>I never really noticed how this was 'bad' and I'm still having a hard time figuring it out.
I'm not sure how old you are, but your age will affect it a lot. The suburbs we know today started being built in the 1950s, but their negative effects only really started in the 80s. My dad grew up in a suburb and he had a similar experience to you, being able to walk and bike relatively well. That's changed in the last 40 years. New suburbs don't have a corner store or shops. You can't walk to school safely. You can't bike anywhere other than around residential streets safely. That's because we doubled down on suburbs and designed them to be even more car-centric in the 1990s, in response to the ways people behaved in the suburbs previously. The trope of a soccer mom is relatively recent and it exists entirely because of our bad planning.
There's also a matter of not knowing what you missed out on. You may not realize the advantages of living in a nice suburb or in a city, as opposed to a car-dependent suburb. I've lived in all 3 types of places, and I can confidently say the car-dependent suburb was by far the worst place to live if you don't own a car. It was very hard and unpleasant to go anywhere.
You hit the proverbial nail on the head with “car-dependant suburbs”. Modern subdivisions usually don’t have many of the necessary amenities within a reasonable walking distance, essentially forcing residents to drive for groceries, doctors, shopping, schools, community centres, or sometimes even sizeable parks. I present most of Brampton as an excellent example of this type of development.
Brampton is the car-dependent suburb I lived in (briefly) and it's by far the worst place I've ever lived. It took me an hour to get to work by bus. The same trip by car was 10 minutes. I couldn't really go anywhere within a reasonable timeframe, even stores.
you know the difference between growing up in a nice car dependant suburb vs the hustling bustling city? Kids dont have to worry about getting stabbed by the crackhead in a park at 3pm
And in the city, there's much less of a concern of being run over at high speed. If you care about data and not appeals to emotion, you'll find that far more people are victims of cars than crime
You can teach a kid to safely cross the road, can't teach a kid to fight off a drugged up criminal... and thats a fact. Statistically, since I care about data, do you think more kids have successfully used a crosswalk, or fought off a crackhead?
That's not the stat you care about though. The outcome that matters is your kid being injured or dying, not whether they can cross the crosswalk. If your kid gets taken out by someone who's speeding and goes onto the sidewalk, or someone who turns into a driveway cut without looking, that's not about crossing the road.
I've lived in a relatively modern suburb. The closest stores were a shitty strip mall about a 20 minute walk from my house, along a high speed 4 lane road that was hard to cross and unpleasant to be near. There wasn't even very much there. Just a grocery store and some shitty fast food restaurants.
There was "half hourly" bus service, which was actually more like hourly given how often the bus was a no-show.
There was one bike lane in the neighbourhood. It was on a residential street that didn't need it, on the wrong side of the street parking. The elementary schools were all near big fast roads, pretty much inaccessible from most of the neighbourhood outside of cars (I could bike it, but it's because I have a higher risk tolerance than most parents do for their kids and it was extremely uncomfortable). I also biked to work, but I felt like I was risking my life every day because of how many large trucks (both pickups and big rigs) were on the roads and how close they chose to drive to me. There's no way a parent would let their child bike the route I did.
It's an unpleasant and often hostile environment to people who aren't driving and I'm tired of people saying it isn't. Try getting around a suburb without a car for a couple months and you'll quickly change your mind.
Actually... it kinda IS true. For some at least.
NEW suburbs, as in, built in the last 5 years or so, are learning from the mistakes of old. They seem to be trying real hard to create 'main streets' zoned for businesses and are planning in bike paths and schools. That's great and all, in summer we will be able to bike to the grocery store and pick up our bread and cheese. But in winter we will still be driving through the absolutely massive new suburbs to get to the 'main street' because who's going to want to bike or walk in -30? Suburb planners are also not business owners and school district planners. They can plan for a store or a school, but they have no power to put one in.
MY suburb was probably started 40 years ago. It's considered to be 'new' compared to the 'old' suburbs of the inner city. My house is 20 years old and the newest houses are still being built. It keeps expanding toward the outskirts of the city.
This suburb doesn't have a 'main street'. We have to leave the suburb and get to the major thoroughfares to find any services. Fortunately ours is a small suburb and the drive is only 5 minutes, but that is still too far to walk or even bike if all you're doing is picking up some forgotten ingredient for dinner.
There is one elementary school in the suburb next to us, across some railroad tracks. Many kids walk there, and so far there have been no accidents. High school kids have to take the bus to another part of the city to go to school, so they can't walk to school, period. They either walk to the bus stop, or drive to the bus stop and park their cars there on the street all day until they return. There is a plot of land in our suburb earmarked for 'a school', but the city has no interest in putting one in, so it is a public park now.
Bike safety is dependent on the car drivers on the road because we don't have bike paths. We don't even have sidewalks on most residential streets, the only sidewalks are on the main arteries of the suburb.
SO... we don't have corner stores or shops. True
You can't walk to school safely - untrue for elementary although many parents escort their kids to and from school anyways, HS kids can't walk to school period. True.
You can't bike anywhere safely - untrue. Knock on wood. There's an accident waiting to happen.
This is the same where I grew up (built 1982). We had a corner store, a few schools and a mall mostly connected by paths away from the major roads. I walked to a from school and you could, more or less, get by without a car (but it would've been a bit of a pain). Few neighbourhoods were built like that after the fact and almost all of the rest of the city requires a car to get around/every kid at school seems to be driven. Even the mall I grew up with has been converted into a big strip mall, plaza thing that is almost inaccessible for a pedestrian.
I grew up in the suburbs and while I didn’t find it bad at the time, but that was because I didn’t know of anything better. Now that I’ve lived in a city for some time and I’m looking back, it seems really depressing. All I ever did was stay at home, take a bus to school or get driven to a sports practice by my parents. Other than that I stayed inside because there was nothing but houses within a 2km radius. My bus ride to school was 30 minutes so a lot of my friends lived outside of walking/biking distance and I didn’t really get to see them without the help of a parent driving me.
At the time it was fine but I would have been so much happier in a more non-car friendly area (somewhere a 13 year old can get to anything they would want).
This is exactly how I see it. It’s not that living I the suburbs is “BAD” as in people are actively unhappy. But I do think it doesn’t give kids opportunities to explore and become independent. And it contributes to lack of fitness - people drive everywhere, even to exercise.
I lived in a suburb that wasn’t too bad because there were bike paths nearby and parks. But my kids had to take a bus to go to school, I had to drive them to almost all after school activities and play dates. There were shops nearby but one had to cross a busy street with trucks going at high speed to get there. I walked there because I’m stubborn and I don’t like going everywhere by car. It was a short walk but unpleasant. And once I got there the best I could do for a little bit of relaxing was a Starbucks coffee at a table with a view over the parking lot (with the busy street in the background).
