yo I’m anticapitalist as fuck
but i kinda fuck with the aesthetic of this picture. i know suburbs suck. but its weirdly pleasing to look at? right?
Maybe from above. Walking around in-person, I’d be saddened by the lack of trees, color, interesting architecture. I don’t even see any parks or playground equipment - where is the life? Is there anywhere the people can go outside and meet up? There’s no sprawling gardens filling up backyards, no pools, no firepits… I grew up in the suburbs and we had all of the things I’ve mentioned in this post. Even the city-building games I play show more vibrant life than this image.
Yeah I mean this aerial photograph in particular looks cool. It would suck IRL
Aerial photographs almost always look cool
Tangential, ever get to see an aerial view of your own neighborhood? It’s pretty cool. My brother and I are both pilots, though he’s current with it while I haven’t flown in years. He visited my parents’ place some time ago and I got to ride along and take pictures of our old neighborhood from above, while he got to fulfill a childhood dream of flying into/out of the local airport (where we used to sit and watch planes doing exactly that.) It was amazing. :)
They could not live with their own failures… 😊
I want people to realize that new housing today has a clause that limits the expected useful age of new builds to around 65-75 years. I just read one a few months ago from keller Williams, before a family member signed. It stated the house had an expected lifespan of 65 years. I get it, proper care and updating will keep it going for decades but a house should not have an expected lifespan of less than the average human lifespan.
Capitalism is not good for humans or the planet.
More like Drabpitalism amirite?
That’s my set for tonight, stick around for the next act and try the salad bar!
We can paint it later when we’re not worried about homelessness. Although in capitalist America I can guarantee an hoa will be there to tell you you can’t paint it a non drab color
Soviet architecture being like that has nothing to do with socialism and everything with authoritarianism. Just like everything else they did.
Soviet architecture is a byproduct of the material circumstances of the moment. The USSR industrialized at an unforeseen speed, took it less than 40 years to reach industrial maturity compared to 100-150 for Great Britain and Germany. They had to build housing for tens of millions of people in newly erected cities from scratch. They managed not only to do that, but to do it fairly, guaranteeing housing for everyone and eliminating homelessness, housing costing 3% of monthly income on average, and on top of that it was built in walkable neighborhoods with a wide variety of services nearby from stores to schools to medical care, and with top notch public transit and urban planning for the time, leaving space for green areas and playgrounds.
Nothing of that is authoritarian, you’ve been brainwashed by capitalism to hate socialism.
Socialism in the USSR stopped existing after the first elections they tried to hold. But it’s not like you’re going to engage in a good faith argument to begin with. Must feel nice to have a Good Camp that can do no wrong.
The equivalent of these people did not live in commie blocks either. The people who did still live in tenements or are straight up homeless.
Communist societies not having a large middle class is a different question though.
100%. They socialized the civic losses and sacrifices, and privatized the gains for their oligarchy.
There may be an argument about how the two are linked, but the -ism on display in the second photo is racism. The US built the suburbs quite explicitly to keep black people out by using poverty as a proxy, after the SCOTUS blocked housing segregation.
Yes, and it’s also unfettered capitalism. Developers buy land cheap, build homes cheap, and sell them for a profit. That’s usually not in the best interests of the homeowners or the community. In many other countries, homeowners buy land, choose a builder, buy materials, and contribute to their local area. It’s a system that costs slightly more upfront, but most of the value stays where it should, with the homeowners and the laborers. There’s no mass-produced garbage or corporate veils to syphon and protect profits far away from the community.
And new houses suck now, like everything does.
Even buildings built for the homeowner suck, because building codes suck and construction materials suck. It’s very hard, and very expensive, to build a nice home of any size. And even if you spend the money, you’ll never get it back because the market doesn’t value quality.
the -ism on display in the second photo is racism.
You can definitely go into the deep history of Levittowns, Master Planned Country Club communities, and Red Lining in the big metro areas. But I think the advent of the modern suburb speaks more heavily to the mix of “Free Real Estate” and enormous state subsidies for rural development following the S&L crash of the 1980s.
