A Citified 14-Year Old’s Perception of Suburbs

American Suburbs and their negative effect.

A commonly conceived definition of a suburb is a community in an outlying section of a city or, more commonly, a nearby, politically separate municipality with social and economic ties to the central city. In the 20th cent., particularly in the United States, population growth in urban areas has spilled increasingly outside the city limits and concentrated there, resulting in large metropolitan areas where the populations of the suburbs taken together exceed that of the central city. As growth of the suburbs continues, cost of labor for common suburban housing

drops increasingly low. Houses are built with cheaper, less expensive materials and are built with the same model of construction

time and time again. As this does no harm financially, the western world loses any uniqueness it once had. Meaning their is a very small

amount of difference between Burnsville,Minnesota and Boone County,Kentucky.

In modern suburbs things like cul-de-sacs and tangle towns are more common to be designed with. This makes it virtually impossible to include a mass transit system into the suburb. Thus, more driving, more gas use, and more emissions created in the atmosphere. A common response to this from a suburban residential is that the city is jam packed with congestion and pollution from stop and go traffic. Yet with cities, they are more dense, highly populated and many of the stop and go traffic is created by workers who live in the suburbs coming into the city at rush hour. One thing that works well in a typical city is mass transit. Things like buses, subways and train systems work well with block by square block areas, but not so with winding curving neighborhoods such as in suburbs. Another reason why mass transit does not play a major roll in the life of one who lives in a suburb is that suburban commuting consists of many different directions and destinations. Where as in the city typical people are commuting into the downtown. A central destination such as a downtown keeps things more conveniently close, and since so many people are making the trip to one single common place then gas can be saved by major carpooling, or in other words mass transit.

An attraction to the suburbs for someone looking to raise a family is the suburbs generally contain less crime, less congestion and more isolation from a fast pace life. In relation to crime in the cities, middle class Americans flocking to the suburbs due to high crime rates in the cities produces more crime with the lack of decent middle class citizens keeping up otherwise run-down neighborhood ghettos.

The rapid eating up of the country side caused by urban sprawl is quickly tearing away at rural America. Concrete roads and small model housing filled communities are replacing farmland and crop growth areas. At this continual rate, modern America will soon consist of a plethora of neighborhoods designed to be inexpensively and quickly built. However financially safe this may be, unique neighborhoods of beautiful architecture housing becomes a thing of the past.

As cities become more and more expensive to live in due to higher property rates, more and more poverty will move into the suburbs. This defeats the purpose of the middle class family who chose to migrate from the cities to suburbs on account of poverty, and crime rates. Many modern suburbs are made for the purpose of raising a family, as this seems like a fine ideal initially, the kids raised in the suburbs have an out of whack sense of culture displayed by the study and report of Hara Estroff Marano known as “Teens:The Suburban Blues.” Living in a suburban world designed for raising a family means rarely will you see real life situations for children to learn from and parents to teach them about.

In summary, western civilization suburbs display a poor design of a road system, a lack of a unique culture, and finally a lack of the taste of a real world society for children and teenagers to learn from.