Reply #29: I'm with you, yurbud [View All]

I can understand the appeal of cities. I can understand the appeal of genuine small towns. I can even understand why some people like to live out in the country (although I wouldn't like it). Hell, I can even understand the appeal of the older inner suburbs, which were built for people instead of for cars.

But I cannot understand the appeal of the suburbs built since about 1965. They combine the isolation of the countryside with the traffic of the city, and you can't walk anywhere unless you drive somewhere to do it.

Suburban apologists say, "Oh, the suburbs are booming because Americans don't like dense housing."

Okay, so what's with all the mega-apartment complexes springing up along the freeways in ex-cornfields and cow pastures?

People move into these oversized, anonymous housing tracts or mega-apartment complexes that are cut off from everything except the freeway. They're an hour from work. They're 15 minutes from the grocery store. Their kids have to be chauffeured everywhere (and there's a lot of "everywhere, because sports appear to be compulsory for suburban chlidren. God forbid that a child should pass up the opportunity to be regimented).They have to spend thousands of dollars per year maintaining two or three cars per household.
So what do they complain about?

Cost of living. (Hey, living in a place where you needed only one car would give you an immediate, tax-free rise in disposable income, enough to make up for higher housing costs closer in.)
Traffic. (What do you expect with your two+ cars per household and your need to drive everywhere?)
Lack of time. (Yes, two hours going back and forth to work plus another hour or two carting kids around to their compulsory round of activities really eats into one's day)

A friend who recently retired from teaching in a suburban high school said that some of her students were sleepier than average during the day. When she asked why, she found that they were working till ten or eleven at night at fast food places. Why were they doing that? To pay for their cars. Why did they need cars? To get to their fast food jobs.

If that's the level of logic operating in the suburbs, it's no wonder that they vote Republican.