11D

Bad Taste

I was too busy at the waterpark this week to give the New York Times a proper look. So, I am grateful to Dr. Manhattan for sending a link to this article about the Bukharian Jews building McMansions in Queens. They're building monstrosities and paving over front yards in Forest Hills.

There, Bukharians have been tearing down the neighborhood’s sedate Tudor, Georgian and Cape Cod-style homes, paving over lawns and erecting white-brick edifices that borrow from old Europe, with sweeping balustrades, stone lions bracketing regal double doorways, chateau-style dormers and pitched roofs, Romanesque and Greek columns and ornate wrought-iron balconies accented with gold leaf that glints in the sun.

I love the quotes from a local rabbi.

“We like to utilize every single square inch of land, every inch of territory,” explained Rabbi Shlomo Nisanov, head of a Bukharian synagogue and community center in Kew Gardens Hills. “For some reason, people don’t appreciate it.”

The Bukharian tendency to pave over everything is practical, he continued. Bukharians preferred a terrace or patio to a lawn, which he called “useless land.” A yard required mowing — “a waste of time,” he said.

“Exhibit A,” he said, gesturing to a brick row house on 76th Road. It had a verdant front yard that seemed to beg for mowing and pruning. “You see this?” he said dismissively. “What is this? What are we seeing here?”

He then pointed to the house next door. “Exhibit B,” he declared. The house was fronted by a well-swept terrace of red and black paving stones and enclosed within a five-foot-high wall that, he said, ensured some privacy. Any remaining green was an accent rather than a feature.

“You can eat outside, the kids have a place to play,” the rabbi said. “You have usage of the front of your house.”

“It’s nice, it’s beautiful,” he added. “What are you afraid of?”

I was laughing as I read this piece not only because you can easily hear the rabbi saying "it's nice, it's beautiful" in a Borat voice, and because the clash of new immigrants and old New Yorkers is such a familiar story. I was laughing, because this story is so universal. This story of clashing tastes plays out everywhere.

Last week, I was sitting in the backyard of some neighbors and gossiping about the latest town battle about a drive through KFC. Clearly, I'm not a fan. (leftie, professor, arugula-eater) I want a walkable downtown with restaurants that I will actually patronize. It doesn't make sense to reduce your tax burden by $20 but lower your property value by $20,000. This all makes perfect sense to me, but I wasn't able to convince my neighbors of the wisdom of my words. They honestly don't think that drive through fastfood joints are an eye sore. More Heart Attack Heavens, they said. After a short while, I changed the topic, because it's impossible to convince people that they have bad taste.

I've been getting semi-involved in town planning politics, because we live so close to the downtown. And I'm fascinated. It's really the politics of taste. I suppose there is something cool that each town defines good taste in its own way, and people can choose where they live in, in part based on the comparable taste levels. It's also very frustrating, because it's impossible to appeal to facts. How do you convince someone that a cement front lawn is ugly?

The Middle Class Crunch

Here's a fabulous Elizabeth Warren speech discussing the main concepts from the Two Income Trap. She compares a family in 1970 with a family today. In short, we have less disposable money, despite having two incomes. Health insurance and housing costs are killing us. We're spending more on houses not for the granite counter tops, but for the schools. Families would rather live next to toxic waste dump in order to have better schools for their kids. College is now a mandatory requirement for middle class status and college is expensive. If someone loses their job, there is no safety net, and the family ends up going bankrupt.

Families with kids are under enormous financial stress.  She thinks we're moving from a three class society to a two class society. (via Corrente and Wendy)

 

The Pros and Cons of Nature

It's spring, and things are alive in the suburbs.

Yes, there are the gorgeous flowering trees. This is a dogwood tree in my front yard. The magnolia, red leaf, and crab apple trees have been happy, happy in the backyard. I've been visiting the garden stores and drooling over the new plants.

But I had to pull off a tick off the back of Ian's neck with tweezers yesterday. The bugger hung on to his skin and put up quite a fight. Asshole.

I also almost hit a wild turkey on the way to work yesterday. It was huge and ugly and stupid. It just ambled onto the road just as I was accelerating for the ramp to Route 17. I had to come to a complete halt, so the dumb thing could slowly stalk across the road. I briefly considered a Grand Theft Auto slam, but I didn't want it to stink up my car.

Will Suburbs Be the Next Slums?

To celebrate the fact that the Atlantic is now letting non-subscribers read their articles, let's talk about "The Next Slum"?

