic called Building Suburbia. It was instrumental in my research for the film.

And the suburbs will only get poorer. “I think it will get worse, precisely because of the combination of aging structures and obsessively low-income populations,” William Lucy (Universtiy of Virginia) says. “The question is, who would step in to help?”

Unfortunately, I these folks are going to have to help themselves. I hope the Little Forest Hills example in Subdivided is inspiring to them.

A new study out of UC Irvine finds that people connect more with their neighbors in the suburbs than in more dense urban areas. (Yes you read that right.)

The study, released by the University of California at Irvine, found that for every 10 per cent decrease in population density, the chances of people talking to their neighbours weekly increases by 10 per cent, and the likelihood they belong to hobby-based clubs jumps by 15 per cent.

“We found that interaction goes down as population density goes up. So, turning it around, it says that interaction is higher where densities are lower,” says Jan Brueckner, an economics professor at UC Irvine who led the study. “What that means is suburban living promotes more interaction than living in the central city.”

This is not particularly surprising, but is not an even field. Some suburbs are very friendly and have a lot of social capital. Others, like the one that I lived in when I made Subdivided, are cold as ice.

My new burb is pretty great - completely different feel than the last one. It can go negative pretty quickly though. A guy down the street has put in the first “privacy fence” which is about 12 feet high. Once a place goes cold its really hard to turn it around.

BTW there’s an interesting thread on a blog called Marginal Revolution about this study.

This study is a very thin look at the issue, a slice. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t cold neighborhoods with no social capital everywhere. It doesn’t mean that the way subdivisions and towns are designed around the automobile and longer and longer travel times is suddenly a smart strategy. And this one study also does not suddenly make suburbia a good idea.