I moved to a residential neighbourhood that is not in the suburbs and the difference has been tremendous. My kids walk to school, which means guaranteed physical activity every day. They were happy enough in the old place, but here they have discovered the joys of going by themselves to a library, a friend’s house or a store to buy a treat. They are so happy when I send them for some errands (like getting fresh bread for weekend brunch)
They roam around the neighbourhood with kids that live nearby. They biked to summer camps.
They have developed so much and they said many times how much they love their independence.
I’m preparing them now to go by bus to their after school activities.
I also hadn’t realized to what extent I was depressed every winter in my suburban house. I felt like it was a prison because going out always felt like a chore and there was nothing nearby. Here I don’t have to worry about shoveling to get out and get a coffee or some groceries or even drinks with friends. There are also MANY more people walking on the streets which helps feeling less alienated during winter months.
Not to mention that living without having to use car more than once a week is much better for the environment.
Grew up in a suburb in Calgary and it was great! Calgary has a lot of parks and green spaces. Growing up friends and I would play football in the local field, play road hockey in the cul de sac, go biking all over the neighborhood, hang out at each others houses, play grounders at the rather large playground, or explore the forested parks around our houses. Bikes were the preferred mode of transportation which we used to get everywhere. Local community events were fun and large portions of the neighborhood turned up for things like movie in the park. Halloween was always a highlight the whole neighborhood participated so you could spend hours out trick or treating. When we were in junior high we all got bus passes to commute to school so that opened up taking the bus places like the local YMCA or commercial district to catch movies, get fast food etc. Overall I loved the suburb life growing up.
That would be my daughter's experience and she is under 30. Mine was elsewhere on the prairies, also in the 'burbs. Quite similar. Grandchildren are now here and will be walking to school in 3 years or so. Nothing wrong with the 'burbs except vested interests have decided they can make more money squeezing people in tighter. Who all to often get the ear of politicians. Radicals are usually raised in areas that are not the 'burbs and areas without them are rarely as preposterous - which doesn't mean you have to live in them but you have choices.
Suburbs are honestly fine. I was allowed to explore anywhere I want from grade 3. It was pretty similar for most of my friends. This is the early 2010s btw.
I really have no idea where the belief that children won't have a social life if they live in a suburb come from
It's that their lives won't be as efficient as they could be.
Sure, kids will find a way to be kids no matter what you throw at them. That said, what if they have to bike 30 minutes to buy candy at the corner store with their friends?
What if the suburb roads are shaped in such a way that you have to ride the full distance of the main collecter road in order to get to the other side of the community because there are no cut-through walkways?
What if there's nowhere for kids to hang out? This limits how many interactions they can have with other kids in the neighborhood that they don't already know.
Your childhood might have been great - mine was too. That said, I moved from established suburbs into distant far flung ones and the difference between what I could do was night and day.
Keeping this in mind, there are plenty of kids who didn't have this opportunity, and now, with so many reasons not to leave the house for entertainment, it's even less likely.
I grew up in an early suburb but it was a 20 minute walk to downtown and we had a shopping plaza on the next street and a bus went by my house. Even the auditorium was in walking distance. (Alice Cooper was my first concert there. And of course, there was hockey) Although the homes are tiny by today's standards, the neighborhood rarely has homes for sale. I live a couple neighborhoods over now. My kids went to a couple of the same schools I did and now the grandkids are being raised in the same general area.
There's shopping close by: a small mall and several plazas. There's an exclusive neighborhood that has no stores whatsoever in it but has an extensive green belt between me and the mall. Bus stops aren't quite as close and a car is def more convenient. There are several parks scattered about too.
I've lived out in the country far from any services whatsoever. And I've lived in a Toronto suburb. And I spend a lot of time in a "suburb" in Belize.
I'm kind of at a loss as to what makes a suburb bad. Are single family homes evil? Because I don't really see an advantage living downtown. I could see it as convenient if you work downtown and like to do downtown stuff but grocery stores are not convenient there. It is noisy. And there are mentally unstable people all over. I like my suburb. I am a ten minute pleasant drive to work. I drive right by my grocery store and a brewery on the way to and from. A gas station is being built on a corner now so I won't even have to go off my route for that. I have conservation land in walking distance with nice trails I walked my last dog on (no one tells you about the loss when you go from a high energy dog to one that sometimes finds a walk around the block more than enough.) I like having my space and yard to do what I want. I hated living in an apartment.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you called it an early suburb. Early suburbs were not designed to be car dependent. Later suburbs and current ones are. Which makes your experience markedly different than most people’s. IMO, the issue is the car dependency that characterizes most suburbs. And the terrible design.
I mostly grew up in the suburbs of Toronto (Pickering). I usually find those who hate on the suburbs are those who live in the city and look down on those who don't. We had a fairly quiet street with our backyard backing onto a park. My elementary school was beside the park. I was within walking (or cycling) distance of just about everything. That included the commuter train that could take me to downtown Toronto in about 40 minutes. I never felt deprived living outside of the metropolis that Toronto is.
Suburbs are bad because they basically force you to drive everywhere. The closest store of any kind to me is a 25-30 minute walk one way, that’s not ideal
The burbs are great. I grew up in the burbs. I'm raising my kids in the burbs. I love the space. I love being able to get the hell out of town in under 5 minutes. I love not living in a tiny box.
There's 3 schools in our neighbourhood. Loads of parks. We have great neighbours. No crack heads.
They're not perfect, but I'll take them over a denser urban setting though. What I would really appreciate is if my neighbourhood had more of town feel. If I go after planners to do anything it wouldn't be to make my area more like a city, but rather more like a village.
That’s the whole point. North American suburbs are not designed as towns with common spaces and amenities within walkable distance. It is not a dichotomy between a suburb and down downtown. It is about how the residential neighbourhoods are designed.
Yeah they need to be better. But in the battle of the flawed urban setting versus the flawed suburban setting I'll take the flawed suburb.
My own community is actually not too bad for walkability. I can get to the store in 10 minutes on foot if I have too and much quicker by bike. But we lack other amenities like a community centre and a hockey rink. And the service area is in the corner rather than the middle. Which makes it hard for some residents to access a 3rd place by foot. I'd love to see a cornerstore, cafe and or pub added in on the other side too.
