Suburbia

[dmaze]

Yesterday, this trend occurred to me: living in the city is expensive and cramped. So people move to the suburbs because housing is cheaper, the schools are better, and you can get more land. But now they have these long commutes. So companies start moving out to the suburbs too, so suburban professionals will be more attracted to the shorter commute. But now those suburbs start getting pricey and overbuilt, so people move further...lather, rinse, repeat.

(If you're familiar with California geography at all, my mom, who works in Mountain View, had some coworkers who commuted in from Los Banos: that was the nearest place that was sufficiently affordable that they could live, even if it came with a 90-minute-each-way commute.)

To some extent, none of this is new. When I lived in southern New Hampshire, Digital already had lots of locations around 495 and even in Nashua on Spit Brook Road. The last time I drove through Hudson, though, it was a lot more built up than it had been 20 years ago. And there are established problems with sprawl, ranging from transit (getting people from "somewhere in Rockingham County, NH" to "somewhere around Burlington, MA" is harder than getting people from "Dorchester" to "Cambridge") to Wal-Mart (there wasn't one of those in Hudson in 1986).

Comments

[kilroi.livejournal.com]

Cos suggested this book to me, "Edge City", by Joel Garreau.

It discusses pretty much precisely that, and why America likes it. A really good book; I've been recommending it along to many people.

[iabervon.livejournal.com]

The thing I find odd is that suburban commuters don't have a shorter commute to companies in the suburbs, because they are unlikely to happen to live in the same suburb that the company is in. When I've worked at companies in Somerville and Cambridge, my suburbanite coworkers have never had particularly much trouble getting to work; when I worked in Peabody, people would not infrequently give up on trying to get there due to traffic. Although it was partially due to working somewhat offset hours, I think I had a shorter commute from the city than people had from the suburbs.

My suspicion is that the motivation for companies to be in the suburbs is simply that it is easier to get space there, not that it is convenient for anybody.