Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream

By Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck

I know this book sounds really appealing, right? Bear with me. This is an excellent book that sums up much of how, when and why suburbs were created. It talks a lot about weird things (to non-city planner types): road width, intersections, residential and commercial sites in the suburbs, laws and tax codes. Suburban Nation taught me the  term “collector road,” for which I am grateful. Everybody should know about collector roads! I swear, the book is absolutely fascinating – that is, until you get about two-thirds through. That’s when the complaining about suburbs and everything that’s wrong with them gets old. By the end, though, the authors redeem themselves by giving very good advice to those of us who wish to make the burbs more livable and sustainable. If only city council people, planners, and other community leaders in the burbs had the wherewithal to read this! That would be something.

Now for my personal take on a major failing of these authors (and others in their field). They talk about the built environment and how much that has to do with how people live. Yes, it sure does. But where do they leave room for the human spirit? So the average suburban environment is, well, a bit appalling  – horrible architecture, collector roads, tract houses, even people with boring furniture. However, I don’t care how drab the built world is, people are always creative. There is always an artist, writer, an entrepreneur, a cool mom, an enlightened dad, the bizarre and funny kid. In short, there is life in the burbs. Much as urban planners like to deny it, we equal more than the sum of our built parts. That’s my lecture for the day. Now go read Suburban Nation. The authors are smart. Besides, this is your world and you should know about it.

Note: since there are seriously no independent bookstores in our part of exurbia, we’re giving you an Amazon link.

I picked a friend up from the airport several months ago. She’d recently seen author Laura Day interviewed on a morning show. She couldn’t remember the name of her book exactly, but she kept looking in the airport bookstores and was disappointed she couldn’t find it. This intrigued me enough to later track down the book at the library. I actually had to be put on a waiting list for this one. I suspect it’s the type of book with a title that really makes you want to believe, yet maybe not believe enough to want to part with $24. Anyhow, I did get it and read it. The whole premise is that any one of us can master our intuitive and psychic powers enough to get exactly what we want. Day has been around a while touting similar ideas. In fact, her Practical Intuition was a NYT best seller. (An aside: She has a lot of celeb friends, too. Cover endorsements from Demi Moore and Brad Pitt kind of made sense but I was a little surprised –and further intrigued — that Chris Rock also blurbed her book.)

Many of you may think all of this stuff is a bunch of nonsense. I don’t. As a health writer (a big part of what I do when not posting here), I put a lot of stock in researchers and JAMA studies and such. However, I also leave room for that which we can’t quantify,  can’t necessarily prove with with double-blind studies. There’s something to the whole idea that we know — or can know– more than we think we know. However intriguing I found Day’s ideas, however, I found the exercises she provided for readers a bit vague and hard to follow. Or, rather, hard to get results. Then again, as Day notes in the book it takes time to cultivate these skills. Perhaps I just need to practice my psychic abilities a lot more. When my husband found me reading this on, yes, our couch, he teased me a bit. I could tell he was interested, though. Guess what he got for Valentine’s Day? I’ll let you know if either of us begin ruling the world anytime soon.

Joel Kotkin, a Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange and author of  the forthcoming book “The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050,” recently authored The War Against Suburbia in The American magazine. Here’s how he kicks off his article:

A year into the Obama administration, America’s dominant geography, suburbia, is now in open revolt against an urban-centric regime that many perceive threatens their way of life, values, and economic future.

As The Cheetah Girls might say: Here we go…Uh oh, uh oh…

First we got blamed (along with others) for the Prop 8 disaster in California and now Kotkin appears to be setting us up as the peeps who’ll bring down Obama. Have I somehow missed this ‘open revolt’ to which Kotkin refers? In his article, Kotkin cites Scott Brown’s win as indicative of suburbanite rage against Obama. Really? As proof that the Obama Administration is against us (and I guess we against them) Kotkin says:

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood revealed the new ideology when he famously declared the administration’s intention to “coerce” Americans out of their cars and into transit.

… current climate czar Carole Browner threatened to block federal funds for the Atlanta region due to their lack of compliance with clear air rules.

