Deep in Suburbia

Can't get much farther away from Civic Park in Flint than Foster City, California. 

Our Increasingly Poor Suburbs

The Brookings Institution confirms that the suburbs are now experiencing conditions that Flint and other cities have been facing for decades:

"The poor have typically been concentrated in big cities and rural America. Increasing poverty in the New York metropolitan area’s historically affluent suburbs mirrored a national trend detailed in the analysis, “Confronting Suburban Poverty in America” by Elizabeth Kneebone, a fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program, and Alan Berube, a deputy director of the program.

"The first decade of the 21st century was a tipping point, the authors wrote. Suburbia, they said, is now home to the 'fastest-growing poor population in the country.'"

Visions of Suburbia

Flint Expatriates hasn't exactly been kind to proponents of suburban living over the years, so I thought it was time to devote at least one post to non-city life. I was driving down Hill Road in Grand Blanc the other day and was struck by how dated the early suburbs are looking, and how small many of the houses seem compared to more contemporary suburban McMansions. And by the care still devoted to the subdivision entry points.

When things get really bad, Flint may get better

James Howard Kunstler, the author and social critic who wrote The Geography of Nowhere, a history of suburbia and urban development in the United States, is often very pessimistic, to put it mildly, about America's post-oil future.

But in an interview with Grist, his vision doesn't sound quite so grim for smaller places like — dare I say it — Flint.

"I see it differently from many commentators, who just assume that cities are going to get bigger and that people will flee the suburbs for the cities. I think we're going to see something completely different -- I think we'll see a reversal of the 200-year-long trend of people leaving rural places and small towns for big cities and metroplexes. I think that the big cities of America -- Houston, Atlanta, Dallas, Washington, D.C., Boston -- these places have attained a scale that is simply not suited for the energy diet of the future, and in my opinion they are going to contract substantially, even while they densify at their centers and around their waterfronts, if they have them.

"If there is a huge demographic movement — and I think there will be — out of suburbia, eventually it will resolve into people moving into smaller towns, smaller cities, that are scaled appropriately to our energy diet -- and to places that exist in a meaningful relationship with productive land. We're simply going to have to do agriculture differently, no question about it, and the places where this is impossible, like Tucson and Las Vegas, are really going to dry up and blow away. In the Northeast, where I live, many of the small towns and cities have about reached their nadir — but they have many virtues that are going to become apparent in the years ahead, not least that they have a relationship with water, both for navigation and for drinking."