The Suburbs Are Making a Comeback. Have We Learned Nothing?
More cars, more subdivisions, more strip malls… but we know there are better ways to live
In the Salt Lake Valley, the world is humming merrily along. The belches and clatters of machines fill the air — the sounds of Inevitable Progress. Housing developments bloom, seemingly overnight, springing from expanses of rock and dirt and tumbleweed.
My partner grew up in the Avenues of Salt Lake City, a quiet urban neighborhood with sidewalks and tall, shade-casting trees. His mother rented a string of one-bedroom apartments until she could finally afford a home to call her own. Homes within the city limits were beyond her reach, as they are for so many of us, so she moved to a suburb. Then to another suburb. Then to another suburb after that.
The suburbs that bleed from the southern perimeter of Salt Lake City all look more or less the same. There are the wide, treeless, multi-lane roads, illuminated at night by the glare of fast food drive-throughs. There are big box stores with their vast parking lots, the continuous procession of cars that scuttle from one to the next. There are the empty stretching residential streets lined with too-new houses and too-small trees, and the people inside, nearly always inside, basking in their square…