OMG! Imagine!  Reliable mass transit and clean air? How horrible. I did find myself eventually agreeing with Kotkin, though, who, incidentally lives right in the San Fernando Valley. He says that urban planners, the movie industry and many others marginalize and misrepresent the suburban experience. The myth of the burbs is that it’s a miserable place and yet, as Kotkin cites, a 2008 Pew study revealed suburbanites displayed the highest degree of satisfaction with where they lived. They were also more involved in their communities. Writes Kotkin:

This contradicts another of the great urban legends of the 20th century—espoused by urbanists, planning professors, and pundits and portrayed in Hollywood movies—that suburbanites are alienated, autonomous individuals, while city dwellers have a deep sense of belonging and connection to their neighborhoods.

And, yep, I even agree with him later when he cites the growing racial diversity of suburbs and the fact that, no matter what urban planners may desire (FYI…many want a future America without suburbs) the burbs are firmly planted. Many suburbanites and exurbanites have now lived in their communities for generations. This is home, even if there are a lot of chain restaurants, little mass transit and too many wasteful big box stores.

Just to be clear…we in the burbs want mass transit, we want neighborhoods where we can walk to schools, services and shops. You don’t have to coerce us out of cars. We will turn over the keys if you give us another way to get around. Already, I see people here doing just that. There are far more bicyclicist, bus riders and pedestrians, in addition to people ditching the huge cars and going for more enviro-friendly ones. And, while it’s great that there’s so much talk about the proposed high-speed light rail system from San Francisco to Los Angeles, we still want something from Thousand Oaks or Agoura to LA. In short, we don’t want to leave but we want to figure out how to make suburbia work better. Mass transit and clean air actually seem like goals that are not inconsistent with the current suburban way of life or values.

The thing I don’t get, though, is how Kotkin can rail against the media for misrepresenting suburban/exurban people and yet, in the words of another great songstress, oops! [He] did it again.

Please tell us what you think. Do you think the current administration is against the suburbs? Do you think the burbs have a future? Click here to read Kotkin’s full article reprinted on JoelKotkin.com

I often have friends ask me what I’m reading or ask for book/author recommendations. So in “What I’m reading now” I’ll simply be posting on, well, what I’m reading! Don’t expect much off the NYT or LAT best seller lists, though. There’s enough out there about those books, plus I usually buy used books or check them out at the library. Occasionally, I’ll do something newish. Like next time I’ll probably tell you about this book I’m reading on how to increase your psychic abilities (it’s gotten a lot of press). Anyhow, for this week, it’s the novel Stoner by John Williams. It was first published in 1965 and it’s a meticulously written story about William Stoner and university life from about 1910 to 1956. Stoner is sent to the University of Missouri by his farmer father to study agriculture. Ultimately, he’s smitten by literature, dumps the farm and becomes an undistinguished assistant professor of English (he also gets married, has a daughter, a mistress, etc. etc.). The “undistinguished” part, though, is key. This is a story about an average guy getting by. It’s a quiet book. The author’s writing style is direct and plain but his descriptions are beautiful and, moreover, his take on the inner life is beyond illuminating. Here I should give you a sample but my feeling is that you can pick up the book and randomly point to any passage and it will be brilliant. So, wait, I’m going to do that…Well, I pointed to the part where he’s getting with his mistress. It is a great passage but I don’t want you to think that’s what the book is really about. Instead, here’s a good Williams description:

It was winter, and a low damp midwestern mist floated over the campus. Even at midmorning the thin branches of the dogwood trees glistened with hoarfrost, and the black vines that trailed up the great columns before Jesse Hall were rimmed with iridescent crystals that winked against the grayness.

And here Williams describes Edith, who would become Stoner’s wife:

Her moral training, both at the schools she attended and at home, was negative in nature, prohibitive in intent and almost entirely sexual. The sexuality, however, was indirect and unacknowledged; therefore it suffused every other part of her education, which received most of its energy from that recessive and unspoken moral force.

Stoner is a somewhat lonely and sad book. If you like Dan Brown, for instance, you might not like John Williams. However, is you’re up for something that operates on a higher level, you’ll appreciate it.