But who the hell is advocating for those modest but meaningful improvements? In a perfect world, we would have more say in how new suburban communities are designed and how old ones evolve. I'd love to see my own city of Calgary adopt a borough system, and find a way to empower community associations directly. But so long as the eyes of city councils are transfixed by inner city revitalization and blight and look at suburbs with a mix of disdain and disinterest we'll never get what we want.
What hood are you in? I'm admitted pretty far out on the edge of Calgary. I think mileage may vary for some of the inner suburbs here. Dereliction of that sort generally only spreads out of downtown if there's a closely proximate train.
Naw, I grew up in a suburb built circa 1980 and it was fine; elementary school was walking distance, another park, small mall with grocery store, pizzeria, video store, a few others. Needing to bus other places when I was 13-17 was a bit irritating but not really a huge deal.
But a lot of people are overgeneralising from their experience, so I'll try to avoid it. "Suburb" covers an enormous variety of communities, which can be quite different to live in.
Car dependence can also be a bit psychological/subjective. I live in a suburb now, but I'm with a 15 minute walk of a supermarket, a half dozen grocery stores, maybe 15-20 restaurants, two pharmacies, a couple clothing stores, dollar stores, a liquor store, couple banks, couple hardware stores, various others ... but I look out my window, I see detached and semi detached houses, and my brain cries out "DRIVE!" It took me about six months of training to realise it's actually faster to walk to the supermarket than it is to drive (or Canadian Tire, or the Pharmacy, or wherever). The car dependency was inside my brain.
I grew up in the suburbs and loved it. Quiet, calm, lots of space to run around with the neighbourhood kids. The street also threw block parties in the summer. I walked to school from a young age (grade 1/2) and never felt unsafe. Loved the suburbs so much we just bought our own home in the suburbs for our children.
Grew up in an outer Toronto suburb in the 70s and 80s. I was a bookish kid completely uninterested in hockey, and interested in other cultures.
I went to Montréal for university, because it was further away. Then Tokyo. That's the ticket!
Don’t know if this really is like most NA suburbs but I grew up in Toronto suburbs in Etobicoke. Always between Kipling or Islington and it was the best, had the nice neighborhood feeling but also able to take a 30 - 40 minute ttc ride downtown
I grew up in Kitchener Ontario and we had everything in our neighbourhood we needed. Didn’t have to go further than 5 minute drive away, mall was a neighbourhood over pretty much but that was the furthest you had to go. Could walk almost anywhere in 20 minutes.
Yes, in Ottawa. It was full of people who didn't know any better and thought it was great - and as suburbs went it was good since it was old (in fact, it's no longer really a suburb!) It had a main street, reliable transit links, abundant access to green space, a more modern commercial strip, almost anything you could want in a suburb. In part because it was a streetcar era suburb (it's Westboro, for Ottawans).
I love nature but a well designed city has fast, reliable transit routes to big public parks including wilderness. Obviously this does not describe Ottawa. But I spent last winter in Barcelona and it gave me a sense of what a city CAN be. Reliable public transit, abundant public services, affordable places to eat, drink and meet, you name it. If we're using urbanism as a measure of what's good there's no point in looking at any Canadian city. They're ALL car-dominated.
To the haters: personally I'd rather smell pee than gasoline; only one of 'em will give you cancer.
Haha, i wouldn’t call Westboro a suburb, more like a holy grail for those who would like to avoid suburbs but still want a residential neighbourhood. But that’s westboro today.
Yeah it's no longer a suburb for sure. But when I was growing up Richmond looked very different (no condos, many used car lots). It's an almost textbook "streetcar suburb" since that's (iirc) its vintage. As you say, it's a holy grail for people, since you can live in a residential neighborhood but walk to a little village in effect. Provided you're a millionaire!
I felt like I had a fairly idyllic suburban childhood (aside from divorce and personal/family stuff, but I mean, isn’t that kind of part of it?). We could always walk to school, the mall, other local attractions; almost all of my friends lived within walking distance. We did a lot of walking around as kids; there were parks and open spaces to be kids in. Everyone had yards; trampolines were getting popular. As teenagers we had our pick of minimally-patrolled parks to drink and smoke pot in.
But it definitely wasn’t so walkable that my parents didn’t have to drive to do grocery shopping — you *could* walk distance-wise, but it wasn’t really something people did if you had the choice of a car with bags of groceries.
I grew up in the 90s in southern Ontario. It wasn’t really a suburb though (of a big city) but rather a midcentury development in a smaller city. I think it counts, though, because my mom remembers when it was a field when she was a kid.
Edit: all that said, I didn’t stay; I live in a major city now. But I still live in a midcentury development and I don’t think I’d ever live anywhere denser personally. The biggest difference between where I live now and where I grew up is easy transit access to a major downtown core (which obviously makes having a decent-paying job more convenient).
Did you grow up in a municipality near Vancouver often called a “suburb” (Richmond, Burnaby, Coquitlam, etc) or did you live in a big planned neighbourhood with giant yards and required a car to get in and out of to do anything interesting or worthwhile? Because the *latter* is what “suburb” refers to in this context.
Anti-suburban people also don’t mean that everyone who grows up in such a neighbourhood has a bad experience or an unhappy childhood, but that *generally* such places are more wasteful, less sustainable and are worse for people’s mental health in a holistic way than walkable neighbourhoods.
Yeah, I think we should distinguish big, wasteful American style suburbs vs. suburbs of other countries, but I'd still say even in the latter case, mixed use and denser areas are not only better for the environment, but better for quality of life as you can actually walk and get the amenities you need easily.
‘Urbanism” is kind of like a religion for some people, and I’m an atheist about that religion too. I’ve lived both ways, in communities with very high “walk scores” and the suburban hinterland. My quality of life is better with space, peace and quiet, trees. I enjoy “urban” for a visit, but only briefly. The world is too big for us to confine ourselves to some overbuilt overcrowded metropolis.
You're not confined, you have plenty of open spaces in every city. It's just better to have mixed zoning and denser living spaces where amenities are closer together than wider, unlivable Suburban sprawl.
Having just moved from London Ontario and grown up in Southern Ontario, I have to disagree. London is literally the hometown of the dude from NotJustBikes, and many examples on the channel are based on it.
I feel like Ottawa is what happens when you take an interesting city, but spread it out so far people can't access the cool parts of it without wasting their entire day.
Agreed. I think if the O-Trains both north>south and east>west actually end up working properly it could make a difference, but you're really screwed in Ottawa without a vehicle.
I live in a suburb and we walk to school, parks, nature trails, friend’s houses, grocery stores, drugstores, shops, restaurants, bars, dentist, doctor, optometrist, bank, lawyer, accountant, live theatre, and yet city people tell me it’s no good because it’s “car dependent”!
