Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent begins a new weekly opinion column on neighborhood issues today.
To many central city residents, the suburban enterprise can seem a quixotic one, and the suburbanite a perplexing character. Pressing ever outward, he seeks to leave behind the impedimenta of urban life, only to find that the more pristine his new surroundings, the faster and thicker does the baggage of congestion gather around him. Almost immediately he finds that his new neighborhood is so crowded, no one wants to live there anymore.
City dwellers are exceptional at finding ways to pat themselves on the back for living where and how they do, present company included, but if the urbanist deserves that feeling of superiority for anything, it’s that he’s come to terms with the essence of city life: a city, you see, is full of people. It’s absurd enough to desire a city connection while simultaneously seeking acres of land and rural home prices, but sillier still when one observes that millions of others have the same twisted idea. Still, the suburbanite is undeterred; out he goes only to scratch his head dimly when he sees that the eave of the house he sold a kidney to buy touches the eave of seven other clapboard-covered sardine packages around a cul-de-sac so jammed it’s being widened for HOT lanes.
Why place oneself in such a distressing position? Where every new family in the suburbs is another minute sitting still on the parkway, additions in the center city are cause for celebration. Bustling shops and restaurants? Lovely. Crowded public squares? Brilliant. Sidewalks filled with people, even in the wee hours? Heaven! In the wilds of Loudoun County, people ruin everything. Around a traffic circle fountain in the District, people are everything. That’s why we live here.
But the distress of exurbanity is contagious. As people move outward, they drag their commutes along with them. Having carved out a slice of rural eden only to watch it erupt with shopping centers and subdivisions, the farflung commuter seeks mitigation, specifically, a pipeline, maybe a whole series of them, through which he can fire himself with some sense of timeliness back into the city proper. Having helped himself generously to some land, he now places his siphon into the public coffers, pulling a large and growing share of the treasury out with him into the suburbs, and away from those traffic circle fountains where the urban sophisticates, present company included, grow weary of waiting for weekend trains and photoshopping potentially convenient routes onto metro maps.
Somewhere, a magical and possibly mythical place called Centreville awaits its date with the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. Fine, Virginia, fine. But since it seems we’re all in this together, could you not throw a crosstown route our way, perchance? A river crossing maybe? Dedicated funding, heaven forfend? We promise not to gloat and say we told you so, that we knew those rolling hills wouldn’t be idyllic long. Please, exurbs, don’t bogart the transit conversation, will you?
Because there are those of us who have accepted the citiness of the city all along, and asked only that the metropolis provide the things any good metropolis should. It strikes us as rather unfair, I think, that having thought you could do better and having found that you were wrong, you now ask the city to come to you.
Picture taken by alykat.
