When
my grandparents married shortly after World War II, they had to
move in with my great-grandparents. After over fifteen years of
depression and war, there just weren't enough houses in America's
cities and towns to hold all the returning GIs, their wives, and
the first wave of the Baby Boom. The answer to the problem sprouted
in a Long Island, New York potato field in 1947, where
William Levitt built a new sort of community that was neither a
town nor a city.
Since
then, the suburb has becomes as central to the American way of life
as processed cheese foods and Disney animated musicals. By 1950,
one-quarter of Americans lived in suburbs. Ten years later, it would
be a third of the U.S. population; by 1990, half. It's gotten so
that we can't imagine any other sort of existence. Kids today think
that the Hopi and Zuni built their adobe houses in cul-de-sacs and
shopped at Wal-Mart. The irony is incredible: We go to the local
cineplex to watch Peter Jackson's imagining of Middle Earth, a land
Tolkien based on an idealized version of his beloved English countryside,
and then return to our own interchangeable geographies. God gave
us the Earth, and we paved it and turned it into a strip mall.
The effect
this has had on our society is downright frightening. The suburbs
are a land without sidewalks—which means that if you want to
go somewhere, you have to drive. Without a driver's license, you
have all the mobility of Christopher Reeves. Yet, the car is also
a prison: Whereas I have a fifteen-minute walk from my apartment
to my midtown Manhattan job, my suburban friends spend an hour-to-hour-and-a-half
commuting every day. The time they spend in their cars, I can spend
in the karate dojo, or writing crap like this. It costs more to
live in the city, but you can't put a price tag on the benefits.
Suburban
car culture contributes to social ills ranging from the obesity
epidemic to our dependence on Middle Eastern oil. Today, kids not
old enough to drink (for fear they'll get in their automobiles and
kill someone) are sent to countries they can't find on the map to
fight and die so we can have cheap gasoline—but why should
they bother to learn geography, when every place they've ever been
looks the same? In Europe and Asia, if you want to go somewhere,
you walk or bicycle. For longer distances, you take a train. In
America, where you can supposedly "have it your way,"
you're not even given that option. The Los Angeles trolley system
was bought out in the 1940s by auto companies who wanted to make
sure that no one could live without a car.
We like
to believe that we live in a world where the potential to learn
and know about the world is approaching the infinite, but in reality,
we're probably the most ignorant generation that's ever been produced.
The only education anyone gets is from mediocre schools interested
in producing standardized-test results; the only venues of entertainment
are malls, movie theaters, and other commercial ventures that see
the young as markets, not resources; the only source of knowledge
of the world beyond the next highway exit is the television. There
is no future other than living the same weary, ordinary life, a
clone of one's own parents. No wonder all the kids drink, take drugs,
and fuck like rabbits. With geographical escape closed off, the
only place left to flee is inside oneself.
Worst
of all, it seems like the suburbs are sprawling at an ever-increasing
rate. My cousin lives out in Flanders, New Jersey, a good hour and
a half down I-80 from the George Washington Bridge. It used to be
all woods and horse farms out there. You could drive along the main
road and not see anything for miles along either side but forest.
Now there are "lot for sale" signs every few hundred yards
along the road; they're cutting down the trees and putting in subdivisions.
Near the highway exit is a brand-new strip mall with a Chili's and
a Romano's Macaroni Grill—prepackaged food for prepackaged
lives. My cousin said the strip mall had been a mountain a month
before. They brought in the heavy earth-moving equipment, flattened
it, and put in chain restaurants in the space of a week. It takes
nature a million years to make a mountain and people a week to make
a Chili's.
That's
not to say there's no hope at all. Towns in New Jersey have instituted
laws that you need to build new houses on five or ten acres. An
entire school of architecture called the New
Urbanism wants to turn the 'burbs into neighborhoods.
But it seems to me that if we want to ensure that our children don't
think that asphalt is more natural than grass and dirt, we need
to demolish the subdivisions and plant some trees.