Make Suburbia Weird

Packing up my grandparents’ suburban house this summer, I was confronted with an unsettling and alien phenomenon: a place I loved, that I considered my own, that I would have wanted to keep — but where I could not imagine living.

Yet this situation is considered normal, even ideal, in American life. If you are lucky, you are raised in the suburbs, then migrate to the cities to enjoy your young professional life, then in due course back to a different suburb to raise your children, then off a retirement destination when your children are raised. Home is where your current housing costs are.

If you had to present an ideal argument for the American suburb, my grandparents’ house in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, would not be a bad choice. The winding streets may lack the welcoming navigational ease of the urban grid, but they also avoid the exurban scream of endless naked homogeneity. The houses are variegated here and there, variations on a theme. They range from modest to ample, but ample means a split-level colonial revival with a garage, not a teeming mass of pustular gables heaving and straining to break free of an undersized lot. There is nothing to win any architectural awards here, but nothing that on a basic level offends the instinctive unschooled eye either. The siding is vinyl, but the foundation is brick or stone.

The streets are well-shaded by trees planted by the first homeowners, when the estate was a postwar new build on former farmland. (New estates, and worse, warehouses, displacing remaining farmland is a reminder that this nicely balanced compromise is perhaps inherently unstable. But the status quo is pleasant enough while it lasts.) The gentle wending of the road, the relict cornfields behind the park, invite children to explore. If there are no sidewalks it is because they are genuinely unnecessary — the street is wide, the cars are occasional and deferential. As I sit on the porch remembering past adventures, I see children one by one and in little groups, rollerblading, biking, and walking, like I used to.

Suburbs have become synonymous with youthful alienation and ennui. And to be fair, the idea of needing a car for the most basic self-directed pursuits sounds dreadful to me. But as a child I did not need a car. Every year for several long glorious weeks, and, once, for an entire summer, I had everything I needed at hand. My best friend was next door. My sister slept in the pine twin bed next to me, under the faint green light of glow-in-the-dark ceiling stars. My brothers were in the next room. There was a park across the street with thickets of raspberry canes at the back, sweet and thorny and dangerous with broken beer bottles. There was a pool down the road and a fridge in the garage full of Klondike bars. All day long, from dawn to dusk, we three girls would be up the maple tree and onto the shed roof, down the laundry chutes, off on our bikes with swimsuits under our clothes. Sometimes we barely saw an adult all day, till we came home to shuck corn and eat chicken, to catch fireflies or run from car lights in the sticky darkness, to be finally caught up and enfolded in loving and exasperated arms that bundled us off again to the crisp green sheets and the moon through the window.

I know why people like suburbs.

Now, up again for the summer to help my grandparents move out, I sit on the porch and fantasize about buying their house, keeping the green summer world forever. Then I stop short. (I believe you should be emotionally honest in your frivolous fantasies. Your money can always change, but it will always be useless to you if you aren’t real about what you want.) Could I actually live here? Would I? True, the only bar within walking distance is a P. J. Whelihan’s, but all the literature suggests that emotionally mature people can make sacrifices of this type, especially to give their children a happy childhood.

I don’t buy the argument that suburbs are the only place you can raise kids well, though. The goods usually associated with the suburbs — good schools, safe streets — are largely incidental, downstream of money and stability. When you get two beers into any man of my father’s generation, he will wax nostalgic about the joys of growing up with eleven siblings in a three-bedroom Roxborough row home. I myself remember other summers in less quintessentially suburban environments, with pools and parks and libraries, and an even greater thrill of independence in traversing them.

An environment rich in activity for children is not the unique purview of the postwar tract. For that matter, children often prefer, with a determined perversity, to pursue their activity in the interstices of the adult world rather than the spaces specially prepared for them. Children will camp out in the raspberry thicket and on the roof. Children will clamber up chain-link fences and colonize empty lots. Anywhere they are, they make and enjoy a secret world. If given the necessities of life, freedom, and reliable adults who love them, they will be happy.