Exurbanite Irene Levine is a clinical psychologist and blogs about friendship at The Friendship Blog and The Huffington Post. If you’ve ever lost touch with a supposedly good friend, been dumped or dumped a friend, you need Levine’s new book Best Friends Forever: surviving a breakup with your best friend. Contrary to what daytime television or Bravo might depict, Levine tells us that friends fall by the wayside not because one steals another one’s husband or anything that outrageous. Check out what she has to say about the lifespan of friendships, her book and her famous neighbors….

1. When I described Best Friends Forever to various people almost everyone told me a story about a breakup with a good friend. Did you also find in your research that breaking up with a friend is nearly a universal experience? Why does this happen and who seems to be most plagued with friendship problems?

I’ve had the same experience and have gotten emails and survey responses from people all over the world, as far away as Nigeria and the South Pacific, expressing their pain about failed friendships. Regardless of language or lifestyle, the feelings were pretty universal. Most people can resonate to the experience of losing a friend—either because they were jilted, dumped someone else, or because two friends simply drifted apart.

As people grow and change, their lives don’t necessarily follow the same trajectories so it’s completely natural that many friendships would fall apart over time. Most friendships, even very close ones, don’t last forever; on average, a friendship lasts about seven years. The more changes that take place in your life (e.g. geographic moves, graduations, changes in marital or parental status, career changes, and personal ones, etc.), the more fragile your friendships become.

Yet, I wouldn’t really characterize it as a friendship problem. It’s only a problem if you don’t understand that friendships have their ups and downs and not all of them last forever.

2. I’ve also found that many people are loathe to talk about it…it almost seems a source of shame or as if they’re afraid the breakup will reflect poorly on them. In Best Friends Forever, you talk about the embarrassment and shame. Why do you think we tend to have such shame over these types of breakups?

Women are often judged by their ability to make and maintain friendships so it’s natural that it would be embarrassing to talk about it when someone suddenly loses a close friend. The subject is so taboo, in fact, that there is often no one to talk to about it. You can’t tell your mother because she’ll likely ask what you did to provoke the breakup. You can’t talk about it to your partner, husband or lover, because he’ll never understand the depth of female friendships. And women hesitate to tell other friends because they think they’ll be looked down upon. There are really no protocol or rules for handling a breakup and that’s one of the reasons why I wrote my book.

3. What’s your best advice on dealing with the loss of a friendship? Do you think people always need to reconnect with the estranged friend and hash it out or do you think it’s usually best to move on and somehow get over it? If the answer is “get over it,” how do people do that?

Getting over the pain of a lost friendship takes time. In the book, I discuss the predictable stages that women go through in reaching a state of acceptance.

One mistake people sometimes make is thinking that they need to interact with their ex-friend in order to reach closure. This isn’t the case. Often, we don’t get that opportunity.

Getting over it means learning from the experience so that you are a better friend and make wiser friendship choices in the future.

4. Is there one or two things people do that typically contribute to friendship breakups? Is there a better way to live to prevent this?

Some friendships are precipitated by disappointments (e.g. failing to acknowledge special days in your friend life) and misunderstandings; these types of breakups can often be prevented with better communication between two friends. If you are a Birthday Princess, your birthday is coming up, and you want to celebrate with your friend, don’t count on her having a crystal ball. Mention it so she knows. Or if you felt hurt by something your friend said, let her know so it doesn’t happen again and you don’t build up ill feelings.

The large majority of friendships, however, break up because neither person cares enough about the friendship to make it work. If you are invested in a friendship, you need to make it a priority and devote time and attention to the relationship.

5. You live in an area that’s become quite well known. Can you tell us a little about Chappaqua and the Washington Post article you wrote for your famous neighbors when they were about to move there?

Chappaqua is a small hamlet in Westchester County, New York, that is part of the town of New Castle (along with Millwood). It is about 50 minutes from NYC on Metro North. When I first moved here from the DC area, I was struck by the sense of intimacy and the deeply rooted community that I found. Compared to how transient I found the DC metro area, the shopkeepers and many of my neighbors had lived and worked here for multiple generations.

When the Clintons bought their home here, I knew that Hillary Clinton would have to make a big adjustment so I decided to write her a briefing memo that was published in The Washington Post. It was filled with the type of humor and gossip that one woman might share with another female friend. Not only was I delighted when it was published but I treasure the hand-written note I received from the First Lady and Mrs. Gore acknowledging they had read it.

THANKS, IRENE!