I have a short quote in an article in the Christian Science Monitor today about extreme commuting.

The thing that strikes me about the extreme commute is how something absurd has become normalized. As Andres Duany said in my interview with him, “time in public means time in traffic” and its a competitive, hostile experience.

The article is partly in response to the Texas Transportation Institute’s 2007 Urban Mobility Report which, among other things, says

• Trips take longer

• Congestion affects more of the day
• Congestion affects weekend travel and rural areas
• Congestion affects more personal trips and freight shipments
• Trip travel times increasingly are unreliable

They have some suggested solutions, but they mostly have to do with traffic engineering (not surprising considering the source). It’s a kind of myopic viewpoint, restricted by the profession. A more comprehensive view would consider urban planning issues, including multiple design theories and scenarios.

Then there’s the personal angle:

“There’s the philosophy that people buy houses on Sunday and discover on Monday that it’s a tough commute.”

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.

James Howard Kunstler has written a starkly critical review of Sprawl: a compact history By Robert Bruegmann. Here are some extended excerpts:

There is a species of fatuous thinking these days in America which states, in so many words, that suburbia is fine and dandy because so many people like it. Variations on this theme range from the idea that suburbia is the highest expression of free markets, to the notion that it is the natural outcome of our democracy, to the belief that God has ordained it.

Despite his boatloads of statistics, Bruegmann is just flat-out wrong in many of his positions and virtually all of his conclusions. At the center of his thesis is the unquestioned assumption that the suburban project can continue indefinitely, that it is a good thing, that we will get more of it, and we ought to stop carping and enjoy it. His book fails entirely to acknowledge the fact that we are entering a permanent global energy crisis that will put an end to the drive-in utopia whether people like it or not. … We are not going to run Wal-Mart, Walt Disney World, and the interstate highway system on hydrogen, coal synfuels, tar sand or oil shale distillates, bio-diesel, ethanol, recycled french-fry oil, solar electricity, wind power, or nuclear fission.

For more on this see Kunstler’s latest book The Long Emergency.

The sad truth is that most of America has come to be composed of places that are not worth caring about, and they may eventually (if not already) add up to a nation not worth defending, or a culture not worth carrying on.

…suburbia… hasn’t delivered very well on its promises for a long time now. In its florid, climactic incarnation today – the McMansion precincts of Dallas, Atlanta, or Northern Virginia – it presents the worst elements of urban and rural life in the same package, with few of the benefits of either. The megaburbs have all the congestion of a city and none of the human contact. They have all of the isolation of the country, but no real connection to nature.

….

What Bruegmann leaves out of the picture is the same thing that the mandarins of American municipal planning have left out for half a century: any consideration of quality and character of place, and the means for achieving it. …the very methods of the municipal planners, which produced the ghastly sprawl environments of our time, are based on exactly the same kind of statistical methods employed by Bruegmann, instead of the one thing that might have mitigated or constrained the mess, namely artistry in design.

….

These are issues which do not yield to strict empiricism and cannot be comprehended by it. The result in American suburbia today is a set of places where private luxury is exalted and public space is grievously dishonored, damaged, and diminished, … where public space is so debased that the only place children can find to play beyond their back yards is the berm between the WalMart and the Winn Dixie.

This is very true. While out shooting one day I came across the very scene Kunstler describes. I was behind a big box strip center and saw a group of teenagers using the truck ramps for skateboarding and general hanging out. I asked them why they were there and they said “there’s no where else to go.” Nowhere but where they were, nowhere.

We flatter ourselves to think that the shopping malls are an adequate substitute for real main streets.

…Bruegmann’s analysis omits entirely the issues of physical form and its quality… All matters pertaining to physical form Bruegmann wrongly identifies (and denigrates) as “aesthetic” issues. This allows him to argue that physical form (including development patterns) are simply differences in taste…

It’s either that people are too dim to see the ugliness and sense the soul killing environments around them or it’s just so stupefyingly depressing that they’ve become numb to it. I fear I’m beginning to fall into the latter category.

Toward the end of the review he writes:

We’re about to find out the hard way that life is tragic and history is merciless and that reality doesn’t care what we like or don’t like. The suburban system we have come to think of as “sprawl” is going to fail spectacularly. We will be desperate to make other arrangements, and all the statistical bullshit in the world will not avail us to bargain our way around it.

His voice may be “ascerbic” (as The Nation says) and vision may be dark but that’s no reason in itself to discount him. I go back and forth between the Apollonian light and the darkness myself. The thing I like about Kunstler is that he is his own man. His voice is authentic. He is not an academic and restricted by the politics of academia and worries about reputation and offence. I see muzzled voices all too often in my university position, and fight to maintain my own voice in the middle of it all. I recommend, if you haven’t read it, Kunstler’s very fine work The Geography of Nowhere. Even if you have only a passing interest in this subject the sheer quality of writing, biting wit, and passion will make it worth your while. The book was a major catalyst in the making of Subdivided, and I thank him for that.

[Read the full review here and check out this review from the Nation, which also describes the book Sundown Towns by James Loewen.]

Our friend Andres Duany is touring the English countryside with the Prince of Wales, and doing a bit of work while he’s there designing a new town near Inverness. What they have there in England, he says, is but “baby sprawl” compared to what we have here in the United States. But if they are not careful, they’ll end up like us. He also noted:

One of the things you can say about America is that at least we are spirited in our commitment to suburban sprawl. Those half-apologetic sub-divisions up there [Inverness] don’t even have the full vulgarity of Dallas, the audacity of the ‘McMansion’

And if you have a choice, and today’s mobile, creative young professionals do have choices, they are not only going to leave vulgar Dallas, but the whole country for Europe, which has a different dream.

Americans cannot get over how people in Europe have five weeks’ vacation annually. They have no concept of quality of life, that leisure time is something to be valued. Europe is going through a spectacularly good time and its quality of life is going to be so superior to America that young people, faced with a choice of living, say, in Atlanta or Munich will choose Munich and Europe any time.