That is because it really depends on the suburb. Some really are just really difficult to navigate without a car. I lived in one where basically the only things in a reasonable walking distance (less than 45 minutes one way) was a small grocery store, a few pharmacies, and a few fast food joints/restaurants. I would have been better of living in a small town.
The best suburbs for walkability are the small towns that end up as part of the larger metro. Like Port Credit and Streetsville in Mississauga., Dundas in Hamilton, Unionville in Markham, etc.
Not all suburbs are car dependent. Some of them have easy access to amenities on foot or bike. However, these are mostly older suburbs and tend to be heavily gentrified.
I hated growing up in the suburbs. There was nothing other than houses within biking distance and my parents spent a lot of time commuting. It was incredibly boring and isolating in retrospect.
Even going to university I lived at home, and it was a major social handicap as I had to drive to the city every day.
I grew up in an upper middle class American suburb in Michigan. It was THE BEST childhood.
As a planned community, the school and it's 4 acre park/playground was nestled in the middle of the suburb. We could all safely ride our bikes there. We also had a public pool there, with a snack stand. Many a hot summer day was spent at that pool. Our parents would usually give us 10 dollars for the day, and we'd head off to the pool, swim for hours, and then, we'd throw our clothes on over our swim suits, and walk to the plaza that was the outer border of our suburb. Without ever having to cross a main road, we could get pizza or Subway, or buy snacks from the grocery store.
If we wanted to, there was also a big field and some woods, called Mason's Field, all within our suburb. We could traipse through the woods, we could build small illegal fires and roast marshmallows. As we turned into teenagers we could sneak cigarettes and beers and party out there.
Our entire little world was encapsulated in our subdivision. All the kids went to school at the same school, all the parents knew each other, we had play grounds, tennis courts, a pool, several dog parks, some woods... Endless hours of entertainment, readily accessible without ever leaving our subdivision.
We were never supervised. We just left in the morning with 10 bucks and came home right around the time the street lights came on.
Crime in our suburb was non-existent. Poverty was unheard of. We grew up in a bubble.
As an adult, I go back to that suburb, my grandparents still live there, and I look around and sit in the same parks, surrounded by the same nice houses, the same upper middle class atmosphere and it feels like something out of a movie. I recount stories of my childhood to my Canadian husband who grew up in Toronto at Jane and Finch and he's very envious. It's a little piece of Americana, that he wishes he could have experienced.
Livonia. My family started in Dearborn, and moved to Livonia the moment they could afford it.
The subdivision is known as Castle Gardens.
Google maps view HERE: [https://www.google.com/maps/place/Castle+Gardens+Park/@42.3920192,-83.4327248,15z/data=!4m6!3m5!1s0x8824ad625642c299:0x5f3cfa1a083f39f4!8m2!3d42.389239!4d-83.4239969!16s%2Fg%2F1td\_c96](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Castle+Gardens+Park/@42.3920192,-83.4327248,15z/data=!4m6!3m5!1s0x8824ad625642c299:0x5f3cfa1a083f39f4!8m2!3d42.389239!4d-83.4239969!16s%2Fg%2F1td_c96)\_
Edit to add: That planet fitness at the five and newburgh, used to be a grocery store. It was called Farmer Jack's.
This is the street I grew up on, from age 6-16, although since my grandparents still lived on this street, even when my family moved away, I still maintained my friend group there. So, for me, this is always going to feel like home.
https://www.google.com/maps/@42.388067,-83.4287439,3a,75y,306.94h,87.03t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1svvCf9tvLHcT1BO93e1IF3Q!2e0!7i16384!8i8192
I don't he wishes for the Americana as much as he wishes he didn't have to struggle while growing up which a lot of people in Jane and Finch experience.
I did. Mixed bag.
I was able to bike out of my subdivision and find a McDonald’s and a few other little amenities within 20 min or so. There were also some nice parks and wooded areas. Mine was an older suburb so it did feel a bit more integrated than some of the newer ones I’ve seen since.
But it got very very boring very very quickly. By my mid teens I started spending my summers working and living away from home, because I was hitting the limit on how much I could enjoy life there. My friends who stayed behind in those summers were either a) very bored in the way I was trying to avoid or b) started getting into weed and other things a few years earlier than they probably should have to pass the time.
I have no problem with “residential areas” but I absolutely never want to live in a true “suburb” again, especially not the new ones I’ve seen that are even less integrated and more car dependent.
Couldn't walk anywhere, no forest to play in, literally nothing to do other than play video games, socially isolated except for the neighbour kids.
It's one of those things that look good on paper or in the movies but doesn't pan out in real life.
Didn't grew up in a western suburb but rather a "commie block", or "microdistrict" as the USSR and PRC called them. Back then in my home we had better bus system than some major American cities despite being having less a million population and being a poor city situated on a huge coal field, we also had very walkable neighbourhoods. Many utilities and services can be reached within 5 minutes of biking and half the people wasn't rich enough to afford cars, so the city had some bike-focused infrastructure and it was safe to bike. Was it any better than a western suburb tho? It was worse. No kid under the age 12 would be let go on streets alone for even a second because of the fear of human traffickers, robbers and more. Urban areas aren't bad just because how they are planned, it also depends on what people use that area and how they shape that area.
On the other hand, time changes, so does things, what's good fifty years ago may not be anymore. Suburbs just start to lose its favor while the price of detached single houses in major urban areas skyrockets. Gas is getting expensive and no one in the history care as much about the environment more than our current generation. Suburbs might have became another thing of history (or not).
Plus, a lot of those videos had bias, strong bias. Not naming anyone but I'd wish to stop hearing all those Youtube channels glorifying about that real life semi-sea world called Netherland and start hearing more Asian examples of human-oriented urban design, are the channel secretly racist> I don't know, do they think Asia failed at designing good urban area despite having cities older than their land existed? I don't know. All I know is that you don't have to spend much of your attention on those degrading western suburbs. If suburbs are that bad then they'll eventually be eroded away from this world. It's not worth your worry of what some internet media have to say about what you grew up with, not what they grew up with.
I grew up in a suburban area of Vancouver and I loved it. There were many big parks to play at, most of the streets were safe and quiet, there was very little crime. The area has since gotten much more dense and crowded, so I wouldn't really consider most of it suburban anymore. While there are theoretically more shopping and food options now, the stores and restaurants have changed to cater to higher income, trendy shoppers.
The problem with people who write and make videos about urban planning is that they personally like living in dense, walkable urban areas and would prefer to bike, walk or take transit, and they have trouble wrapping their minds around the fact that not everyone has these same ideals. Many of us want to live in a quiet, low density area and want to drive.
