Interesting article about the new wave of surbanites, leaving the faded dream of surburbia behind for (surprise!) a New Suburbia. He says:
"George Santayana once observed that Americans don't solve problems, they just leave them behind. They take advantage of all that space and move. If there's an idea they don't like, they don't bother refuting it, they just go somewhere else, and if they can't go somewhere else, they just leave it in the past, where it dies from inattention....It's not worth the trouble. He just bolts. He heads for the exurbs and the desert. He goes to the new place where the future is still open and promising. He goes to fresh ground where his dreams might more plausibly come true."

My friend Andrew is looking for a new house now. He's mainly been looking at houses that exist only in Surburia. 3 bedrooms with a big backyard and a garage for a price less than a friend in New York City is willing to pay for a bathroom. He doesn't care about location--it's about the perfect house--and has offers on beautiful houses in both the far east and far west of the city in equally unpleasant (to my mind) communities.

Myself, I don't understand. I'm not looking for space, when all I want is a room where I can put a bed and hang my pictures. I'm not looking for a garden, when it would be left fallow for the weeds. And I definitely don't want to live in a place where I need a car.

I think that Andrew and I have different dreams of what we want our adult lives to be. Andrew, I think, dreams of stability and the idylic existence promised by the surburbs. The manly domesticity, too, of the barbeque/perfect lawn lifestyle I can see being a big draw for him. Because my dreams lie at the other end of some spectrum, I can see the appeal of the surburbs, without feeling the draw myself. I lean towards the romanticism of the old, myths of brick and wood, packaged in a veneer of sophistication. My ideal is places like Greenwich Village in NYC, the Annex in Toronto, or the Plateau in Montreal. Places, I guess, that once were suburbs long ago, then overtaken by the inevitable urban movement, without surrendering to the concrete and steel that makes most cities revolting places. They seem like places of community, of culture, of artistic expression and fun. I suspect my dream is no more realistic than Andrew's though, and the trade off between commuting time and a cramped apartment, is not a moral issue but is just that, a trade-off.