Our Homes

Recently, the Pew Research Center finished a poll on American's attitudes toward their homes.  By this, I mean (and maybe so did Pew) the places American's want to consider home, not just the walls, but the location or ideal, as in near mountains, on a river...

During the past number of years, urban planners as well as hip transit engineers, have dreamed of a new American order, one where sprawl would be eliminated, people would move to cities, urban areas, and live in dense, transit oriented developments.  Now, with the real estate crash, these same urban planners believe the idea of a single family house is dead, and are piling dirt on the suburbs as well.  In fact, many of them have articulated the belief that the real estate crash is exhibit A that the single family home was "unsustainable."  They believe high density housing, clustered around urban amenities is the panacea to everything that irks them.

You can see the effects of this urban planning dream in small townhouse condominiums that sprouted like weeds in cities throughout the West (they are, in my aesthetic opinion, ridiculously designed and probably a developer's dream because they can be replicated over and over without any additional design costs to the developer).  These urban planners believe the single family house with a yard is wasted space, encouraging the suburbanization of America.  They tend to think folks who disagree with them are old guard, out of the mainstream, and not particularly environmental.

But the Pew Research shows that most Americans still want to live in a house with a yard, a fence, and in urban areas that have natural amenities (think Seattle, Portland, Denver).  In fact, one op-ed writer opined that American's want to live in those cities and have a garage filled with outdoor equipment (welcome to my world)!  

Increasingly, I think there is a polarization that is occurring in our society that may lead to as intense battles as the so-called blue/red polarities we currently witness.  This divide is over age and, for lack of a better word, entitlement.  The young, hip, urban planner types remind me of the young, hip, Wall Street types, or the young, hip, dot.com types of the late 1990s.  They know a lot.  And are not afraid to let you know they know a lot.  But they also feel they are entitled to being right.  A recent study on expectations of college grades demonstrates my point.

And so, these young urban planners are confident. They know that all the theories they studied, all the GIS maps they've done, all the European cities they have evaluated, are right.  Density is the trick.

But homogeneity is so un-American.  We don't want to look all the same.  We don't live all the same.  Many of us have kids who play sports, all over the city.  Some of us work from home and use our cars during the day to check on elderly parents.  Seniors like getting out and about, maybe even driving to the store or a mall just to look, to be around people.  Not everyone commutes to a downtown glass office building.  Those who want to live near natural amenities want to get out in them.  Not all of us want to live in cookie-cutter close in townhouses.  I think if we wanted to be Europe we'd have designed our communities based on those models decades ago.

I think about my friend who lives less than a mile from her office.  I have known her for over 30 years, and not once has she walked, biked, or even ridden the bus to work.  But she votes for every tax that will go to mass transit.  She's emphatic that we should have it.  But she has never used it to get from her single family detached house with a yard home to work.  She drives to work because she likes to meet with friends who don't work where she does for lunch, or see them for dinner.  Her car has given her a way to maintain a vibrant and vital life with her community.

While I appreciate what the young urban planners are trying to do, and applaud their ability to reach the ears of many politicians who sit through the transit oriented development seminars at their retreats held in swanky hotels far away from urban centers, I also think the young urban planners need to realize they are not the only ones living in urban centers.  Diversity is what makes us vital.  The Pew Research shows that just as much as we are hip and like Starbucks, the same survey on housing also showed that more Americans like McDonalds.  Now, perhaps the urban planners want to encourage more fast food chains near their transit oriented development?