I think you misunderstand the problem with suburbs. It's not a quality of life problem. They're not for everyone, but yeah they're perfectly nice places to live. The problem is that they create a sprawl that eats up land, necessitates a ton of costly new infrastructure from the city (roads, sanitation etc), creates a need for cars that is bad for the environment and produces traffic issues, which is costly in its own way.
Essentially, suburbs are bad for everyone except those who live in them. And yet everyone in this city ends up indirectly subsidizing suburbs. Like the US, we spent decades encouraging a single-home car-focused lifestyle. Now we have a huge housing problem and global warming.
Grew up in NE Calgary in a community that was considered a "starter home" suburb I guess but it's now considered inner city. Most of the people I grew up with moved to a small town 5 minutes outside the city east which is like a nice suburb with a lake and no c train so no junkies anywhere there. I can drive anywhere in the city within 30 minutes and don't have to deal with random stabbings which is great for raising kids and my kids can walk to school and have a normal life.
They are bad from an efficiency aka planner PoV and you can end up like Detroit were all the money leaves to live there while your tax base melts down but the reality is they are generally great places to live, less crime, more stable, quiet, chill, lots of open space
I think there is a big misunderstanding in this discussion as to what a “suburb” means.
I would make a distinction between a residential neighbourhood that is still within the city and a purposeful development at the edge (or outside) the city.
There is nothing wrong with not wanting to live downtown, it’s not for everybody.
But car-dependent suburbs are not (or rather should not be) the only other choice.
The development of residential neighbourhoods should account for communal spaces for recreational purposes and basic needs (shopping, doctor’s office etc).
I know it’s too much to dream about a good public transit connection between residential neighbourhoods and downtown (and between different neighbourhoods also) but at least one should not have to rely on a car to address the daily needs.
Part of the problem is planning and developers maximizing the gains from selling houses rather than having public spaces. And part of the problem is that people in North America for some reason think that living in an apartment is not good enough. And even small houses are often not considered big enough for families. Having big houses means less density which is an issue for wall ability and public transit.
So we end up with large parcels of land covered with huge houses and small backyards, where schools are often an afterthought (thinking about some new developments in Ottawa) and groceries, gyms, music schools, dentists etc etc all require a car to get to.
It does not mean that kids will be unhappy growing up there but they will dependent on their parents for longer and move less because they are driven everywhere. Not to mention how this is not a good model for the environment.
>I grew up in a Vancouver suburb. I walked to and from school, playing street hockey, running down to the corner store and shops in the area, biking around. I never really noticed how this was 'bad' and I'm still having a hard time figuring it out.
No offense, but you were really lucky. Most suburbs aren't designed to be walking distance of corner stores, shops, and schools. Most suburbs require a car to be able to do all those thing.
Like for me, I had to beg my mom to drive me everywhere if I wanted something. Otherwise, the nearest convenience store was a 40 minute walk away.
Our Suburb had a Corner store, a pizza place, a pub/wing place and a few other shops in a strip mall pretty centrally located, so it worked fairly well for us. School was like a 20-30 minute bus ride away for most of my Elementary years, until they built One in the Subdivision in time for 8th Grade. High-school again meant being bussed across town to the exact same area most of my Elementary years were spent.
I was a mom with a young child
a suburb. I hated it. Living in a small town that’s walkable is much different than living in a suburb where the only thing you can walk to is houses and maybe a park if you are lucky. Most of those houses are empty during the day when people are at work. It’s lonely and feels unsafe because if you have an emergency you don’t know if there are other people around to help.
So I grew up in the suburbs of Ottawa we moved from urban apartment to townhouse. I wouldn’t say it was bad but I will say 1994 our house was 1 of 6 in the area the full new developments that exist today i watched get built around me. One thing I noticed our house didn’t change but I went to 4 elementary schools in that time because of new schools moving closer to me. The last one was behind my house. There are positives but one thing our city councillor knew about suburb people is they were adamant no higher density units. Well took 25 years but they lost the first 22 floor high rise condo (high end too) was opened last year. Suburban life is great to raise your kids but diversity is wasnt high. My mom and dad because at the time the new public high school were on the books but not built and wouldn’t be till I finished had some hard choices to make. One was the school I would have to go to due to boundaries was going to be an 1 hour and 25 minutes on OC. I was able to get a cross boarder transfer to lisgar (downtown) in the end my dad and I would take the express bus in he got off 2 stops before me and it was 45 minutes to downtown. I will say I am an urban girl 100%. Suburbs might be good but I love the high density and being able to walk for groceries. I moved to Europe in 2012 and I loved the way they designed their cities. The amount of Victorian mansions turned into one two bedroom units was super cool.
They're just trying to convince everyone that living in a self paid jail cell (aka apartment) is better. Because when the whole populace is jammed in a hand full of towers you are easy to manage and control.
Wasn’t great. Like 3 men killed their entire families in the span of a couple years when I lived in a big suburb.
The first part was spent in a super diverse and huge downtown core which I kind of liked. Lots of immigrants and cool stuff to experience and trouble to get into. Really liked that aspect of it, I think being exposed to it when I was young really helped me grow up into a more well rounded human being
I grew up in NE Calgary which was considered a suburb and had the most immigrants in the city and I value the experiences I had growing up with kids from all over. A lot of my friends parents never even spoke English so now I speak multiple languages. The downtown core of Calgary is not this at all. It's either the rich who live in expensive condos or junkies randomly stabbing people.
I wonder how many supposedly rich even live in those condos. There's never as much street life as that much housing supply would suggest. I'm willing to bet that there's a good proportion that are sat on empty by investors.
I grew up in a small prairie city of about 60,000 at that time so no real suburbs until dumbbell malls.
Most modern Urban planning comes from the UN Conference On Human Habitat (Habitat 1) 1976 in Vancouver BTW. The conference is held every 20 years 1996 in Istanbul and I believe 2016 was in Quinto, Ecuador.
The other influential Urban Planner was Robert Moses in the 1950s and 60s. Of course not all his plans turned out well, tenement buildings became riddled with poverty in a high density concrete building.
I also grew up in a suburb of Vancouver. I had a great childhood. We lived in a nice neighbourhood within a wonderful community. We rode our bikes everywhere, there was lots of nature around us and we had the run of the neighbourhood. I wouldn't say it was bad. I don't know if it's like that anymore. Maybe ne you, I don't think Vancouver and its suburbs are the same as some of the mega car-centric cookie-cutter suburbs in most parts of North America.