The author, Christopher Leinberger, argues that homebuyers' tastes have changed. They no longer desire huge lawns on deserted cul-de-sacs. Everybody is sick of the Gap in the mall. People want the urban lifestyle. So, all the McMansions that multiplied in the 1980s are turning into slums. Those grand atriums are empty or filled with dodgy renters. Urban areas are improving their schools and offering safer streets. People are moving back to the cities.

I'm one of those who prefers an urban lifestyle. We've got a foot of snow out here right now, but we're going into the city tonight for date-night even if we have to attach a snow plow to the front of the Toyota. When the lack of affordable housing and the quality of schools forced us out to the suburbs, we chose to live in the center of an older suburban neighborhood. It has an urban flavor.

Our house has the high ceilings and fat moldings of a city apartment. Our lawn is very small. We can walk to a Starbucks and a bagel store. We immediately started yuppifying our old house.

This kind of living is also very green. My husband walks to the bus, which takes him to work. We only need one car. Our patch of grass doesn't need much water. Instead of building a new home, we're fixing up a 100 year old home. The old home was built so well that we don't need central air-conditioning.

If you look around the other homes in our downtown area and you'll see a few families like ours -- educated, professionals. But you'll also see many driveways with piles of contracting refuse. Several of the homes have been carved up into illegal sublets. One house is full of illegal Mexicans farming pepper plants on their front lawn. The roof on the porch has collapsed and the town refuses to condemn it.

Our walkable downtown is one of the real perks of living in the town, along with the easy commute into Manhattan. But our town is filled with struggling contractors and seniors who can't afford the high taxes, so they want to increase the ratables in town. They want to kick out Starbucks and put in a drive in Kentucky Fried Chicken.

I thought that we would be pioneers out here. I thought our downtown area would attract all sorts of people like us who were interested in urban-esque living.

I'm not seeing it. The bigger homes are holding their value. There aren't any big changes in our neighborhood. Instead of new urbanism, I'm seeing the same old preference patterns for driving culture and large lawns.

Green Materialism

Watch me offend SUV-owners, Hummel collectors, eco-moms, rich people, and pretty much the whole green consumer movement. Not my most tactful blog post ever.

Update: Russell Arben Fox makes me feel smarter by tying my rant to "pioneer truths." I'm going to come back to this debate next week. I want to address one of Doug's comments.

Does Space Equal Babies?

Jeremy sends me an article from the Times that suggests that the world-wide dropoff in fertility rates has more to do with a lack of housing, rather than other variables such as women's employment or lifestyle issues.

But at a time when no cocktail conversation is complete without a discussion of real estate, the boomlet raises a question that has long interested social scientists: What is the relationship between fertility and real estate?

In the wide-open mortgage climate early this decade, creative loan products allowed more people than ever to buy homes, often a precursor to having children. In 2006, the babies arrived — a reminder, perhaps, that if you build it, they will toddle.

I would describe this as the Goldfish argument. The bigger the tank, the bigger the fish.

I have to admit that when we moved to the suburbs, we did toss around the idea of making another. When we lived in a cramped apartment with the four floor walk up, it was physically impossible to lug another kid up the stairs. Also, there was no place to store the kid in the apartment. Maybe if the third kid slept in the bathtub, we could have managed. The lack of kid storage space and the stairs hike capped our kid quotient to two, and there was really no discussion about it. 

We moved to the suburbs with a novelties like a driveway and a dishwasher. Suddenly, spawning again was an option. Steve and I tossed the idea around for a while. But the negatives outweighed the positives. I started calculating how old I would be at my kid's high school graduation and at the kid's wedding. I hadn't had a teaching job in a couple of years and was antsy to get out of the house. Ian was also going through a really tough time. He was two and he screamed all day in frustration, because he couldn't talk. I was afraid. I'm not sure if we made the right decision or not, but that ship has sailed.

So, I'm not sure I buy the goldfish argument. In our case, making more babies involved a series of variables -- space being one.

Jeremy asks what I tell people who ask if we're going to have more kids.

I haven't gotten that question in a while. I choose to believe that it is because my youngest is now five, and people assume that we're done. I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that I look old, old, old. My usual answer, a few years back, was to simulate self-embowelment with a sword.

Downtown Suburbs

Matt Yglesias and Ross Douthat are fighting about cities and suburbs. Interesting discussion worth checking out.  (I'm in a rush this morning, so I'm just quickly going wade in here.)

