Duncan Crary (as host): You’re listening to the KunstlerCast, a weekly conversation about the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl, featuring James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency, and World Made By Hand.
I’m Duncan Crary. Today’s topic: Children of the ‘Burbs.
James Howard Kunstler: Nice to see you, Duncan.
Duncan Crary: Nice to see you, Jim.
James Howard Kunstler: [joking] I’ve just consumed a quart of paint thinner to try to clear my mind.
Duncan Crary: So, Jim, I have a question for you. It may sound a little lame, but one of the things that people always say — the first thing they say when they choose the suburbs over living in an urban environment is, “Oh I have children. I’ve got to raise children.” But I want to ask you, is raising children in suburbia good for them?
James Howard Kunstler: Well, I think that it has a lot of drawbacks. When people say that, generally what it means is that they’re afraid to send their kids to schools in a city. And behind that are racial issues that are too toxic for us to have a public discussion about. But then there are the other aspects of living in suburbia for a child that go beyond school, that have to do with their “normal life,” supposed normal life. And they end up having a pretty abnormal life in the ‘burbs.
Apart from the school issues, kids over seven years old have a tough time in the suburbs. Under seven, they don’t really have to go anywhere. They’re happy in their little cul-de-sac, playing cops and robbers, or flies up. In fact that was my experience the three years that I lived in the suburbs between the age of five and eight. That was OK.
The trouble starts a little bit later when they have to start becoming socialized. And by that I don’t mean becoming socialists, I mean learning how to use their daily environment themselves and developing their own sense of sovereignty.
And that tends to not occur because it’s too hard for kids to get places. They can’t get to their soccer match by themselves. They can’t get to their clarinet lesson. So the family “chauffeur” ends up taking them to all of these places. And a kid doesn’t develop any sense of moving through space himself or herself under his or her own power.
And then there are other things. Now, I happen to live in a small town that is set up so that kids really can get to things on their own. They do come downtown, and they do go to the coffee shop. They go to the stores. They buy things. They learn how to do things that will eventually lead them into being fully functioning adults. The kids in the suburbs don’t learn how to do that. Mommy does everything for them.
When I was a kid, I moved from the suburbs of Long Island into Manhattan at the age of eight. Previously, my whole life was kind of centered around throwing baseballs around the cul-de-sac and riding my little bike. Then I got into Manhattan, and I didn’t even have a bike anymore when I moved to Manhattan. That was over with. My whole life, all of the sudden it was about learning how to get on a Madison Avenue bus, to go from point A to point B at the age of eight, learning how to take the crosstown bus from 86th Street to the planetarium at the Museum of Natural History.
That was kind of a scary thing for an eight year old to learn how to do, but I did. Then I got over it and I wasn’t scared anymore, then I did it over and over again. I was just a normal person using part of the city, the planetarium, going there when I was able to go.
Duncan Crary: Well, Jim, I grew up in the ‘burbs, too, and there was sort of this dead zone between the age of like 13 and 16, where you can’t drive.
James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, and your needs at that point are greater than they were when you were seven years old, and you need to be connected to stuff. And you’re frustrated continually by not being able to do it.
Duncan Crary: Well, there’s a lot of drug use in, like, Dad’s rumpus room in the basement. It’s really depressing.
James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, playing with Dad’s guns.
Duncan Crary: [laughs] It’s true, but also, we send our kids in the suburbs to these schools that look like penitentiaries. They’re really demoralizing, these suburban high schools.
James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, well I don’t understand why the schools just look so terrible and scary, why it’s necessary to do that. Obviously we didn’t do that in an earlier period. If you go up to Glens Falls, New York, there’s the old high school, which I think was converted into an office building. It’s a wonderful, dignified building. It fits in with the city. It sends a message that what goes on here is all about the eternal verities, the classical verities. The school building is a neoclassical building, so it sort of speaks in the language of the classical verities.
And then you go see the new junior high school on Route 9 in Saratoga, it looks like as Tom Wolfe described it: “an insecticide factory.”
Duncan Crary: Yeah, it’s scary. I went to a private school in Albany. I went to the Albany Academy, which a beautiful building designed by Marcus T. Reynolds. It’s a nice classical — it looks like an institution of higher learning.
James Howard Kunstler: And by the way, by saying this, I don’t think that either one of us is necessarily pimping for neoclassicism as the only way to decorate a building, or the only way to design something. It happens to be an architectural language that’s suited to our democratic society, our republic. It takes the idea from Greece of being a democracy, and the idea from Rome of being a republic and combines them.
And so we express that in a lot of our civic buildings, not just schools but libraries, museums, and all sorts of things, courthouses. But we’re not pimping for that. It’s not the only way you can — there are plenty of wonderful other styles. It’s not about style. It’s really about making a statement to the user of the building that this is a dignified place, and that it’s an honor to be here, and it’s a privileged activity that goes on in here. It’s not punishment.
But with our mentality of just creating “facilities” rather than actual typological buildings like schools, churches, etcetera. When everything is a facility, it’s really nothing. And a facility is also a prison. In fact, most of our prisons are now officially called facilities. That is actually their name. We have gotten into a lot of trouble by sort of technologisizing these things. And we manage to take all of the artistry and humanity out of them.
