There’s a much better looking Quicktime version, but if you can’t see it, here’s the google version:

Clip from Subdivided: Isolation and Community in America

Clip from Subdivided: Isolation and Community in America

Are McMansions a real estate fashion trend, doomed to fail like pet rocks and bell bottoms and singers who look good but can’t write thier own songs? That’s the opinion of Arrol Gellner. Writing in SF Gate he notes

After the current taste for huge houses inevitably fades, our infrastructure will be burdened with untold thousands of residential white elephants for decades to come.

What’s so awful about these big, bad houses?

Here’s the usual litany of answers: They use more building materials, wasting natural resources. They take more energy to heat and cool than a comparable small home, consuming more nonrenewable heating oil or natural gas and more electricity (most of which is also generated by fossil fuels, creating more pollution).

In a city like Dallas with a special talent for vulgarity, the moral arguments never work. As Gellner says, “moral arguments won’t dissuade people from buying big houses, just as they haven’t dissuaded them from buying sport utility vehicles.”

Basically, he says, people will just get sick of taking care of them. And if Kunstler is right, they will not be able to afford the costs of energy to heat and cool them, not to mention the gas to drive several hours a day to and from the place they work all day in order to afford the things. Geller points out that there was a previous cycle around 1900 when larger homes were eschewed for smaller ones:

…with efficiency-minded magazines such as Ladies’ Home Journal leading the charge, overworked homemakers rebelled against the large, ornate and hard-to-maintain homes of the Victorian era. … they quickly came to be seen as the apex of vulgarity, and many were eventually carved up into rooming houses — a common strategy to make use of all that burdensome space. The remaining numbers that escaped demolition continued to be held in contempt for 60 more years. Today’s McMansions, with their overbearing scale and frenetic ornamentation, are a pretty close match for Victorian excess. And after their inevitable fall from grace, time won’t treat them any better.

I hope he’s right, but as long as people can max out their lifestyles in order to fulfill the mantra of worth = $worth (or the appearance of it), of the replacement of citizens by consumers, those hulking garish boxes will continue to thrive.

Looks like the folks in Little Forest Hills (the neighborhood profiled in Subdivided) sent Robert Wilonsky a post about the upcoming KERA screening (Jan 3 @ 8pm on KERA 13). He kindly wrote a note about it on the Dallas Observer blog.

Michael Davis over at Dallas Progress also picked it up. I read through his blog and noticed an interesting post about how San Diego has banned giant retail stores. Hard to imagine that outside of the west coast and certain parts of New England. Davis writes:

I hope that the current and future Dallas City Councils take notice.

While some community and elected officials openly wish that they had a Wal-Mart in their area, I ask you to take a drive to 3155 W. Wheatland (map) and ask yourself if this is what you want in your community.

The mismanaged Wal-Mart near US-67 & Wheatland is a disaster. Their lack of selection, filthy floors and shelves, dirty parking lot, and overall lack or willingness to provide a decent shopping experience is evident. Once night falls, it simply feels unsafe. Only open for three years, the store looks like it’s been open for twenty.

Good stuff. And thanks Michael for the kind words on the film!

This is a segment I made that went unused in the final broadcast version of Subdivided. It is a reenactment of road rage by my friend and UT Dallas colleague Fred Curchack - an internationally acclaimed performance artist. This version includes his cursing so be advised. When we shot this it was actually frightening to be in the car with him as he was driving like, well, a maniac.

This is the only part of the project that uses someone else’s music. I just couldn’t resist using the tune “I Hate You” from Crossing Ellum, a local Dallas band. You can hear the full tune here. I have a longer version that features the vocals which are great. The chorus is literally “I hate you!.” Perfect for a piece about road rage. Many thanks to Matthew JC for letting us use the song.

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.]

A lot of new stills from Subdivided have been uploaded to flickr.

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.

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.