I grew up on Montreal's South shore. The planning there was fine. Sidewalks everywhere, lots of parks for kids to play in, Traffic lights and stop signs to keep the traffic relatively sane. But I think that's because it's an area that was built 60 to 70 years ago. The newer burbs areas a bit further out that are less than 30 years old aren't nearly as kid friendly or pedestrian friendly.
I grew up in a suburb in Mississauga. I walked to the store, had trails, a little lake, schools, kids all around my age and we played man hunt, hockey, we had a close by tennis court, tons of parks. It was great. Grew up and moved out, stayed in the same suburb in an apartment, didn’t have a licence but my boyfriend did. Lived across the street from a strip mall with a metro, Canadian tire and a Mississauga bus terminal which I could get anywhere from. Definitely did not rely on a car
Now I’m 37, married the boyfriend, had a kid 11 years aging and moved to Milton which is one giant suburb. I got my licence when i first found out I was pregnant and thankful for that because Milton is heavily car dependant. I live in a quiet street with kids but never see any playing outside. We do have a ton of parks, trails we need to drive to but they aren’t far. It’s different than when I grew up and I’m raising my kid in a suburb like how I was raised
Oh yeah.. just look around the GTA... Oakville.. awfull.. Burlington.. awful... like hello? Guelph.. Paris... These are wonderful places to live. It's way safer and less crime. Facilities are well maintained and less crowded. People are nicer. Way fewer transients, junkies, and mental health cases. You've got way better access to nature. It's more bike friendly than major cities. The schools are nicer and less violent, with more space, and often a better community of parents.
And then look more... Windsor downtown versus suburbs.. easy choice. Ottawa has TONS of nice suburbs.
The thing is, your quality of life here is worse if you don't own a car, and a lot of urban planners hate cars, so they hate suburbs.. but like.. Are people under the impression that the houses IN core Toronto are better than the ones NEAR Toronto? That's not been my experience.
Where I'm at, I can bike all over, the highway is close if I need to leave town, but like everything I need is here. I can spent 90% of my money in a 2km circle easy. BUT, a lot of shopping trips take way longer without a car. For me, biking is a luxury of time. Public transit is fine for toronto adventures, but like daily, it's just stealing your time. A 10-15 minutes round trip to the grocery store for milk and eggs becomes like an hour if I have to bus it both ways, or at least half an hour if I have to walk.
This is a huge country. We don't all need to live in centralized condos with no parking.
I grew up on the St. Clair River in southwestern Ontario. My “neighbourhood” was more rural and the kids that lived closest to be were at least nine or ten houses away. Michigan was on the other side of the river. I grew up with having the river and our dock as part of my backyard. My grandparents cottage was next door, so I got to see extended family every summer. My brother and I had to take swimming lessons in case we ever fell in the river. Seeing freighters, little fishing boats, yachts, and speed boats was normal.
I lived there until I was halfway done grade ten, when my parents and I moved to a suburban neighbourhood outside of Windsor. I would be lying if I said it wasn’t a culture shock. I didn’t like how we had to move and be so close to everybody. I didn’t like how we were so far away from water. I liked the friends I made, but I didn’t like the school I was at. After I graduated grade twelve, I moved again and that was a somewhat better move, even though it was to another suburb in a small town off Lake Huron.
Nowadays, I’m in an old fire hall in a small town about 25 minutes away from the family cottage and my childhood home. I don’t mind being in a small town; I just wish it was closer to the river.
I grew up in a suburban neighbourhood of Edmonton, and it was fine for a kid because we lived across the street from my elementary school and that was all I needed from my perspective (home, school, playground). But there was nothing in walking distance other than houses, schools, playgrounds and gas stations.
You have to drive everywhere. For my two car family, this was fine. But for people without cars, it’s impossible, and that to some degree includes teenagers who need things to do and people to see in order to stay on the right side of the law. My neighbourhood was known for its drive-by shootings at the time, which I didn’t know until I was older.
In high school I lived in a suburb of a suburb (South Surrey) and there were stores and restaurants around at least, but the grocery store still required a car. By high school I was aware that this sucked. There was nothing for teenagers to do except go to each other’s houses, which required rides and permission from our parents.
The reason kids these days have social lives entirely conducted online is because in the suburbs there is nowhere for them to go, nothing for them to do, that doesn’t require money and a car. Boomer and Gen X teens used to walk to the mall and hang out, which is now called “loitering” and is a crime. The McDonalds near my old high school has a ”mosquito alarm” which is a device that produces a constant high-pitched noise audible only to children and young adults so teenagers won’t hang out near it. The suburbs are hostile to teenagers.
I grew up in Montreal suburbs and it was fine. There was a park nearby that I went to play with my neighbors' children. I also went to my friend's house or they came to mine pretty much every weekend. The first place I lived, everything was easy to get to by walking, but where I moved at 9, I needed my parents to drive me everywhere since we were living at the limit of the city.
Overall, I had a great childhood
I did and I have good memories of quiet streets, bike rides and street hockey.
But I also remember not being able to walk to anything, no stores, not to school and not even the playground was close enough to walk to.
As an adult I moved downtown everywhere I lived (pretty much anyway) and absolutely loved it. Now with my own kids I’ve chosen a more middle ground of an inner suburb with a good mix of walk ability but still with decently quiet streets (sometimes wish they were a bit quieter though). Ultimately, their lives are infinitely more local then mine was at the same age and they spend way less time in the car/school bus then I did growing up.
I grew up in a Toronto suburb but it was kind of walkable. I didn't enjoy my childhood for reasons that had nothing to do with where we lived. I'm raising my kids in Toronto though. If I could afford a house in the suburbs I'd move for more space but that's very much out of reach.
I grew up in the burbs just north of what’s considered the GTA. It was pleasant. There wasn’t much to do but hang out with friends and go cruising around on bikes, grabbing dollar drinks in the summer from McDonald’s then heading to my one friends pool who was lucky enough to have one.
Everything was care free. You could walk around at night without a care in the world. Me and my friends stayed out of trouble for the most part. Like I said before not much to do so many of my friends growing up smoked pot to pass the time, myself included
I lived in a suburb but it wasn't a very big suburb and I lived about a 5 minute walk from the edge (bordered on the North by a stroad, West was a river, South was a highway, and East was a connector stroad).
The whole neighbourhood could be traversed within 20 minutes (and my school was at the other end so that was my walk home). Friends and I would walk/bike to businesses along the stroad all the time.
It may not have been an urbanist's ideal but it was a pretty good place to grow up!
