When my fiancé and I started looking for houses, I was undecided on whether I wanted to live in the city or somewhere completely rural. My fiancé pointed out that living in the sticks would result in way too long of a commute (damn him and his logic!), and also that we were both starting to tire of the proximity of our neighbors after many years of city living. As much as I hated to admit it, the latter was true; we were routinely woken up an hour or so before our alarms by the mother next door yelling at her sons to get out of bed. The wee hours of the morning were sometimes accompanied by bar patrons puking outside our bathroom window, and it was common knowledge that if our neighbors were eating dinner at their dining room table, they were looking clear into our kitchen.
With these two well-made points, I had to confront what was, for me, a less popular option: The Burbs.
I can admit that it was hard for me to leave the city life; crowded as it was, I loved the shops and the bars, the restaurants revitalizing tired neighborhoods and breathing new life. Our city is in the midst of a renaissance, and the thought of leaving in the middle of all that saddened me. Facts were facts, though; I was raised in a house with a backyard that backed up to woods and fields, and I was secretly yearning to have my own piece of green space and the open fields just a mile or two away.
My friends were shocked to hear that we had purchased a home in the suburbs. We didn’t seem like the type, the couple to want the white picket fence and the perfectly manicured lawn.
Only that’s not the type of suburb dwellers that we are.
Instead of a sprawling castle in a brand new subdivision, we reside in a small Cape Cod in a lower-income neighborhood. We are using our decently-sized backyard to grow vegetables, and built a raised bed out of someone else’s cast-off bricks to grow hops for when we brew beer. We collect up downed branches from our trees and, instead of putting them at the street for pick up, we invite our friends over for a bonfire. We compost our leaves and scraps in a homemade compost bin in the backyard, and ride our bikes through cow pastures in the dying light of the summer evening. While we aren’t a stone’s throw from a culturally cool bar, we have been investigating our local pubs and have even found some that have great microbrews on tap and sell them for super cheap.
Do I sometimes feel like a sellout to my generation for leaving the city for the suburbs? Hell yes. Do I feel like it was a bad decision? Sometimes… but it’s a decision I’d make again. I guess it’s time to own up to the fact that I am a suburbanite now, and try my hardest to break the stereotypes.
The funny thing is that I didn’t even know there was such thing as suburbs until I moved out of Las Vegas! Seriously; Vegas is just one big, sprawling suburb. Hardly anyone lives on the strip because well…that’s where all the hotels are. Granted, there have been developments with high-rise, luxury apartments being put onto the strip, but no Vegas local would want to live right next to where all the craziness is. We’ve been having a hard time selling the apartments as well (too expensive and no access to nearby convenience such as grocery stores).
Every part of Vegas outside the strip is nothing but your typical fare of stucco-block housing with layout A, B, C, etc. the only ‘inner city’ we have is downtown and a bit past the Las Vegas boulevard part, and that’s where the ghetto pretty much is.
Honestly, I got sick of suburbia as everything seems to be the same…one foreign exchange student from Pakistan once told my class that she hated the housing here in America because they all look the same, lol. Such a shame that she hasn’t seen other American cities, as that won’t be the case!
I live in Los Angeles now, and I must say that I love the charm of living in a beach city (South Bay area). So unique and a breath of fresh air from what I’m used to!
I’m always wondering: what exactly is it that defines a suburb as a suburb? Is it a residential neighborhood with parks and community centers? Do you have to be removed from the city center by so many miles? In Portland (where I live) I hardly know anyone that lives in “proper-downtown”. Most people I know live in the little sub-neighborhoods within the city limits and each area has it’s own little restaurants and shops but is mostly residential. What is it that makes a suburb different? Just wondering what people’s definitions are.
I think of suburban as a non-dense residential neighborhood without much that you can walk to. In some suburbs, you can walk to a corner store or a coffee shop, but you almost always need to drive to the grocery store.
Does most everyone have a yard? Are there many apartment buildings or is it mostly single-family dwellings? Do most people get in their cars to drive elsewhere to work? These are all hallmarks of suburbs, which I think of as very different from urban villages… where you have a mix of multi-family dwellings and single family dwellings clustered within walking distance of commercial strips that include restaurants and a grocery store.
I referred to my neighborhood as a street car suburb because the streetcar used to run right down the main commuter street (which runs from just east of the city center out to the suburbs). I wish it still did because, as many people probably know, the move to buses from cars was terrible for an urban location. Our city transit system is a joke.
To me suburbs are usually planned developments and are not based around a multi use commercial areas (offices, stores, entertainment, etc.). Most are not within walking distance of commercial areas either, or are based around car travel to access such areas even if people do walk. Housing tends towards single family homes with yards, and there is not an emphasis on mixed types of housing or mixed income areas. There is an emphasis on sprawl and not density.
I grew up near Columbia, MD which was planned to be “villages” around centers that had stores, restaurant, and some offices, all connected by walking/biking paths. Despite this planning it has turned into a lot of sprawl with strip malls ,and it’s very car dependent. The original idea was noble but I would say it hasn’t been entirely successful.
I TOTALLY feel the same about selling-out. I have been a die-hard “Inner-Looper” (urbanite) since I escaped the suburbs after my divorce 10 years ago.
Now, my new husband and I are buying a house in a suburb. It’s a close-in suburb and is recent construction, but it’s so… Pleasantville.
I won’t be composting or brewing beer, but I hope I otherwise adjust as well as you have. I’m having a lot of anxiety about the radical change from everything I need being half a mile or less from my house, to everything I need being scattered 3 miles away.
My husband and I just moved into a house in a suburb north of Atlanta. The move resulted in needing a second car, because sprawl, which led to a lot of feels, but oh well. Biking to work was just not happening with the current construction. So far the transition has been great from our little 1/1 . We can garden and compost, and our dog had a yard. The best part has been the neighbors! We have these old short fences from the 50s with gates connecting the backyards. One neighbor has a few dogs and now we have dog play dates just by opening the gate!