What was unique about the suburban summer world of my grandparents’ house, in retrospect, was that it was a world I could not grow into, only out of. All its energy is in the secret world, in the interstices. What could I do here now? In a city or even a very small town, the relative proximity of human life and human activity of all kinds — economic, civic, artistic — provides its own unceasing drama and opportunity. In the rural places I’ve lived, you are in constant and uninterrupted conversation with the natural world on one hand, and the factors of production on the other — tractors, oil rigs, trucks carrying fertilizer salts in one direction and wheat in the other.

But what is there to do in a suburb? What goes on in a suburb? They are places for living, conceived of as a discrete activity defined by the exclusion of all others, which is what makes them so lifeless. You drive away from a suburb to go to work and come back for your regulation dose of life: work–life balance. Telecommuting does not solve this problem — a telecommute is still a commute. The point of telecommuting is that you can participate in work happening somewhere else, not that anything is happening where you are, in the suburbs. You finish your meeting, close your laptop, and exit your office into the domain of life. A suburb is defined by what it is separate from.

But then, I think, still sitting on the porch, I know what I’d do here. There’s lots to do here. I’d scrimp and save to replace the vinyl siding with wood. I’d plant cherries and apples and mulberries and persimmons behind the shed and along the driveway. I’d put a still in the basement. No one’s doing small batch applejack the way I’d do it. And mulberry brandy — you’d have to work on it, couldn’t expect it to be like the one in Armenia right off the bat. I’d experiment with building the perfect rabbitry. The rabbitry problem has not yet been solved. Rabbit burgers — Americans could eat rabbit burgers if you went at it the right way. I’d set up a butchering station in the garage. I’d put up some fencing. How many chickens could I run on half an acre?

Suburbs, like cities and country, do in fact have a characteristic good. They seem so strange, so uncannily empty on the surface, because all their possibility is in their private underside — for adults as well as children. They are tiny fiefdoms, to arrange and order optimally and devote to your demented little experiments — space enough to make real decisions, on a scale small enough for democratic accessibility. In the suburbs, everyone is a miniature aristocrat.

Or they should be. In actuality, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, keeping chickens is prohibited; your cottage industries are jointly throttled by zoning authorities and the USDA; and the pot still, for the time being, remains a victim of various alphabet agencies’ ceaseless assault on women’s hopes and dreams. And that’s before you deal with the HOA and the neighbors in general. If you like restoring old cars or refrigerators, you cannot keep future projects lying around your yard. If your gardening ambitions extend beyond the purchase of a riding mower, you may have to fight for them. It is not out of the question that the very colors you paint your home in are regulated. In general, anything too ambitious, too visible, too eccentric, or too fun will be suspect.

The traditional selling point of the suburbs, as a kind of nature preserve for serene and pure life, unsullied by any bumptious activity, is at odds with its real good — as a ferment of individual projects and their caprices. As much as we all hate legal crackdowns on innocent goods, there is simply no constituency for deregulating the suburbs as long as people are buying into them on these terms. And even if there were, the financial underpinnings of the suburbs forbid it. You have your fun in the cities, and if you’ve done well, you leave them, like eels migrating to the Sargasso Sea, to raise your young in the suburbs. Eventually, you fund your second round of fun (in Florida this time) with the next generation of in-migrants, who will buy your house for more than you paid for it. Everyone has a gun to everyone else’s head, watching for a sign of unpredictable movement that might impair the property values.

In the Summer 2024 issue of this journal, Joel Kotkin argues that the suburbs of America, not the cities, are where our future lies. So be it, if that’s the way it goes. Urbanization took the population of rural America, and turnabout is fair play. But if that’s the way it goes, I hope the suburbs come into themselves — with a still in every basement and a bakery out of every garage and a scrap iron art gallery in every yard, and four generations in every house. I hope they become places for sullied, bumptious life, all of it, and not just sanatoriums for serene living.