Key Magazine: Unlocking Urban Realities?
Diana Lind | Mon, Apr 7th, 2008 | Category: Commentary | Tags: new york city, suburbs, growth, foreclosure, diana lind, brooklyn, magazine, new york times, real estate, key magazine
In The Boomtown Mirage, Samantha M. Shapiro explores the astounding growth of Maricopa, Arizona. The town, which barely existed four years ago, now features 14,000 new houses, many of which are uninhabited and some of which are subject to foreclosure. Shapiro’s piece illustrates the perfect problem that’s created by the combination of easy money, overdevelopment, and first-time buyers. But her piece smacks of disdain for the exurban population.
She writes,"I rented a house in Rancho El Dorado for my weeklong stay in Maricopa. I figured it would be a good way to meet people… It was a four-bedroom house, located on the golf course at the end of a cul-de-sac. It had a dishwasher, a three-car garage, an office and a laundry room, all for about half the rent of my one-bedroom third-floor walk-up with crooked floors in Brooklyn. Although it was exciting to experience features you don’t often see in New York apartments, like the “great room” and the “media room,” it was kind of spooky being in a giant house with no furniture. Once the sun went down, the street was very dark and very quiet; the blank faces of empty houses were only occasionally lit by garage lights. There was nowhere to go and no one on the street.”
Of course, this kind of life isn’t ideal. But what Shapiro doesn’t seem to address in her piece is that many people don’t have the opportunity to live in a one-bedroom in Brooklyn, or even in Phoenix. Most people Shapiro’s age have families they need to support and need space to house them. These kinds of towns aren’t anyone’s top choice, but rather the best way of making do.
-image courtesy of Key Magazine
David Leonhardt’s personal essay, ”Holding On,” argues that the ultimate luxury in life is choice of where and how to live. His essay, which I highly recommend, suggests that major cities haven’t suffered from the current housing bust as much because, despite the supposed irrelevance of location (see Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat), major cities have high concentrations of ideas.
Leonhardt explains his thesis here: “‘[Cities have] always had the advantage of making the movement of people easier, the movement of goods easier and the movement of ideas easier.’ What has changed over the last few decades, Glaeser says, is that good ideas — be they in finance, entertainment, technology — have become much more valuable. The best ones can be turned into products that are soon being sold all over the world, thanks to globalization, FedEx, the Internet and a host of other forces. But it’s still much easier to come up with a good idea when you are surrounded by a lot of other people working on the same problems as you are.”
Having resided in New York City for almost a decade, Leonhardt is moving to the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Although he doesn’t comment on what kind of ideas are floating around there.
Diana Lind is editor in chief of Next American City magazine.
Richard Ginn in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Mon, Apr 07, 2008 at 7:26pm
Ah! Someone discovers the vacuum of suburbia, and the especially empty feeling of a new development, an instant community (just add people) just like all the other instant communities spread all over the nation. Many all look the same, some sort of residential fractal that is repeated over and over for whatever reason (I think there are development catalogs filled with house shapes and mailboxes and signage, maybe with ratings from banks as to which they prefer to finance based on what sold last year, thus creating uniformity). Strange as that suburb feels to the city dweller, the suburbanite might feel just as strange living in the crowded city spaces. There are happy averages, smaller cities and larger towns with some of each attraction found in either extreme. Good thing there’s some media devoted to exploring this.
Ezra in Washington, D.C.
Mon, Apr 07, 2008 at 8:27pm
Two years ago in Democracy Journal, Joel Kotkin derided the “creative class"-driven urban thinking as “Potemkin cities,” and praised fast-growing “aspirational” cities like Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Houston. These essays provide a welcome counterpoint as we find that some of this success was, in Shapiro’s term, a “mirage” of boom construction. It takes more than aspiration built on a construction boom to make a city last.
But if homeownership is not the key to a great city, let’s not leap back to “the movement of ideas,” as Leonhardt’s expert puts it. The wealthy professionals of Palo Alto or Manhattan are no more an unlimited supply than is water in the desert. For the rest of us, as for the Foxes, the hand-up given to boom construction over the past decade is going to make it hard to even “make do.”
Anne in Baltimore
Mon, Apr 07, 2008 at 10:21pm
While myself an escapee of the suburbs, I’d have to disagree with Richard’s assessment of suburbia as total vacuum. The point Shapiro herself seemed to miss was that, for all of the loneliness of the suburban setting—and since her particular setting was half-vacant, how could it be anything other than lonely—she managed to find people. People and ideas have a way of finding each other, even if only at the lowly suburban grocery store. While we like to extol the virtues of our melting-pot cities, in reality, even the glamorous cities have some pockets of demographic homogeneity as well as social and intellectual isolation.
Ms. Lind points out quite accurately that not everyone has the ability, the desire or, perhaps most importantly, the finances to partake in the “city life” of Brooklyn or Manhattan. And really, when authors like Leonhardt are talking about “city life” they are talking about Greenwich Village or the more posh sections of Brooklyn—the places inhabited by those who can afford to take full advantage of “city life” and who, according to Leonhardt, are comparatively unaffected by things like housing fluctuations because they are such wonderful, glamorous places to live. They are not, I presume, talking about places like South Jamaica, Queens or East New York, Brooklyn, which were among the many poor New York neighborhoods that experiences record foreclosure levels last year…