If you have kids and value privacy, space, quiet,good public schools and uncrowded green spaces, then the burbs are the way to go
Wasting money on restaurants or door dash 3-5x a week is a yuppie thing, not a family thing,
If you are rich, have “help”, can pay for private school and one partner can manage the helicopter parenting and “enrichment” activities for kids, then sure, Cities can be great (and that describes the life of some “urban experts”), but not in NYC. I’d recommend London where you can be 30 minutes from the City and have a garden and birdsong (not just pigeons).
I agree it is a period-of-life thing. Before kids I preferred big cities. With kids I prefer the high-cultural amenity, good schools environment of an American college town. I could imagine in retirement I might prefer a city again.
That article seems one of the already classical articles imagining that "autonomy" is kids going alone to shop things; for under-12, "autonomy" is mainly playing unsupervised in the street, parks, woods, etc. and I suspect this is more easy in suburbs and exurbs than in cities
One pet peeve of mine related to anti-suburb sentiment is the enormous pile of media portrayals from when I was younger like Weeds, Desperate Housewives, American Beauty, and Serial Mom thinking they're edgy and clever for saying "the suburbs aren't wholesome as you THINK!" when they were just recycling a trope that was already stale by then.
In the case of the Desperate Housewives I am not much sure if the tone is "the suburbs aren't wholesome as you THINK!" or "the suburbs are much more wholesome than you THINK!"
The chart of commuting distance versus time for public versus car transportation is interesting But ignores the important question of *how frequently* a given resident needs to commute such distances. As a resident of a small City (Cambridge Massachusetts) I find that almost all of my transportation needs can be met by cycling because everything I need to get to is within 2 or 3 mi of my home. And at that distance, And at that distance using a car would take almost the same time, sometimes a bit less, sometimes a lot more. There are entire weeks when I don't use my car at all. Nothing like that would be true if I lived in the suburbs.
Having grown up in Cambridge, I'm probably biased, but it's hard not to think of it as the perfect city. Almost everything is within walking or biking distance, and the T is there for going into Boston. No wonder it's so expensive now!
Having grown up in Hickory Hill, Memphis, moving to the suburbs (finally) in high school was nothing less than the gift of a childhood. I was burglarized three times before I was a teenager. You just didn’t go play on the street; that wasn’t a thing. Every night was an arms race between sleep and fear. Hearing about their putative soullessness later blew my mind - to me, it was the first time life was unreservedly on offer.
1) pro-suburbs: since increasing amounts of our lives are lived online, suburbanites get access to the digital world. That can make up for the lower density of in-person services. Also, suburbia tends to have better internet than rural areas.
2) pro-city: suburbs can have a higher carbon footprint with more car driving and less PT.
Starlink has quickly levelled the field by providing rural/remote residents with at least one high quality option. And this year, it appears to have decided to get aggressive on competitive pricing.
With more satellite constellations now on the horizon, I expect the distinction to almost disappear.
Great article Noah. I’m one of those that has long disdained suburbs, but now I live in one with a young son and another on the way.
Couple thoughts:
I think there should be a distinction among suburbs and what they offer. There is absolutely a large number of suburbs that hit all of the negative cliches. Think large soulless homes, no trees or sidewalks. Populous is largely conservative, has views much of us would disagree with and the average night out consists of bland restaurants or other “middle America” type places that are based around convenience.
However, where I live (east Grand Rapids Michigan), I’d consider much different than that even though it is still a “suburb”. Our populous is educated and largely liberal. Sidewalks are everywhere and the suburb is very walkable to restaurants, coffee and shopping. Homes are larger with yards, but not huge, so the footprint is reasonable and trees are abundant. Housing stock is older, with many having updated homes that retain character but have modern conveniences. It’s overwhelming safe and schools are great
The suburb I’m in feels less like a typical American suburb and feels more like a semi-urban area that retains the pros of suburb living. It certainly isn’t as dynamic or multi-model as urban life, but it packs a lot of those punches. Housing prices reflect that as it isn’t cheap, but for a 3,000 ft home it isn’t astronomical.