Like, there’s no reason these can’t be high rise condos with racist building managers, rather than cookie cutter ranch homes with racist HOAs. The suburb isn’t merely about racial segregation, it is about individualist alienation. Breaking up the extended family unit into the nuclear family cluster, subdividing the working class into thinner and thinner economic tranches, and fencing people into gilded cages complete with 30 year golden handcuff mortgage notes.
You can debate over the exact degree to which civic planners intended to separate and capture individual specimens of human labor. Or how deliberately the 1950s architectural model of personalized kitchens, TVs, and car ports manufactured an increasingly pliable working class subject. But the subdivision doesn’t end at the color line. We are a fully balkanized society.
Yeah, my wife and I moved in with my parents ~ 8 years ago while I was between jobs, and because we all get along it has been such a lovely experience (especially during the pandemic!) that we have never felt a need to move back out. A couple of years ago my uncle moved in because his house was unlivable, and being able to spend time with him has been nice too.
On the other hand, I did also like living by myself, and later just with my wife, for a while, so that I could have my own personal space and privacy. I think I would have felt resentful if I were forced into a particular living situation rather than being able to choose it.
I think I would have felt resentful if I were forced into a particular living situation rather than being able to choose it.
I mean, we’re all forced into a living situation that our budgets and our work-life demands. The illusion of choice is going to a real estate agent and seeing twenty different near-identical overpriced units, then making a dubiously informed decision that’ll lock you into 30 years of debt.
I’d love to live in a crystal palace on a tropical island next to a rail station that’s thirty minutes east of midtown Manhattan and an hour west of the Vail chairlifts which runs me $99.50/mo for the note. No amount of resentfulness will give it to me.
I was thinking more along the lines of situations where the forcing took the form of emotional pressure.
ADUs and duplex/triplex/fourplex housing would go so.hard
We’re already seeing them pop up wherever real estate prices go vertical.
But dense housing builders are constantly at war with suburban city planners. Getting permits is an increasingly Kafka-esque endeavor, unless you can buy yourself an exemption through municipal corruption.
We don’t have to debate to what extent civic planners intended to divide people by color. In his book, The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein just straight-up quoted them. They weren’t shy, and they wrote it down in memos, meeting minutes, and even speeches.
That’s why I say that the suburbs are a product of racism… because the people who created them intended them that way, and said so.
For the economic analysis from the class perspective, look at why suburbs became entrenched, which has a lot to do with the auto industry.
I think that you missed the point the post is making, which is that it is ironic to claim that capitalism saves us from having to live in drab cookie-cutter housing given what suburbia looks like.
You don’t have to live in those places. You choose to.
Can’t pay me to live in one of those.
The vast majority of housing in the country is that type of housing, meaning that the vast majority of people end up living in it, willingly or not.
Dumb
Historically lawns were basically a show of “look at all the labor I control to keep this land barren.”
Racism AND capitalism.
The “single family home” was barely a concept before American development early last century. For the majority of human history, people dwelled together, raised families together, stayed together and supported each other their whole lives.
It was the housing industry making these “neighborhoods of the future” that started pushing the idea of moving out at 18 and getting a home on your steel-mill salary of $10 per week, and then it became shameful to still live with your family past a certain age. Forcing so many Americans into a role of being a sole-provider for an entire household as wages have dropped and house prices have soared, and we all still keep “investing” into homes in suburbia despite nobody feeling fulfilled in these cul-de-sac lives, and both parents of children having to work 6 days a week or more just to afford to sleep there.
How many housemates do you have? Why don’t you have more?
This is largely ahistorical, ignoring factors like:
- Availability of land
- The desire for privacy
- The invention and spread of the car making living further from places of work practical
- The desire for (ones own) outdoor space
The desire for privacy should, in particular, be obvious to the fediverse’s privacy conscious users: I don’t necessarily want my parents, grandparents, children, siblings, nephews and nieces all knowing:
- What I’m reading/watching on TV
- How my music practice is going
- What I’m having for dinner
- What time I go to bed
- When and with whom I have sex
- etc
There are many reasons why it’s not sustainable to focus on them as the main unit of housing, but the rise of detached houses corresponds to living standards rising to the point where it was something people could afford. It’s not a nefarious plot orchestrated by a secret cabal.
