I’ve lived in some version of the suburbs for a sizable majority of my life. I spent the first 18 years in Port Arthur, Texas. At about 60,000 people, Port Arthur was half the size of nearby Beaumont and around 100 miles east of Houston. After two years of college in a suburb of Austin, I worked, lived, and cavorted in the sprawl that is north Houston from 1999 to 2009.
In August 2009, the skies parted, and the heavens blessed me with residence smack dab in the middle of Houston. It was beautiful, and I lived there until December 2014.
But what did I do three months before my daughter was born?
I moved BACK to the Houston suburbs!
Going south this time, I went for all of the reasons people typically give for such decisions. Good public schools and a house I could afford with an actual yard where my kid could play when she got older.
To this day, I’m conflicted about the decision I made for a whole passel of reasons:
- The hour-each-way commute to my job is soul-crushing.
- It’s also harmful to the environment.
- Most of our friends still live in town (or in the north suburbs).
- When my family wants to do anything fun beyond going to one of the (excellent) neighborhood parks, we drive INTO TOWN.
And that doesn’t even count any of the typical complaints people have about the suburbs. The blandness, chain restaurants, HOAs, small-town mindset, and lack of culture. Much less the sheer distance to anything beyond the rows upon rows of lookalike houses designed to crush even the most resilient of spirits.
There’s a reason why so many movies and so much music about, by, and for teenagers directly discuss rebelling against and rejecting the ethos and aesthetic of the suburbs. The subtly enforced sameness doesn’t encourage kids to express themselves. Not to mention it doesn’t help that teenagers lack the freedom to change their surroundings.
In short, it’s easy to mock the suburbs and hold them in perpetual disdain for being bastions of repression, soulless consumption, and culture-free existence.
Jason Diamond agrees with a vast majority of these claims, and he discusses them in fantastic detail throughout The Sprawl. Subtitled “Reconsidering the Weird American Suburbs” and released on Coffee House Press, the book spends over 200 pages describing, deconstructing, and reassembling this most American of inventions. After all, you can’t really imagine baseball and apple pie without conjuring up images of June Cleaver, Donna Reed, and Betty Draper running their suburban households while their husbands commute to city jobs.
Yet, a funny thing happened on the way to what could’ve been a cheap trashing of the suburbs. Diamond insidiously builds a very sturdy case that the idea of the suburbs isn’t a bad one. It’s the sprawl that’s the problem. Specifically its associated capitalistic underpinnings. Across 11 chapters of intertwining history, memoir, and cultural criticism, the reader is presented with the idea it might actually be OK to not live in a bustling urban center. Specifically, if we can find a way to redefine how to live, work, and play in those areas.
For a glimpse of how this might look, let’s re-examine all the core criticisms I levied earlier with some of the solutions the author presents:
- The commute – Replace it with companies moving to the suburbs or increasing the ability to work from home
- The cars – Replace them with reliable public transportation that can bring suburban dwellers to to the city
- The community – Better city planning so people don’t have to drive everywhere for everything
- The capitalism – Center the businesses more effectively to create better public spaces and eliminate the removal of natural vegetation
Diamond is a very persuasive writer. The basic thesis of The Sprawl is this:
If the suburbs are supposed to be this mythical and pastoral middle-ground between the urban and rural, then the project wholly failed. However, it can be fixed.
And he’s absolutely right. If you drive the major thoroughfares between any major city and its adjoining suburbs, little to no separation exists between them. The sprawl has killed the idea of the suburbs while also caused them to metastasize almost exponentially. It’s not that the suburbs as a concept are bad, but we’ve hopelessly mangled the creation and execution of that idea for a very long time.
To be clear, Diamond does not give the suburbs a free pass. He pens lengthy passages declaiming their history of segregation, sexism, xenophobia, and religious persecution. He’s quite aware they used to intentionally keep out the “other” in the name of protection, whether of property values, womanly virtue, religious belief, or pure racism.
These efforts are helped by frequent references to how the suburbs have been rendered in American pop culture. Cinematic, literary, and musical references abound, often using these images of the suburbs we have in our heads as the lens through which Diamond walks us into his larger themes. Examples include:
- Hill Valley, CA in Back to the Future
- Shermer, IL in the John Hughes Cinematic Universe
- Sacramento, CA in Lady Bird
- Grosse Pointe, MI in The Virgin Suicides
- The existential ennui of David Lynch
- Anthony Bourdain
- John Cheever
- William Gibson
- Chief Keef
- Arcade Fire
- Lil Peep
- The Pleasure Seekers and Suzi Quatro
- Madonna
- Iggy Pop
- Touch and Go
- Danzig / The Misfits
He even manages to spend an entire chapter outlining why the classic idea of the mall as envisioned by its creator – Victor Gruen – is good! To the author, it should be used as a key way to reduce the noxious spread of the suburbs. Not because it’s a place to spend money, but because it’s a place to gather and build community.
Ultimately, The Sprawl does not seek to praise or kill the suburbs.
It’s a deliciously empathetic and clear-eyed treatise about The American Dream and the various ways it’s mythology has worked itself into our collective brains. It digs deep into how those lived ideals have often created disastrous consequences for our individual and collective psyches.
The nostalgia of the author’s life story and pop culture touchstones are the incisive tools that help lay bare why we believe the suburbs suck, even though they’re larger and more popular than ever. But while he often reaches some depressing conclusions, he continually reaches for hope and reinvention. By first examining why people like the suburbs alongside case studies of why people have broken free of them, he can analyze how they’re broken and explores ways of making them better.
Jason Diamond has given us a genuine and heartfelt collection of essays equal parts personal reflection and public policy prognostication.
It’s funny, warm, and eminently readable. But I still think I want to sell my house and move back into Houston proper.
To learn more about Jason Diamond, follow him on Twitter.