Duncan Crary: Jim, let me ask you something. When I was a kid in the ‘burbs one of the most common disputes, at least, among the boys when they got mad at each other, they would say, “Get off my property.” They would have these arguments over property lines. Eight, nine, ten-year-old kids. It’s absolutely insane. Did you experience any of that when you grew up?
James Howard Kunstler: It’s funny that you mentioned it. I seem to dimly remember exactly those kinds of things. I guess what it shows is that the exaggerated sense of hyper-individualism out in the suburbs is even communicated to eight-year-old kids.
Duncan Crary: You know, Jim, one of the things that kills me, there is a strip mall in a suburban town that I visited that has a sign saying, “No bicycle riding. No skateboarding. No horseplay.” And I just think “What the hell are these kids going to do?” These are their public spaces now, strip malls, and because they are privately owned the kids can’t interact with the centerpiece of their town at all. It’s really sad.
James Howard Kunstler: The whole key to understanding the suburbs, I think, has to do with the impoverishment of the public places and the glorification of the private realm. We have more bathrooms per inhabitant in our houses of any nation in the world, but we have extremely poor public places in most of suburban America, which is most of America.
Most of the public places for kids are the leftover scraps, you know, the berms, the parking lots, the places that nobody really cares about. We have very few places that really demand respectful behavior from the kids, and so you put them in a place like that they are going to tend to be as wild as possible.
You put them in a berm between the Wal-Mart and the K-Mart, and they are going to torture kitty cats and make homemade tattoos and smoke bongs and drink aftershave. That is how they behave in the public place of the berm in suburbia between the K-Mart and the Wal-Mart.
Duncan Crary: I had a pretty good childhood. I’m not trying to complain, but one of the lingering psychological effects is that I have anxiety whenever I find a nice open, undeveloped natural place, because growing up in suburbia the landscape got so gobbled up as I grew older. I don’t want to get attached to any patch of woods or field or anything. Do you experience any of that? I feel an anxiety about that.
James Howard Kunstler: Oh, yeah. I think it creates a lot of tension and anxiety. Tony Hiss wrote a wonderful book back in the late ’80s called The Experience of Place in which he said pretty much that nobody in America anymore feels that they are entitled to go back home and find it being the same thing that it was when they left a few years earlier.
The rate of change has been terrible. It’s not just the rate of change. It’s the quality of the changes that have taken place because almost everything we’ve built in the last 50 years has made people uncomfortable or made their lives worse.
In fact, that is what is really behind so much of the NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) activity today when the demonstrators come out. First, the bulldozers show up. Guys in the yellow hard hats show up, and then the NIMBY protesters come out. They don’t want anything new built next to them because all these things have made their lives worse. The old expression is they don’t want a house just like their house next to their house.
Duncan Crary: Yeah, they originally moved into someone else’s backyard, too, before they started protesting. The whole situation has got me — it’s funny because the word “development” has been hijacked. I dread the word “development.” Development should be a positive word, shouldn’t it?
James Howard Kunstler: Oh, yeah. But to us basically, it just means a new parking lot will appear next to your house.
Duncan Crary: I don’t want to see any more “developments.” I’ve heard people actually say that raising children in suburbia is a form of child abuse. I get the feeling you wouldn’t actually agree with that statement, would you?
James Howard Kunstler: Well, you know, I don’t think it’s that far off the mark. But, obviously, this is really mostly not intentional. Most people move to these places because that’s what we’ve got in America. We don’t have a whole lot of choice, especially when it comes to the schools.
People are making these decisions because they feel like they are compelled to make them. It’s just unfortunate. The suburbs are not good places for kids. The cities are not really adequate the way most of them are in America.
You know, New York City has a lot of wonderful amenities and attractions and opportunities, but it’s really an overwhelming place. I don’t think that kids necessarily feel comfortable in it. The scale of the streets and the buildings is huge. The traffic is overwhelming and frightening. There are very few places in Manhattan or Brooklyn that are really scaled very well for kids, and that’s one of the better environments in the U.S.
You go outside of New York, and you start talking about Akron, Ohio, and Kansas City. It’s really hard. For me, the default solution would be small town America, but a lot of people don’t have the ability to get there, and there isn’t that much of small town America left that’s still OK, you know. A lot of it is really struggling.
Around here where we are, the town of Saratoga Springs is doing fairly OK. It’s healthy, but most of the other towns around here are in a kind of a post-Soviet backwater haze of desolation and dereliction. Their school systems are suffering. Physically, the places are deteriorating. It’s a really tough one.
Where are you going to live in America? You can count on your hands the places that are really wonderful, and there are very few places that are even adequate beyond that.
Duncan Crary: Well, Jim, it’s always a pleasure talking to you. Thanks a lot.
James Howard Kunstler: It’s always a pleasure to be here, Duncan.
Duncan Crary: See you next week.
James Howard Kunstler: OK.
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I’m your host, Duncan Crary. Thanks for listening.
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