Why the Suburbs Are Terrible for Us (and the Planet)

In this Our Changing Climate climate change video essay, I look at why the suburbs are so terrible for people and the planet. Specifically, I look at the racist history of the suburbs in the United States in order to understand how the suburbs came about. The suburbs have a dark history of white supremacy and settler colonialism that suburbanites still wrestle with today. Suburban design, a result of white flight and fear of the perceived ills of the city, locked in a way of living and a way of moving about the landscape that is incompatible with the environment. The suburban lifestyle is not sustainable, both in terms of our well-being and our planet.

Check out other Climate YouTubers:

Timestamps:
0:00 - Intro
1:38 - Settler-Colonial Roots
5:57 - How Racism Made the Suburbs
10:06 - Suburbia's Environmental Destruction
12:28 - Building for the Planet and People
15:15 - Check Out the Nebula Companion Video
17:44 - What To Watch Next

_______________________

#suburbs #urbandesign #climatechange

[OurChangingClimate]

How is your city (or town) designed? Do you like it or hate it?

[NotJustBikes]

This was an exceptional summary of the explicitly racist origins of modern suburbia. I have literally nothing to add. This is a great video.

[aliciadelasmaravilla]

Moved to Germany from California three years ago. I lived in a very typical home. Then once I lived here I was in shock at how accessible everything is. Within a 5 min walking distance I have multiple hair salons, bakery, pharmacy, doctors office, hotel, grocery store, post office and many small shops. I don’t even live in the city centre. If I go to the city centre it’s much bigger stores and lots of shops with a huge park. All my friends here also live within a walking distance to nearby stores and small shops. It’s just normal here. It’s so convenient and sometimes I will never understand as why the USA can’t replicate this. The city I live in isn’t for rich people and it’s very affordable. The crime here is low and I feel safe walking around.

[PixelShade]

One thing I find interesting with western capitalist culture and American suburbia is how the lifestyle demands consumption. Since you become car dependent, everything you have to do becomes a massive chore, you can't pop in for some fresh produce grocery shopping on your way back from work, instead you do it once a week, requiring enormous freezers and fridges (not to mention that many American foods would be illegal in Europe due to all conservatives and antibiotics). But other than that, with massive spaces the house demand a lot of furniture, and with no services in close proximity (gym, cinema, public baths, library etc), each house owner wants their own gym, their own home cinema, their own pool etc in this never-ending pursue of comfort (due to car dependency)... American suburbia is tailored around exploiting consumer patterns amongst its inhabitants, it systematically demands and exploits you to consume more.

Personally I live in a small apartment, 21sqm (226sqft) in Malmö, Sweden. I live close to the sea (great for swimming), I live close to parks (great for workout and we have tons of outdoor gyms as well), the cinema is only 15 minutes walk away through a park, and you can always rent movies, books, and even games for free at the library. These days I barely consume anything but groceries, and those are bought on a daily basis, which means that I never throw away food. It's such a stark contrast to American suburbia. But with this being said, there are well designed suburbs as well. My childhood home was in such a suburb. The train would take me to the city within 15 minutes. It was built around local services, gorcery stores, flower shop, library, gym, restaurants, even video games stores, youth centers etc. you name it. Houses were often two stories built in chains (reducing energy consumption), they weren't oversized and they didn't have massive lawns (no one had anything else but a manual lawn mower). instead housing areas were built around local forests, and fields, and then the municipality added benches, playgrounds in those natural environments and made them accessible as public spaces. It's weird, it was close to nature, close to the city, and still financially viable for the municipality due to the local commerce.

So really, suburbs themselves aren't terrible, but the typical American suburbia is. (With this being said, you can find similar kind of development in Sweden as well, and it pains me whenever I see it)

[Orynae]

I just explained American cul-de-sacs to my French bf the other day... "Cul-de-sac" is a French word, but it just means a dead end road, it doesn't really evoke the same image -- more of an alleyway than a sprawling suburb.

[pickuptrash]

Very interesting topic. Urban sprawl like in LA is very untypical here in Europe. Thanks for shedding light on this problem!

[mariegarside]

I live in white flight suburbs that is currently exploring how to improve zoning. The fears expressed when accessable multi use neighbors are discussed is astonishing. Many residents list traffic and parking as reasons to remain primarily single family homes community. Expanding and improving public transportation is seen as the problem not as part of the solution.

[klubstompers]

The problem is, we are not building new cites. We are just sprawling outwards from existing cities, or infilling already overly congested ones.
If we planned new cities with urban design as the main focus, we could create wonderful places to live. When that city fills to the designed population, you build another city, a few miles away. It is a lot cheaper to design a good city from the start than to try and fix cities with bad planning.
I don't understand why there aren't developers building this way, when there is such a huge demand for homes in well designed areas of existing cities where good urban design exists. Not only is this a better way of living, and better for the environment, but every aspect of these urban economies thrive. These areas are always the most desirable, and are the places people visit when they travel to the US.
Nobody has ever said i want to visit the US to see the suburbs. People come here to see national parks and cities, and this is where they spend their $$$$.
Urban design supports many small business', and contributes greatly to the overall prosperity of an area.

