Are Suburbs Immoral?

Two phenomena in particular cause me to wonder about the morality of suburbs. One is the fact that they seem to be hotbeds of the kind of conservative politics that I view as immoral. The second is that when it comes to addressing the biggest challenge our of young century, global warming, suburbs are part of the problem.

In the two maps of Chicago above (larger version available here), we see CO2 emissions displayed in full color - the more energy is used the redder the picture, and the less energy used the bluer. The left map is CO2 emitted per square mile. In this map Chicago looks like a humongous energy user, which jives well with anecdotal evidence about the Sears Tower (which supposedly uses as much electricity as a town of 35,000) and auto emissions and so forth. But in the map on the right, CO2 is measured on a per household basis, with red meaning more CO2 is produced per household and vice versa for blue. In this map it is clear that the denser areas of Chicago use much less energy per person, emit less CO2, and make less global warming impact.

In the Chicago region, and many others, the suburbs have been the force of conservatism, as compared to the liberalism of the urban core. Around here, that takes the form of machine politics in town and conservative values further out. In LA and DC, it takes the form of a large inner city black population versus affluent suburbs in Orange County and Virginia. The great exception may be San Francisco, where suburbs in Marin and Berkeley could give the most liberal regions in the rest of the country a run for their money.

Before I get too much further, let me define a couple of my terms. For my purposes, a prototypical suburb is a low density (one household per lot) town that is more or less coterminous with a combination of other such towns, countryside, and/or an urban core. There may even be a gate at the edge of the community. Energy use per person is high: life is more spread out, requiring more driving, and stand-alone dwellings do not have the same efficiencies of scale that large, multi-family structures in the city have. Suburbs often vote conservatively.

Everyone has his or her own definition or what's moral, but it is widely agreed that the essence of morality is taking other people into account when choosing actions; usually, concern is further directed to the well being of other people. Note that conservatism is recognized as being the ideology of individualism (e.g. private accounts for social security), which is the fundamental opposite of other-mindedness. This is part of the reason I consider conservatism immoral at heart.

It is often surmised that people in suburbs vote more conservatively because of issues like crime and the economy due to their possession of children and mortgages. I think it goes a little deeper than that, however. I believe that suburbs promote conservatism by removing a variety of impediments to selfish thinking that would otherwise be found in a more dense environment. To wit, as a suburban resident, you live in a detached house. You drive a car that you own, and you use it to take yourself (by yourself) between home and work along a roadway meant exclusively (or almost exclusively) for cars. You occasionally stop at the supermarket in the strip mall or your kid's soccer field. If you want to sunbathe or barbecue, you go in your own backyard. Other people only enter your world when they cut into your lane or steal your lunch out of the fridge. It isolates you and removes consciousness of other people from your usual frame of reference.

Living in a city, on the other hand, you are constantly exposed to other people and their problems, which can start to seem like your problems. If you HAVE to deal with that homeless guy on the bus, homelessness seems like your problem. If your kids get sick at school because their friends' families can't afford health insurance, health care seems like your problem. Even if you don't start feeling like you share problems, I think it makes a difference in your consciousness to just see that homeless people or people without health insurance are real people that are trying to live real lives. And for that matter, you may see how people interact with each other around pollution, and it may give you a better sense of the importance of environmental issues. Issues like how much energy you consume compared to someone else.

Some holes are appearing in the argument that suburbs are conservative, however. For example, Democratic Senator Jim Webb, newly elected in Virginia, probably owes his victory to the increasing size and liberalism of D.C. suburbs. However, much (though not all) of this growth is occurring in places like Ballston (pictured here), which is really nothing like the prototype I've described. It's more like a small city right outside a larger one - it features dense development clustered around transit hubs and puts residents close to jobs. Plus, on a more puerile level, Ballston is one of the all-time funniest/most homoerotic city names in the country, although it's only one vowel switch away from being dethroned by nearby Manassas.

At any rate, Ballston and the rest of suburban Virginia seem to be part of a national trend whereby so-called inner suburbs are becoming denser and more liberal. This appears to be true even in suburban Chicago, where the sixth Congressional district has always been a reliable Republican seat. The last couple of elections, though, Democrats (Cegelis, then Duckworth) have provided strong challenges. Places like DuPage County are still a long way from cleaning up their environmental behavior, however. This is where some doom sayers have started to seem cautiously optimistic.

This key is this phenomenon of peak oil, whereby oil will become so expensive as it runs out that it will become uneconomical for most of its current uses in a very short timespan. Many of its adherents envision a world where suburbs are simply no longer viable, doomed by the death of the personal automobile. This seems like a pretty safe bet to me, since (a) we know that oil will run out eventually and (b) we're not doing anything about it right now. To support the kind of population we have now, it seems clear that we will have to find a way to live more densely sooner or later.

And that brings us back to the environmental side. There is one guy in particular, Joel Kotkin, who addresses these issues frequently in various opinion pieces and articles for relatively mainstream publications. Kotkin is really more of a hack making a career as a "thinker" by peddling one contrarian idea: that predictions of the demise of suburbs are overblown because people like living in them. Telecommuting and the relocation of high-paying jobs to suburbs will make travel from suburbs into cities obsolete, thinks Kotkin.

But to a certain extent, I think Kotkin is arguing against a straw man. If pressed, I don't think any environmental alarmist, myself included, would really say that the very existence of a suburb is immoral and everyone needs to live in a city. Some even think that cities will be every bit as obsolete as suburbs, once the crisis hits. Denser, more efficient and transit-oriented suburbs would be (and are starting to be) delightful for both political and environmental concerns, in fact. It's the outmoded, automobile-based prototype of the suburb that breeds immorality, and that is the version that needs to go.