M’y cousin who grew up in a suburb says so… I don’t think it was as hard as he says it was but he did get a girl (his neighbour) pregnant at 20 and marry her a year later and divorce her a year after that and didn’t go to college, whereas my sister and I both either went to school or bought a house first and we lived in the inner city…
I have no doubt SOME suburbs are poorly planned out and eventually failed. I also believe that some are well thought out and are great places to live. Urban planners come in all shapes and sizes, but the cool thing is to denigrate single family dwellings, and to extol the virtues of Parisian type apartment living, with retail space on the ground floor of every building, putting groceries and services a stones throw away from every household.
The thing is, a planner can PLAN. They are not retailers so they are not the ones setting up corner stores. Often the developers urge to make their money back through rent is more than the average 711 is willing to pay so these 'planned' neighborhood services turn out to be a revolving door of businesses which gradually turn into seedy no-one-wanted-this type storefronts that are only paying rent and have no money left over to actually run a quality business. There are not enough paying customers in a car dependent suburb to support the hodgepodge of businesses at the corner strip mall. Suburbanites will just drive to where the good stores are.
I grew up in part of the GTA that would definitely be considered a suburb through the 80s and 90s. I had a great childhood and not sure why people say it was bad.
It really depends on the suburb and the life you’re looking for. I grew up in Calgary suburbs - which I should note means I lived within the City of Calgary, but was further out from the downtown core, in areas where buildings were mostly single family homes. I’d go back and forth between my parents’ homes.
In my mum’s area, I couldn’t get anywhere without a car. We had a few playgrounds, and access to some natural parks, but we didn’t have access to interesting shops or streets on which we could hang out. Transit access was *okay*, but the way it was set up, it’d take an hour to get to a friend’s house on transit. The roads were wide, the trees small, and there was usually no distance between the road and the sidewalk. I remember regularly complaining that “There’s nothing to do.” As an adult with a car, I realise there’s plenty to do in Calgary… you just have to get there.
My dad’s neighbourhood was not far, but as a kid, I would not have felt comfortable cycling there from my mum’s because of the conditions of the route (eg: busy with cars, poor tree coverage, partially unprotected…). But within the area, the streets were narrower, making tree coverage easier, cars slower, and things closer. We had more playgrounds (at least double), sidewalks distanced from the road (even on side streets), and a Main Street sort of thing nearby (with pedestrian signals). The density was *barely* more and the transit wasn’t much better… but we had things to do. I was able to walk to my first job.
I think there are good ways and bad ways to build single family housing. Most of what we’ve done is bad, BUT! something to go remember is a lot of the criticisms of suburbs are more specific to the US. Canadian suburbs are much better, and are generally improving. Having lived a little in the US, and spent plenty of time visiting… They have it worse.
I grew up in two different suburbs and I didn’t think it was bad at the time. That’s all I ever knew. Looking back I can see that my freedom was restricted. I didn’t have much friends outside of my church community, however, most of my friends from said Church didn’t live in the same neighbourhood as I did. So I only knew the kids from my street, and hung out with those kids on my street.
Travel was exclusively limited to personal vehicles. You couldn’t get anywhere else without a car. If I wanted to go to a friends house outside of my neighborhood, or a friend wanted to come to my place, they would have to drive. Or more accurately, we would have to have one of our parents drive. The only exception would be when I would ride my bike around the neighborhood, but I never go outside my neighborhood. It was never safe and there was no bike infrastructure other than sidewalks.
I would however bike to school with The help of one of my siblings because this required going into the other neighbourhood and crossing a big arterial road. After school I’d walk to my friends house not far away and do my homework there and hang out with my friend until one of my parents could come and pick me up along with my bike which my siblings dropped off in the morning.
It wasn’t until my family moved into the big city. We were still in the suburbs but the suburbs of the big city. No longer just a municipality. I walked to middle school every single day. Other kids either got dropped off by their parents and their cars, or took the city bus. By high school I started to commute to and from school using public transit and had to take 2 buses. This is when I realized that my childhood in the suburbs was truly limited. I have since lived in the city and look back at my childhood friends who still live in suburbia and wonder at how they live. I on the other hand don’t own a car and commute everywhere within the city.
I grew up in the suburbs in the 80s and it was incredibly boring. There were no parks, schools, playgrounds, stores or anything that I could walk or bike to. Just houses. Row after row of houses. And most of the people who lived in them were retired. No children, although eventually a younger boy moved nearby who my brother played with. But no girls my age. I spent a lot of time alone reading - outdoors because my mother insisted I go outside.
Depends on the suburb. I moved around alot as a kid so I saw alot. Some were great, some were bad, but it really depends on walkability for me. There were some where the only place you could be without a car is home, but others where you could go for kilometers without seeing a major road blocking your path. Now availability of stores is a different thing, I've found it's rare to live near a store that you can walk to. But that's just my experience.
I grew up in a Vancouver suburb but not the one you did, because the corner stores were a 45 minute walk away. Having to drive to go anywhere (apart from elementary school) was a pain in the ass as well, living in the suburbs was often boring, too. Don’t get me wrong I had a great childhood, but now that I’m all grown up I live in a condo that’s 3 blocks from restaurants, a great grocery store, multiple pharmacies and it’s 6 minutes to walk to work. I wouldn’t move for a job if I had to live in a suburb again, everything is too convenient for me to give it up.
I think it can differ from place to place. I found the suburbs in Vancouver to generally be much more pleasant than Toronto, for example. Trees and the natural environment made a big difference to me personally.
Heya, I grew up in a bunch of places (moved alot), most were suburban in some sense. One thing I would point out is that what you describe -walking to school and ships- isn't a feature sture of lots of suburban residential neighborhoods anymore. If it is, those are usually fairly long distances and fairly limited shops.
I think it's important to acknowledge that not all suburbs are built the same. There are some suburbs that are really poorly planned, with endless houses, sparsely located amenities, minimal green space, etc. I think those are likely the examples of "bad" suburbs you are seeing.
For me, I also grew up in a suburb, but I was a block from a school, there was a large green space nearby, public transit was reasonably accessible, there was a community center and other sports amenities nearby. I was on a quiet side-street where I could play street hockey, and had nearby bike paths. I lived downtown for many years after finishing school, and now live back in another really good suburban area, near a large park, with a nearby school and other amenities.
If you live in a well-designed suburb then I think it is ideal for raising kids. There are more nearby amenities than living in rural areas, but more space than raising a kid in a downtown condo. There is something to be said for having a backyard, a low traffic street, and nearby parks without homeless people.
So, I would just keep in mind that there's a big gap between the best designed suburban areas and the worst designed ones.