You are right. We should live in trailer parks and farms with all the other… Oh shit.
It is not clear to me why you think that is the only other option.
At least there’s a sidewalk. That’s more walkable than some places I’ve lived.
I agree with you, absolutely right, but also
"I’m walking to the store honey, I’ll be back in 90 minutes!
that sidewalk guaranteed has cars parked on it every third house
Sidewalk on only one side of the road is pretty insane.
Why? It’s not a main thoroughfare or (trigger warning) stroad. You can just cross the street back and forth as much as you like without any safety risk. Why put down even more non-permeable material and decrease density and increase the city’s maintenance burden for no increase in utility or throughput?
People with mobility issues should be kept in mind. Some may say just walk/roll in the street, but drivers are quick to get angry when some thoughtless wheel chair is taking up almost HALF of a lane.
If they even see the wheel chair.
You can just cross the street
Yeeeeeaaaah, that is exactly the issue here, no one ever does that just so they can walk on the sidewalk.
Quick test:
if someone want to go from house (a) to house (b), which path do you think they will use?
Answer:
Because they’re normal people and they’re already walking, crossing the road just to cross it again at destination is sort of redundant and take way more effort and risk than it should be(because car, fast or slow, still a threat to people crossing road), and people following the designated path by the developer is pretty sociopathically law abiding.
non-permeable
Permeable sidewalk exists. Even then, a 4 or 5 feet wide sidewalk have less impact than the asphalt. If that’s a big issue for you, then the street should be narrowed. And even if you want to retain the size of the street, i still see a tons of permeable surface, a sidewalk will have minimal impact.
decrease density
Density of what?
increase the city’s maintenance burden for no increase in utility or throughput?
It doesn’t increase the throughput and utility because based on this picture, the whole environment outside of the house is build for car, not human. And based on this picture, i can be certain that car is hoarding most of the city’s maintenance fund anyway, because maintaining road cost significantly more than maintaining pedestrian infrastructure. The burden are mostly caused by car infrastructure, while the earning from designing the area this way isn’t even enough to cover the maintenance. If maintenance cost is of concern, maybe build something human-scale?
Part of the reason why I hate the concept of emigrating to countries with McHouse suburban sprawls. The goddamn lack of convenience of just walking down to nearly every shop addressing my needs, and instead forced to drive a car.
Except under communism you would have densification with public spaces and parks.
you couldn’t pay me to live in one of those cookie cutter deed restricted HOA infected insect colonies
It always makes me sad to see developers come in, raze all of the trees, and replace them with depressing housing in their place…
In the Midwest of the states it kills me. Hey here is the most fertile land ON THE PLANET and were just going to pave over it, add shitty suburban sprawl that will be bankrupt in 30 years, and kill the soil while we’re at it. So goddamn wasteful.
Oh hi neighbor! Just taking a shower. Hope you don’t mind, but I don’t like draperies.
Cars are also unattractive when viewed from the bottom.
There’s a flattering angle for McMansions?
Point being, an aerial shot of almost any neighborhood is going to look like that. Those are also not McMansions; they’re ranch houses.
Point being, an aerial shot of almost any neighborhood is going to look like that.
No, I just zoomed in on a place in my home city that looked interesting from the satellite view, and took these screenshots a few hundred meters apart:
Forgive me if I’m totally wrong, but doesn’t having a T intersection in the roundabout kind of defeat the purpose?
No, you’re literally not allowed to enjoy having a private space to yourself.
An HOA isn’t mentioned in the capitalist handbook.
Must be a pic from a few years ago, now they’re basically town homes with about 3ft in between them so they can cram more in but still list it as a single house. Plus just enough land to fit the structure on, then they sell it for twice as much as the 20yo house down the road with at least an acre.