Middle class families leave the city for a lot of reasons, not just the schools. Affordable housing. Appliances (All you childless hipsters might mock appliances. But I saved hours and hours of drudgery time by having appliances out here in the suburbs. Kids generate a lot of dirty sippy cups. They also puke on their comforters at 4 in the morning.)  The kids can play unsupervised in the backyard. No alternative side of the street parking. I can go and on. My life is MUCH easier out here. I wouldn't be able to work, if we stayed in the city.

I just don't think that any of those problems with cities will be fixed any time soon and middle class families will continue to vacate to the suburbs.

However, I do think that suburbs are going to change. The ex-urbanites are bringing their preferences to the suburbs. Suddenly, the homes directly around the town center are increasing in value. They are being renovated by finicky young professionals who don't really care about big lawns, but like to walk to town for a coffee. Developers are putting up high-end apartment buildings right next to the train station in town. Trains are increasing their traffic to the city.

That's happening here in my town and we're one of those finicky families in the downtown area. My husband walks to the bus or the train, which takes him to Times Square. My kids take a bus to school. I drive to the supermarket and my job. Our town is increasing the train stops. They are putting a light rail system into my parent's town. We walk into town for bagels and coffee.  And at the same time, I have an herb garden, my kids ride their bicycle in the street, and I have time to work.

I think we can take many of the positives of urban life - the walkability, the diversity, the mass transportation, the community - and transplant them to the suburbs. We need to create a hybrid. I think it's developing on its own, but a little nudge might help.

Suburban Hippy

When I moved to the suburbs after years of city dwelling, I had a hard time with it all. One of the ways that I got over suburban shock was to imagine I was Vanessa Bell and be an eccentric British woman with a garden. I don't know how well I succeeded. I finally invested in a good handbag this weekend, and I think a good handbag means eviction from the hippy club.

Anyhow, I was amused to read that I wasn't the only one who used Bloombery to overcome Suburban Shock.  Read about Frances Palmer.

I am enjoying the gardening, though not in hot muggy days like this. Check out Echidne's garden and Kieran's weed.

Lexus Lanes

We're in the midst of some family drama at the moment, so forgive the sparse posting this week.

Loren sent me a fascinating article this summer by Benjamin Ross in Dissent about ideology and traffic. Who knew that there was a politics of traffic? Really fun piece and worth checking out in full, but today I'm just pulling out one concept in the article, one that generated some debate around here:

This is especially true of the latest fad among the free marketeers, what are known as express toll lanes. These are pay lanes added to existing highways that currently don't charge tolls. Toll rates vary from hour to hour, increased at times of heavy traffic in such a way that the toll lanes never back up. The main advantage of this procedure is that the driver who pays the toll is guaranteed a fast trip; on the busy suburban highways where these lanes are under consideration, there is so much traffic that simply widening the road would not get rid of congestion. Proponents argue that express toll lanes give the consumer more choice than building additional free lanes — when you need to get somewhere in a hurry, you pay the toll; when your time is less valuable, you don't.

Express toll lanes were quickly dubbed "Lexus lanes." Their promoters indignantly reject this appellation, claiming that the lanes benefit all income groups. But a 1999 survey of drivers on the first such project in the United States, SR 91 between Riverside and Orange counties in southern California, showed that drivers with incomes above $100,000 were about four times as likely than those who earn less than $40,000 to have used the toll lanes on their last trip on the highway....

These survey results suggest that the "Lexus lanes" moniker is well deserved. Who uses pay lanes is mostly determined by income. For most of the people in the free lanes, consumer sovereignty is a fiction. They haven't made a voluntary decision that their time isn't worth the price of a quicker commute. They are sitting in traffic jams because the toll exceeds what they can afford to pay.

OK, who likes Lexus lanes?

Green Days

In the beginning of the week, we were weighed down by worry over Ian. Yes, he's making big improvements, but there is still a lot going on -- still not talking enough, still irked by sounds, still stressed out for unknown reasons, still frustrated. Rather than having one ailment, it seems to be more of a little of this and a little of that. There's also the uncertainity about next year. Will he be able to go into a regular Kindergarten?

But damn. It's nice out. These kid worries, which every parent has, flow in and out like waves. And right now, the weather has supplanted worries with awe.

How can you describe these blue skies and crisp air? The lilacs, dagwoods, and cherry trees exploding with supernaturally large flowers? The cloudless skies? It's a David Lynch movie! A David Hockney painting!

Ah, I'll be lazy and let my camera do the work for me...