These suburbs are all over the country and have an extremely high quality of life. I wouldn’t recommend for 20s or early 30s singles, but for those looking for space and especially with kids, it’s a fantastic option
For the OECD commute times it might make more sense to use Table LMF2.6.A instead of Chart LMF2.6.A that is used in the post.
The table counts only people who actually commute compared to the chart that uses overall population. From the difference between the chart and the table it looks like significantly less people commute at all in the USA.
The overall point stays the same (shorter commutes in US) and provides clearer insight into the actual commute times.
I rode my bike to the grocery store in the exurb yesterday and realized I didn't want to park it in front of the just-out-of-jail characters lurking about the entrance. A small public park near there was completely fenced off to reduce the squalor that had turned it into a public health hazard. Right next to the police station, in fact. This is the kind of thing that wouldn't yet have influenced where I lived when I was in my 20s. Back then, I moved to SF and Berkeley and put up with having my car broken into and having rocks thrown through my closed front room window by the kids from across the street. More recently, the people from outside the grocery store yesterday have increased around town. My favorite wine bar gets fewer customers because they also loiter around there and the manager can't get the cops to do anything. Those people probably migrated from SF recently. Word on the street travels fast about where the cops don't pay attention. "Criminalizing homelessness" comes out of my daughter's mouth effortlessly. She moved to SF, naturally, like I once did. Tens of millions of Americans vote for Trump because it gives them a feeling that he will make sure they never have to live in a place like that.
Enjoyed the discussion and would like to see an analysis looking at population density from 100K people per square mile to 10 people per square mile treating the question of population as a continuous variable not a pairwise comparison. Agree with the conclusion that different amenities serve different groups because we can't all live in the same place! Polling to find a preferred population density would yield a very different result than simply providing an urban/suburban choice.
Noah, I particularly enjoy what I think of as your coming of age articles. Given that I first ran into your work in your late grad student years after the crash of '08, I would guess that you are now headed toward your forties. Way back in the 60-70s I followed a similar path. Started in the 40's in suburban Rochester, NY and then did most of my growing up in the country on the edge of the suburbs of thee Quadcities along the Mississippi. College in Ames, Iowa and then off to Grad school and Cambridge MA where I really enjoyed the Urban life all the way through marriage and two little boys. When the boys were ready for elementary school, the outer suburbs and good schools beckoned and that was the end of the urban life. Plenty of kids grow up in the big cities, but there really seems to be an attraction to the wider open spaces and suburban schools as the family grows, that seems to have held for the last 100 years, at least. Of course, then the kids, just like their parents are attracted to the Urban scene and the whole cycle starts over. I see you as, if not an emerging suburban Dad, quite possible a suburban rabbit manager. Good luck.
I see comments have already gone down the rabbit hole of arguing on City vs Burbs
The proper take-away is really Stop the Finger Wagging My Values or the Highway "Yet among my fellow urbanists and YIMBYs, I often encounter disdain or outright hostility toward the suburbs that define most of America’s present urban landscape. ... And I think that the constant ranting against the suburbs complicates the quest for denser cities. It creates the suspicion that urbanists and YIMBYs want to make the whole nation into Manhattan. Nothing like that could ever happen, of course; even Japan is mostly suburbanized. But painting the quest for denser metropolises as an attack on suburbia makes everything needlessly confrontational, polarized, and zero-sum."
Live and let live.
Stop making it Anti-Suburbia and Finger Wagging & Moralising.
(me I like my urban living and I have a family but the constant especially Lefty Proggy judgmentalism to the burbites is just unhelpful)
I’ll just observe that I live in a suburb town in CT. I can be in nyc or Boston by train in a couple of hours. I can be in downtown New Haven with great restaurants and music venues, world class museums, world class medical facilities in 15 minutes. I’m a short walk to a state park with miles of hiking trails. A horse farm where polo is played is a five minute drive in 15 minutes.I get fruit and vegetables from a farm in town that dates to the 1800s. I can walk to a great wine shop, a French bakery, a natural,food store, the post office, the library, city hall and my doctors office. I’m a half hour from the best beach on Long Island sound. Oh and housing is affordable. Eat yr heart out Manhattan.
