CSY Replay #4: Residential Dissonance -- Where Americans Want To Live, And What They Settle For
Something like suburbanism was bound to happen in a nation like America.
Source: mashvisor.com
(Note: This morning I came across this post from fellow Substacker Addison Del Mastro. In it, Addison questions whether America has moved beyond dense urbanism because our expectations have grown as we’ve developed. This post from 2023 serves as a great response. -Pete)
Originally posted: March 27, 2023
Americans seem to seek out dense and walkable urbanism on occasion, but don’t as a whole don’t choose to live our lives that way. Why is that?
A few months ago I came across Ray Delahanty on YouTube, creator of the City Nerds channel. It’s a great channel that I highly recommend for excellent content on cities. I saw a video he did on this very topic late last year. He noted that Americans like to visit dense and walkable places on vacation – Delahanty mentioned European cities like Paris and Venice, amusement parks like Disney World, and even the forced density of cruise ships. He also mentioned that Americans seem to like the faux density of places like lifestyle centers. Lifestyle centers, which rose in popularity over the last 20-25 years, are essentially shopping malls with the roof pulled off and the stores oriented around pedestrian streets instead of tiled floors. They simulate downtowns but offer the comfort of still being able to use cars easily to get in and out.
Delahanty comes to a couple of conclusions about why density is appealing in small bites but not really built into the living decisions we make. First, like a lot of urbanists, he concludes that there’s an undersupply of walkable urbanism in the U.S., and people find ways to seek it out elsewhere in their lives. But Delahanty’s second, and much broader, conclusion is that individual choice is built into the DNA of American culture. He’s definitely right about that. However, there are three points I’d add to Delahanty’s conclusions. Here they are.
Americans don’t recognize the durability of agrarianism principles in our culture. Those principles were probably most explicitly articulated by Thomas Jefferson. The Wikipedia comment about Jefferson’s view of agrarianism:
“The United States president Thomas Jefferson was an agrarian who based his ideas about the budding American democracy around the notion that farmers are "the most valuable citizens" and the truest republicans.[12] Jefferson and his support base were committed to American republicanism, which they saw as being in opposition to aristocracy and corruption, and which prioritized virtue, exemplified by the "yeoman farmer", "planters", and the "plain folk".[13] In praising the rural farmfolk, the Jeffersonians felt that financiers, bankers and industrialists created "cesspools of corruption" in the cities and should thus be avoided.”
If this sounds familiar, maybe it’s because I wrote about Jefferson’s codification of agrarianism in our society in a recent post:
“America has never been an especially “urban” nation. I blame Thomas Jefferson for that. His Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and related Public Land Survey System, effectively codified the ideal of the agrarian philosophy and yeoman farmer into American law.
I believe the Northwest Ordinance is the key reason Midwestern cities, among the first to be established beyond the original thirteen colonies, were and are decidedly less dense and walkable than their East Coast counterparts. The Ordinance was created to distribute land to Revolutionary War soldiers in reward for their services and to sell land in an orderly fashion as a way of quickly raising money for a debt-ridden young nation. But with its emphasis on creating large-scale individual landowners who would dictate development decisions on their terms, rather than complex and multidimensional communities, set the development pattern that would dominate the rest of the nation to this day.”
Individual choice and agrarianism had a baby. That baby is suburbanism. After the Civil War it became apparent that America had a path to global wealth and leadership that involved manufacturing, and not agriculture. However, cities, the vehicle best suited to manufacturing production and distribution, still ran counter to the nation’s general ideals. Individual choice and agrarianism fueled the rise of the slave plantation South, the agrarian settlement of the Midwest, and the pioneer spirit that claimed the West.
It’s rarely talked about now, but I’d say the anti-urban sentiment that’s imbedded in our society put a ceiling on our urban development in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I imagine the period between 1870 and 1930 saw many people asking the existential question, “what kind of nation are we now?” We left behind the virtuous “yeoman farmer” society in favor of cities-as-economic-engines, and not cities as livable places first.
That 1870-1930 period gave us the rise of factories of all types in cities – steel plants, auto factories, chemical production sites – that relied heavily on human labor. European immigration soared during this time, as did Black migration from the Deep South. It didn’t take long for attitudes about American cities to be shaped by books like Jacob Riis' How The Other Half Lives (1890), about tenement life in New York City’s slums, or The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (1906), which highlighted the dangers and griminess of the meatpacking industry in 1900’s Chicago.
That led to the formation of suburbia, a new take on human interaction with the natural environment. As soon as manufacturing began to take over large cities, those with the means to move further from its impacts did so. As soon as the tensions flared between racial and ethnic groups about who could live where, and who would exert political and social control on the always-changing city, those with the means to remove themselves of the city influence did so. The wealthy sought green spaces and smoke-free skies. They sought calm, quiet and certainty. And of course, the suburban development pattern became the dominant pattern of the 20th century in America.
For most Americans, urbanism is a fantasy, suburbanism is reality. Before coming after me with pitchforks, let me explain. City living has definitely been an everyday reality for millions in Americans throughout our history – and, more often than not, a positive reality at that. However, the 19th and 20th century American city came up against the volatility and tensions of the time, and never really addressed them. Think about it – race riots in the 1910s and 1920s; depression and labor strife in the 1930s; overcrowding in the 1940s and 1950s. Cities burned in the ‘60s, and the economy turned away from cities in the ‘70s and ‘80s.
And honestly, the American agrarian ideal never really went away. It simply morphed into suburbia. And rather than spending our efforts at creating better cities, we idealized them and settled on the suburbanism that became our reality.
Consider when Americans go to simulated urbanism in America, or to actual urbanism here or in other parts of the world. When we go to a lifestyle center, or to Disney World, or walk the Vegas Strip, it’s viewed as fantasy. A change of pace. It’s an escape from the reality of the suburban environments most of us inhabit. A pleasing escape, but an escape nonetheless.
There is a particular urban development type that I believe can satisfy the goals of walkable density while also allowing for the privacy and autonomy that suburbia supports. I’ll cover that in a future post.
That idea of why American cities were built is super interesting and corresponds with the idea of escaping and making something new. Thanks for the repost.