[tylerbhumphries]

I completely agree and it’s still happening. I live in St. Louis city. Born and raised and not enough has changed. Over the past 2 years I’ve learned so much about my city’s racist history after I inherited a house that was built in 1899. My grandparents bought the house in 1962 and within 4 years, all the White people in the entire neighborhood was gone and the neighborhood was moved from yellow to red on the maps. Because the neighborhood was majority Black, it was never put on the historical registry so my house, which is a decade older than the houses in the next physical neighborhood, does not qualify for any of the grants or loans to help restore it. To put that into perspective, if my house was located across the street from where it currently is, I could have gotten a $20k grant to restore my house. The only reason the other neighborhood was put on the historic registry was because it stayed majority White for longer. All of our houses are the same design with the same materials and my neighborhood is older. And the only reason these grants and loans are popping up for the other neighborhood (which is where I currently live in an apartment) is because it’s being gentrified.

But it’s deeper than that. Because the house I inherited has been devalued for so long (because the neighborhood was redlined), I couldn’t pull equity from it to renovate it. The house has been paid off since before the 1990s. According to the City of St. Louis, my house is worth the same as a burned down house at the end of the street. My house is a 2, 000 sq ft, 3 story, brick house. Yes, all the big box things (plumbing, electrical, and HVAC) need to be updated but the house should not have to same property value as a completely burned down house.

I don’t want this to come off as a hate post because it’s not. I’m thankful for most of my new neighbors because they are restoring these beautiful turn of the century homes. I just hate that the Black people who own these properties will not benefit from it. I know a lot of us don’t have the money to quickly renovate these homes but the homes would have never got has bad as they did if they hadn’t been cut off from traditional means of financing. You can’t put a mortgage on the homes where my house is because the property values are too low for a bank to touch. I went through that when I found out I couldn’t pull equity so I tried to take our a mortgage. Even offered to buy it from my mom. I was told by several banks that I qualified for a mortgage but my neighborhood didn’t. It’s frustrating.

[staviwavi]

What about ecovillages as a solution to the suburb problem? One example is Ithaca: they took land slated for suburban development. Originally the land was going to be 90% houses, driveways, roads, etc and 10% greenspace. The ecovillage took the land and flipped the numbers. 10% is for mid density townhouses and 90% is for forests, farms, parks, etc. They did this while housing a similar number of people. Truly inspiring. A better way is possible and ecovillages offer interesting case studies

[grimsbeast]

Watched this over on Nebula but wanted to comment here. This video is the kind of thing of why I became an eco-socialist. These issues are not separate but heavily intertwined and I hope to start making the changes pointed out in the video. Meanwhile, a small way I am helping out is refusing to conform to the suburb norms of having a lawn and such. Not only am I slowly converting my lawn to clover but I have several wildlife gardens in and around my house because whenever I go for a run in my suburb, I just always get the sense of how much these are just life deserts.

[Gigachad-mcqz]

Sometimes i wonder what wouldve happened with the native americans if there wasnt colonialism

[Lilli-Marie]

I’m from the City with the biggest bike parking garage in the world :) So I guess that says it all (I love it!) I just spend a month traveling the US and I miss Utrecht so much! Using public transport or quickly going to the store is barely existent in the US… and so so so many homeless people, breaks my heart :(

[AlexCab_]

Have you also noticed suburbs lack people in their 20s? It seems to mostly be older people because even people who grew up in suburbs hate it and tend to move to major cities and I think that is the solution for the burbs, to depopulate them and to move to dense major cities.

[PawsOnTheBalcony]

I'm so glad that at least in my hometown in Austria, officials recently made an ordinance that all newly built houses must have at least 2 units or must be built with use by 2 families in mind. I don't mean apartment buildings here, but what, in America, would be a single-family house.
I also live in a suburban town with 6, 000 people, but I live in an apartment building, while my parents live in a single-family home in the same town. I can walk, bike or take the e-scooter to the store, and there's a bus going to the next bigger city with 250, 000 inhabitants. Only reason I still have a car now is because while going to the city with public transit is easy, going home later in the evening or at night is very hard.
But yeah, suburbs really don't need to be these car-centric, soul crushing food deserts that they are in America, if houses and infrastructure are built with a bit of brains.

[FinancialShinanigan]

HOAs allowing trees to be planted in yards that have space will be a plus but won't happen because it'll obstruct the views from their breakfast nook

[neelp]

I grew up in a dense city, neighborhood and Apartment complex. Currently I live in a suburban home, personally I would pick it over the apartment any day since dense housing has no privacy, room to pursue outdoor hobbies or a functional garage where I like to fix things. It might work for people who like being part of crowd and chaos that comes with it but some people like peace and quiet that comes with a suburban home and its well worth it.

Forcing people to cram into a densely populated urban core because it has less carbon footprint giving them sleepless nights and anxiety is probably not the best idea. Yes the HOA's and
"hassle" of fitting into a ideology takes some effort but its the same as putting up with the noise, chaos and crowd of living in a packed neighborhood.

[FutureCommentary]

Pete Buttegieg mentionned in a recent interview that the expression "wrong side of the track" tells us a lot about why certain roads/tracks were historically created in the USA.

[MyrthexLatoya]

wait… US suburbs don’t have shops/supermarkets? I get needing to go a bit further for things like cinemas because those will be in the centres of towns, but basic things like supermarkets? Why try to isolate yourself from all the ‘scary and dangerous’ things in the city and then design your place in a way that you STILL have to go into the city for basic needs? That doesn’t make sense at all 😅

[Thebreakdownshow]

Another great video, there is a huge contrast between the way Europe developed compared to America and even Canada.