I live in the suburbs...but also work in the suburbs. My workplace is literally half a mile away from my residence and I chose to live where I do for less commute time. Living in the city would entail a giant commute and huge rent for a worse lifestyle. I know I'm far from alone in this sort of situation. A LOT of people don't work "downtown" in whatever city they're in. The idea of "everyone works downtown" is just so absurdly outdated.
I think of myself as a public transport fan, but I just spent a week in Stockholm and found myself missing American car based infrastructure. Reason being, I was in Stockholm with my young kids and elderly parents. Trying to herd them all safely - and together - through multi-step itineraries on crowded buses and metro trains quickly had me missing the minivan I drive at home.
Having lived in downtowns, suburbs, an exurb, a rural and a remote community and enjoyed them all, often for different reasons, I would have expected less loneliness with less density.
I have observed that the lower the density:
- the higher the societal trust within the community
- the more general-community socializing (less siloing by interests, age, etc.)
- the easier and less formal the recruiting of volunteers
- greater social connection density. The more likely you are to know more people through multiple means (work, locale, volunteering, family, friendships, family-members' friendships).
- the greater the average connection longevity (especially life-long)
...and would expect these to reduce loneliness.
For me, less parental worrying too, due to some attractive social correlations with lower density:
- more comprehensive knowledge of people and relationships. Consequently, you have socialized with a greater share (or all) of the families of all your kids' many friends
- more assistance with raising kids when they're not with you. Your kids are recognized by more people (as yours) when they're out in the community, and know what you expect of their behaviour, or can more easily see when they're struggling or when something is wrong.
If you have kids and value privacy, space, quiet,good public schools and uncrowded green spaces, then the burbs are the way to go
Wasting money on restaurants or door dash 3-5x a week is a yuppie thing, not a family thing,
If you are rich, have “help”, can pay for private school and one partner can manage the helicopter parenting and “enrichment” activities for kids, then sure, Cities can be great (and that describes the life of some “urban experts”), but not in NYC. I’d recommend London where you can be 30 minutes from the City and have a garden and birdsong (not just pigeons).
I agree it is a period-of-life thing. Before kids I preferred big cities. With kids I prefer the high-cultural amenity, good schools environment of an American college town. I could imagine in retirement I might prefer a city again.
As a gentle push-back on the kids point, urban neighborhoods can actually be great places to raise kids:
https://ifstudies.org/blog/heres-to-urban-parenthood
That article seems one of the already classical articles imagining that "autonomy" is kids going alone to shop things; for under-12, "autonomy" is mainly playing unsupervised in the street, parks, woods, etc. and I suspect this is more easy in suburbs and exurbs than in cities
One pet peeve of mine related to anti-suburb sentiment is the enormous pile of media portrayals from when I was younger like Weeds, Desperate Housewives, American Beauty, and Serial Mom thinking they're edgy and clever for saying "the suburbs aren't wholesome as you THINK!" when they were just recycling a trope that was already stale by then.
In the case of the Desperate Housewives I am not much sure if the tone is "the suburbs aren't wholesome as you THINK!" or "the suburbs are much more wholesome than you THINK!"
Maybe I'm misremembering it? I watched the first few episodes and was so bored I didn't continue.
The chart of commuting distance versus time for public versus car transportation is interesting But ignores the important question of *how frequently* a given resident needs to commute such distances. As a resident of a small City (Cambridge Massachusetts) I find that almost all of my transportation needs can be met by cycling because everything I need to get to is within 2 or 3 mi of my home. And at that distance, And at that distance using a car would take almost the same time, sometimes a bit less, sometimes a lot more. There are entire weeks when I don't use my car at all. Nothing like that would be true if I lived in the suburbs.
