I live in slumburbia.
I started using this term about 4-5 years ago, right around the crescendo of the housing bubble. At the time, the term didn't have much currency. Mainly the only other person using it on the web was some visual artist from Canada.
If you're in your 20s or 30s and grew up liberal and neurotic; the suburbs are a Tragically Unhip* place to live. The suburbs are considered a destination for losers and clueless middle Americans. I know this because I used to be one of those self-hating liberals. Now I'm an independent and over 30 so I don't have so much patience for this culture anymore.
*another Canadian allusion there
California Über Alles:
Early last spring, San Francisco real estate journalist Carol Lloyd used the term to apply to some rather spacious tract house communities around the Bay area. To be quite honest, far-leftist anti-sprawl activists would like nothing more than to see suburbia rot. It's powerful symbolism, like vandalizing Eisenhower’s tomb or something.
But I have to say that this is such an absurd application of the term slumburbia. Anybody applying this neologism to millenial large-lot McMansion boom developments in central Cali has never experienced authentic American slumburban living in a fifties-era small-lot roach magnet. And even I know that the corner of slumburbia I live in has nothing on the strains of slumburbia found in L.A. County.
Luckily, around the same time as the San Francisco Chronicle / SFGate article, The Atlantic published a more well-researched piece that extended the term beyond outer-ring exurbs.
Here is an excerpt:
“On the other hand, many inner suburbs that are on the wrong side of town, and poorly served by public transport, are already suffering what looks like inexorable decline. Low-income people, displaced from gentrifying inner cities, have moved in, and longtime residents, seeking more space and nicer neighborhoods, have moved out.”
“The Next Slum?,” The Atlantic, March 2008
Now, that’s the slumburbia I’m talking about. The old housing stock slumburbia. The middle-class flight slumburbia. The slumlord rental units slumburbia. The lawn-paved-over-into-a-mini-parking-lot slumburbia.
Now that's my corner of America.
Welcome to slumburbia, friends. You must be lost.
So here's a tip: Lock your car doors, do a U-turn in the clogged cul-de-sac up there, and keep driving until you get to the mall.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Welcome to Slumburbia. Now get lost.
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5 comments:
Yeah man.
There are a couple of competing definitions of "slumburbia" but they all have a few features in common.
Mostly they are in parts of town that have for some reason been "forgotten". Frequently the "forgetting" involves scheduled maintenance of infrastructure, whether it's the city pipes or the roads or the schools. Basically, "things fall apart / the center cannot hold" as the poet said. "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?"
But still, look out at the northern end of Cashell Road, SW of Olney. A mere change in the zoning code, and the McMansions all become 8-suite rooming houses with ten gajillion cars all commuting on a few 50-year-old two-lane roads, and they had to plow under some of the last bits of pre-automobile farm and forest to build that brand new suburbia. I don't know if you like the music of Einsterzender Neubauten, but the name says it all, "newly built but falling down" (or, alternatively, "modern ruins" or "instant desolations").
Other than that, yeah, we live in places built back when the dream was sweet, when the country was not yet full and gasoline was not yet much over 25-cents a gallon and a two-ton car that got 10 miles per gallon with a 420 cubic-inch engine was considered light and underpowered. For what it's worth, for a lot of people, it makes sense to live in giant beehives close into town. But for some of us, we remember the dream that built our houses back in the day when we'd just won the war and hadn't yet learned to fear The Bomb. My house is older than Sputnik and the trees in the yard are older than that. I'm not going anywhere and the thing about Slumburbia is this: A lot of it can be fixed, and all of it needs to be fixed.
Join Us!
Or perhaps we should join YOU.
I did think about calling my blog something more positive like “[Fighting] slumburbia.” This would have been accurate when I first moved here half a dozen years ago and got involved in the local “civic” group, but it’s hardly the case now.
“Slouching towards Slumburbia” is far more accurate at this point, sadly.
Hardman, it’s good to read your posts. I am a Gen Xer / 13th Generation thirtysomething (b. 1970s).
From reading your stuff, I guess you and your cohort are apparently part of the so-called “Generation Jones” tail end of the Baby Boom. The caboose boomers that got the short end of the stick and came of age in all that cultural ferment of the seventies.
My generation of baby-busters (many of whom came of age in the cultural ferment of the nineties) have quite an affinity with many tail-end baby boomers. A lot of my favorite music was made by members of your generation in the late seventies through early eighties.
I know the dream was once sweet. I just think that by my time, it turned more or less saccharine with a bad aftertaste.
My house is also pre-Sputnik. ;}
In fact it’s pre-Army-McCarthy Hearings.
One of my college roommates years ago used to mention Einstürzende Neubauten; I should look up their stuff.
“Collapsing New Buildings.”
The imagery reminds me of the Clash’s “Up In Heaven (Not Only Here)”:
“The towers of London, these crumbling blocks, /
Reality estates that the hero’s got…”
(Housing estate “tower blocks” being the British equivalent of U.S. urban housing projects, and all that.)
And later on in the song:
“Allianza dollars are spent, /
To raise the towering buildings, /
For the weary bones of the workers, /
To go back in the morning.”
If that’s not a romanticized portrayal of low-income “workforce housing,” I don’t what is. “Up In Heaven” is one of the scant highlights on the sprawling mess that is the ¡Sandinista! double-LP. Sure it has cheesy ’80s overproduction, but it’s still a swell track.
Apparently the entire “Allianza dollars” refrain was lifted from Phil Ochs, the sensitive leftist bipolar folkie who tragically checked out in 1976. Poor guy shoulda taken his Lithium or something.
I like how in that song they mimic the sound of the wind hitting the tower blocks toward the end near the fade-out.
Woo Hoo, another Wheaton blog
I like the term slum-burbia, I tend to use "white collar desperation" but the area has trended a bit downwards recently....
So are you East or West of Georgia
West of Georgia Ave, near the Conn Ave / Veirs Mill Rd intersxn.
What about you?
Oh, I like that (white-collar desperation).
I do sometimes feel like a lone white-collar desperado out here. Although I suspect that I am slipping out of the middle class with every passing day I live here in west Wheaton.
West of Georgia, South of Randolph, East of Viers Mill.
The white collar thing changes day to day...,I think that staying in Wheaton helps with maintaining you in the middle class, a mixed white, blue and pink collar middle class, but middle class none the less--true white collar desperation can be seen more in the neighborhoods up Rockville and points north and out Olney way. Those were the people who stretched and bought houses in "good" neigborhoods so they could bring their rug-rats up without any dark skinned people about. Of course once gas hit $4/gallon and then they all got laid off life is a bit tougher up there.
Me, I bought in Wheaton because I loved the diversity and dont see a need to breed.
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