Whatever Happened to the American Suburb?
On the side streets, quiet reigned; kids played in front of pretty, cookie-cutter homes. It had the slightly shabby but tidy look of countless suburbs in Long Island, in New York State, or in America at large.
But if most suburbs look similar to this one, it's because this was the first. This is Levittown.
The town, built by William Levitt, his brother Alfred, and his father Abraham, is where the American dream was conceived: In rejecting the teeming urban tenements of Brooklyn and Queens, the Levitts can be said to have given birth to the modern suburb when they built Levittown on what had once been potato fields.
Now, Levittown's history is both a point of pride and a burden.
It’s difficult to recognize the old Levittown today: The 17,447 single-story Cape Cod and ranch homes -- the 2 types built after World War II, from 1947 to 1951, for GIs and their families -- have been remodeled, expanded, and dormered beyond recognition. Still, several of the town’s original features remain, including 7 village greens, 9 pools, a community center, 2 libraries, several schools, and a post office.
Like suburbs everywhere, Levittown now has much in common with the overcrowded, noisy, and blighted tenements it was meant to replace. Increases in foreclosures and unemployment brought about the recession are besieging the once-idyllic planned community.
Our postindustrial economy is glaringly ill-suited for suburbia's low-density sprawl and a workforce made essentially immobile by the scarcity of suburban public transit. Visiting such benighted communities, one is almost grateful that the 60 years of cheap credit, cheap gas, cheap land, and cheap goodsthat made the modern suburb possible are finally over.
“It’s changed a lot here,” Bill Mullan Jr., a local architect and builder, told me as we sat at a restaurant just off of Hempstead Turnpike. “There’s a lot of concrete now. There used to be a lot of empty lots. The number of cars is out of control, and the roads are bigger.”
Gone are the mom-and-pop businesses and department stores such as JC Penney (JCP), Sears (SHLD), and Woolworth’s. They've been replaced by the ubiquitous Wal-Marts (WMT), Targets (TGT), and mini-malls.
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The suburbia that I'm familiar with - which was created ~30 years ago - was created for only one reason. So the dominate ethnic group could flee (flee in terror) from "those people". The suburbs were built as quickly as these "poor refugees" - "refugees" from horrific liberal political persecution - could find "safety" in places where they could see only their own kind.
But, in today's society, the sorting is more by economic class (but, yes, "THOSE people" still matter - becuase they're gonna git ya). So, there are still suburbs, but upper-class ones and lower-class ones. The gaited-community is an example of developers trying to market to this phenomena ("Gates, they don't JUST keep out THOSE PEOPLE anymore").
The biggest effect people have on their kids is the peer-group their kids come in contact with. This "contact" is determined largely by which schools their kids attend, which is mostly determined by where the parents choose to live. The upper-class is STILL separating themselves from the teaming-masses of peasants.
Suburbia isn't dead just like the peasants aren't saving (although, yes, they ARE upwillingly spending less).
The upper-class IS still migrating, and the ever-increasing numbers of lower-class peasants are living on the edge of survival and STILL hoping they can live like the upper-class people on TV (just a soon as those loans start-up again).
All we could afford was a turn of the century fixer upper. Please do not imagine some quint Victorian house with fancy woodwork. This was a rural home and except for the care done in the actual structure, it was devoid of some of the nicer things that come with old houses. It did have almost all of the crappy features however.
I can't tell you how many hours that flippin house sucked away of my 20's. (I can tell you how money, however, because that was neatly tracked. ;) )
There's got to be something than living to fix up a house. (Or selling your life away to buy a modern fishbowl with no real ventilation.). We rent now, do some minor repairs, and don't worry about counter tops or septic systems. Our neighbors are great. It's good, all in all, with no American box to be fixed.