Having grown up in Cambridge, I'm probably biased, but it's hard not to think of it as the perfect city. Almost everything is within walking or biking distance, and the T is there for going into Boston. No wonder it's so expensive now!
Having grown up in Hickory Hill, Memphis, moving to the suburbs (finally) in high school was nothing less than the gift of a childhood. I was burglarized three times before I was a teenager. You just didn’t go play on the street; that wasn’t a thing. Every night was an arms race between sleep and fear. Hearing about their putative soullessness later blew my mind - to me, it was the first time life was unreservedly on offer.
A good, thoughtful argument.
I'd add two details.
1) pro-suburbs: since increasing amounts of our lives are lived online, suburbanites get access to the digital world. That can make up for the lower density of in-person services. Also, suburbia tends to have better internet than rural areas.
2) pro-city: suburbs can have a higher carbon footprint with more car driving and less PT.
Starlink has quickly levelled the field by providing rural/remote residents with at least one high quality option. And this year, it appears to have decided to get aggressive on competitive pricing.
With more satellite constellations now on the horizon, I expect the distinction to almost disappear.
Great article Noah. I’m one of those that has long disdained suburbs, but now I live in one with a young son and another on the way.
Couple thoughts:
I think there should be a distinction among suburbs and what they offer. There is absolutely a large number of suburbs that hit all of the negative cliches. Think large soulless homes, no trees or sidewalks. Populous is largely conservative, has views much of us would disagree with and the average night out consists of bland restaurants or other “middle America” type places that are based around convenience.
However, where I live (east Grand Rapids Michigan), I’d consider much different than that even though it is still a “suburb”. Our populous is educated and largely liberal. Sidewalks are everywhere and the suburb is very walkable to restaurants, coffee and shopping. Homes are larger with yards, but not huge, so the footprint is reasonable and trees are abundant. Housing stock is older, with many having updated homes that retain character but have modern conveniences. It’s overwhelming safe and schools are great
The suburb I’m in feels less like a typical American suburb and feels more like a semi-urban area that retains the pros of suburb living. It certainly isn’t as dynamic or multi-model as urban life, but it packs a lot of those punches. Housing prices reflect that as it isn’t cheap, but for a 3,000 ft home it isn’t astronomical.
These suburbs are all over the country and have an extremely high quality of life. I wouldn’t recommend for 20s or early 30s singles, but for those looking for space and especially with kids, it’s a fantastic option
For the OECD commute times it might make more sense to use Table LMF2.6.A instead of Chart LMF2.6.A that is used in the post.
The table counts only people who actually commute compared to the chart that uses overall population. From the difference between the chart and the table it looks like significantly less people commute at all in the USA.
The overall point stays the same (shorter commutes in US) and provides clearer insight into the actual commute times.
I rode my bike to the grocery store in the exurb yesterday and realized I didn't want to park it in front of the just-out-of-jail characters lurking about the entrance. A small public park near there was completely fenced off to reduce the squalor that had turned it into a public health hazard. Right next to the police station, in fact. This is the kind of thing that wouldn't yet have influenced where I lived when I was in my 20s. Back then, I moved to SF and Berkeley and put up with having my car broken into and having rocks thrown through my closed front room window by the kids from across the street. More recently, the people from outside the grocery store yesterday have increased around town. My favorite wine bar gets fewer customers because they also loiter around there and the manager can't get the cops to do anything. Those people probably migrated from SF recently. Word on the street travels fast about where the cops don't pay attention. "Criminalizing homelessness" comes out of my daughter's mouth effortlessly. She moved to SF, naturally, like I once did. Tens of millions of Americans vote for Trump because it gives them a feeling that he will make sure they never have to live in a place like that.
Enjoyed the discussion and would like to see an analysis looking at population density from 100K people per square mile to 10 people per square mile treating the question of population as a continuous variable not a pairwise comparison. Agree with the conclusion that different amenities serve different groups because we can't all live in the same place! Polling to find a preferred population density would yield a very different result than simply providing an urban/suburban choice.
