The Unsettlers by Mark Sundeen

The Unsettlers by Mark Sundeen

Author:Mark Sundeen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-12-02T12:47:44+00:00


Nine

The story of Detroit is not complete without the story of the suburbs. Indeed, the origins of the back-to-the-land movement aren’t so different from those of the suburbs. With the advent of commuter trains and freeways nearly a century ago, suburbs were envisioned as a place where people could be closer to nature, have a small garden or at least a lawn, free themselves from the pollution and crowding of the city. By the 1960s my own family had all left Los Angeles proper, my grandparents for an Orange County retirement village and my dad to Hermosa Beach with its bungalow walkstreets and sandal shops. But the suburbs also enabled sprawl and overconsumption, and resulted in isolation and segregation. And there simply aren’t enough resources—not even enough land—for everyone to have a big backyard.

These days it’s unclear exactly what a suburb is. A generation ago it was a bedroom town close to a large city, characterized by homogeneity of race and class (white, middle), low crime and good schools, and homes that were bigger and newer than their urban or rural equivalents. But all that has changed. Take Monterey Park, a suburb of Los Angeles, which is almost entirely Chinese immigrants, or Ferguson, Missouri, the suburb of St. Louis that is now predominantly lower-income blacks. Meanwhile, if Park Slope—a Brooklyn enclave of whites pushing strollers between health food stores and wine bars—is not a suburb, then what is?

Suburbs are defined less, then, by geography than they are by economics and demographics. They are a place where one can enjoy the benefits of the industrial economy—high wages, good infrastructure like roads and parks, and excellent public services such as schools, libraries, and police departments—without confronting its by-products: crime, crowding, poverty, pollution, blight.

I spent years fleeing the suburbs. Even though my family was have-nots by the standards of Manhattan Beach, from a young age I could see that we had it better than most people in the country, certainly in the world. I had done nothing to deserve such advantages. If anything, I had benefited from the sins of my ancestors who had owned slaves. What had been bequeathed to me, however, was not land or even fortune, but this more slippery thing: privilege. It meant that I grew up in a town with good schools and little crime, where when the police broke up parties, they just sent us home, straight no Taser.

When I landed in Moab, Utah, in 1993, I felt I had escaped. The “Uranium Capital of the World” was poor and undesirable after the bust of its mine had left few jobs and a mountain of toxic dirt. But in a decade that changed. As Superfund cleanup began, an economy of tourism and second homes blossomed, and suddenly you could get a latte and pad Thai and raspberry beer. A two-bedroom miner’s shack would eventually cost $250,000. I complained that the suburbs were following me.

Later I moved to Missoula, also a postindustrial outpost with a Superfund site and an air pollution problem.



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