Noah, I particularly enjoy what I think of as your coming of age articles. Given that I first ran into your work in your late grad student years after the crash of '08, I would guess that you are now headed toward your forties. Way back in the 60-70s I followed a similar path. Started in the 40's in suburban Rochester, NY and then did most of my growing up in the country on the edge of the suburbs of thee Quadcities along the Mississippi. College in Ames, Iowa and then off to Grad school and Cambridge MA where I really enjoyed the Urban life all the way through marriage and two little boys. When the boys were ready for elementary school, the outer suburbs and good schools beckoned and that was the end of the urban life. Plenty of kids grow up in the big cities, but there really seems to be an attraction to the wider open spaces and suburban schools as the family grows, that seems to have held for the last 100 years, at least. Of course, then the kids, just like their parents are attracted to the Urban scene and the whole cycle starts over. I see you as, if not an emerging suburban Dad, quite possible a suburban rabbit manager. Good luck.
I see comments have already gone down the rabbit hole of arguing on City vs Burbs
The proper take-away is really Stop the Finger Wagging My Values or the Highway "Yet among my fellow urbanists and YIMBYs, I often encounter disdain or outright hostility toward the suburbs that define most of America’s present urban landscape. ... And I think that the constant ranting against the suburbs complicates the quest for denser cities. It creates the suspicion that urbanists and YIMBYs want to make the whole nation into Manhattan. Nothing like that could ever happen, of course; even Japan is mostly suburbanized. But painting the quest for denser metropolises as an attack on suburbia makes everything needlessly confrontational, polarized, and zero-sum."
Live and let live.
Stop making it Anti-Suburbia and Finger Wagging & Moralising.
(me I like my urban living and I have a family but the constant especially Lefty Proggy judgmentalism to the burbites is just unhelpful)
I’ll just observe that I live in a suburb town in CT. I can be in nyc or Boston by train in a couple of hours. I can be in downtown New Haven with great restaurants and music venues, world class museums, world class medical facilities in 15 minutes. I’m a short walk to a state park with miles of hiking trails. A horse farm where polo is played is a five minute drive in 15 minutes.I get fruit and vegetables from a farm in town that dates to the 1800s. I can walk to a great wine shop, a French bakery, a natural,food store, the post office, the library, city hall and my doctors office. I’m a half hour from the best beach on Long Island sound. Oh and housing is affordable. Eat yr heart out Manhattan.
I live in the suburbs...but also work in the suburbs. My workplace is literally half a mile away from my residence and I chose to live where I do for less commute time. Living in the city would entail a giant commute and huge rent for a worse lifestyle. I know I'm far from alone in this sort of situation. A LOT of people don't work "downtown" in whatever city they're in. The idea of "everyone works downtown" is just so absurdly outdated.
I think of myself as a public transport fan, but I just spent a week in Stockholm and found myself missing American car based infrastructure. Reason being, I was in Stockholm with my young kids and elderly parents. Trying to herd them all safely - and together - through multi-step itineraries on crowded buses and metro trains quickly had me missing the minivan I drive at home.
Having lived in downtowns, suburbs, an exurb, a rural and a remote community and enjoyed them all, often for different reasons, I would have expected less loneliness with less density.
I have observed that the lower the density:
- the higher the societal trust within the community
- the more general-community socializing (less siloing by interests, age, etc.)
- the easier and less formal the recruiting of volunteers
- greater social connection density. The more likely you are to know more people through multiple means (work, locale, volunteering, family, friendships, family-members' friendships).
- the greater the average connection longevity (especially life-long)
...and would expect these to reduce loneliness.
For me, less parental worrying too, due to some attractive social correlations with lower density:
- more comprehensive knowledge of people and relationships. Consequently, you have socialized with a greater share (or all) of the families of all your kids' many friends
- more assistance with raising kids when they're not with you. Your kids are recognized by more people (as yours) when they're out in the community, and know what you expect of their behaviour, or can more easily see when they're struggling or when something is wrong.