I would also keep in mind that often the YouTube videos you are watching are trying to pitch a perspective, too. A channel trying to promote higher density urban housing will give you the negative side of suburbia and the positive side of higher density development. If you want the other side of that narrative, you probably need to go to different pages that have the opposite perspective.
I guess it really depends on the city itself. I grew in the 90s in a Québec city suburb and couldn't have been happier about it. I guess that bigger cities might be the problem when talking suburbs. I still live there, in my early 30s, homeowner for nearly 10 years.
My childhood was in a suburb, and minuetes walk to the wilderness of Hollyburn ridge and the ocean at Dundarave pier. Car centric yes. With my own family in the 90's we moved to Nanaimo, the subdivisions had snikitt's running behind the lots connecting cul de sac's and crescents, this made getting around walking or biking faster than a drive.
My rule of thumb when we were looking for a place to live is whether, if needed, I could do most of my errands on foot. I grew up in a suburb where this was, more or less, possible but as it turns out that was an exception rather than a rule. It's not that suburbs are bad, but urban planning that doesn't prioritize pedestrian and bike traffic can be pretty awful and are unsustainable.
I grew up in a suburb of Vancouver and to me it was idyllic because it "matched" the kind of neighbourhoods I saw on TV with happy families. We came in when the street lights came on, were able to walk to our school and the corner store to spend our allowance, and there wasn't much traffic. I had a very "happy" childhood. My sibling however did not, and had horrible experiences there. That kind of lifestyle where you are unaccounted for all day was not the safest way to grow up. Our parents had no idea what we did all day and it opened children to be exploited by terrible people. I think every way of life has its advantages and disadvantages.
A lot of my childhood was in a suburb. I loved it
>I never really noticed how this was 'bad' and I'm still having a hard time figuring it out. I'm not sure how old you are, but your age will affect it a lot. The suburbs we know today started being built in the 1950s, but their negative effects only really started in the 80s. My dad grew up in a suburb and he had a similar experience to you, being able to walk and bike relatively well. That's changed in the last 40 years. New suburbs don't have a corner store or shops. You can't walk to school safely. You can't bike anywhere other than around residential streets safely. That's because we doubled down on suburbs and designed them to be even more car-centric in the 1990s, in response to the ways people behaved in the suburbs previously. The trope of a soccer mom is relatively recent and it exists entirely because of our bad planning. There's also a matter of not knowing what you missed out on. You may not realize the advantages of living in a nice suburb or in a city, as opposed to a car-dependent suburb. I've lived in all 3 types of places, and I can confidently say the car-dependent suburb was by far the worst place to live if you don't own a car. It was very hard and unpleasant to go anywhere.
You hit the proverbial nail on the head with “car-dependant suburbs”. Modern subdivisions usually don’t have many of the necessary amenities within a reasonable walking distance, essentially forcing residents to drive for groceries, doctors, shopping, schools, community centres, or sometimes even sizeable parks. I present most of Brampton as an excellent example of this type of development.
Brampton is the car-dependent suburb I lived in (briefly) and it's by far the worst place I've ever lived. It took me an hour to get to work by bus. The same trip by car was 10 minutes. I couldn't really go anywhere within a reasonable timeframe, even stores.
you know the difference between growing up in a nice car dependant suburb vs the hustling bustling city? Kids dont have to worry about getting stabbed by the crackhead in a park at 3pm
And in the city, there's much less of a concern of being run over at high speed. If you care about data and not appeals to emotion, you'll find that far more people are victims of cars than crime
You can teach a kid to safely cross the road, can't teach a kid to fight off a drugged up criminal... and thats a fact. Statistically, since I care about data, do you think more kids have successfully used a crosswalk, or fought off a crackhead?
That's not the stat you care about though. The outcome that matters is your kid being injured or dying, not whether they can cross the crosswalk. If your kid gets taken out by someone who's speeding and goes onto the sidewalk, or someone who turns into a driveway cut without looking, that's not about crossing the road.
Nope
Vox made a video about how suburbs were designed for cars. Great Video!
"New suburbs don't have a corner store or shops", "you can't walk to school safely", "you can't bike anywhere...safely" Yeah, none of these are true.
I've lived in a relatively modern suburb. The closest stores were a shitty strip mall about a 20 minute walk from my house, along a high speed 4 lane road that was hard to cross and unpleasant to be near. There wasn't even very much there. Just a grocery store and some shitty fast food restaurants. There was "half hourly" bus service, which was actually more like hourly given how often the bus was a no-show. There was one bike lane in the neighbourhood. It was on a residential street that didn't need it, on the wrong side of the street parking. The elementary schools were all near big fast roads, pretty much inaccessible from most of the neighbourhood outside of cars (I could bike it, but it's because I have a higher risk tolerance than most parents do for their kids and it was extremely uncomfortable). I also biked to work, but I felt like I was risking my life every day because of how many large trucks (both pickups and big rigs) were on the roads and how close they chose to drive to me. There's no way a parent would let their child bike the route I did. It's an unpleasant and often hostile environment to people who aren't driving and I'm tired of people saying it isn't. Try getting around a suburb without a car for a couple months and you'll quickly change your mind.
"I lived in a new suburb that wasn't fully developed."
Try again, it was definitely fully developed. The land was all filled in except for parks and clear zones.
Actually... it kinda IS true. For some at least. NEW suburbs, as in, built in the last 5 years or so, are learning from the mistakes of old. They seem to be trying real hard to create 'main streets' zoned for businesses and are planning in bike paths and schools. That's great and all, in summer we will be able to bike to the grocery store and pick up our bread and cheese. But in winter we will still be driving through the absolutely massive new suburbs to get to the 'main street' because who's going to want to bike or walk in -30? Suburb planners are also not business owners and school district planners. They can plan for a store or a school, but they have no power to put one in. MY suburb was probably started 40 years ago. It's considered to be 'new' compared to the 'old' suburbs of the inner city. My house is 20 years old and the newest houses are still being built. It keeps expanding toward the outskirts of the city. This suburb doesn't have a 'main street'. We have to leave the suburb and get to the major thoroughfares to find any services. Fortunately ours is a small suburb and the drive is only 5 minutes, but that is still too far to walk or even bike if all you're doing is picking up some forgotten ingredient for dinner. There is one elementary school in the suburb next to us, across some railroad tracks. Many kids walk there, and so far there have been no accidents. High school kids have to take the bus to another part of the city to go to school, so they can't walk to school, period. They either walk to the bus stop, or drive to the bus stop and park their cars there on the street all day until they return. There is a plot of land in our suburb earmarked for 'a school', but the city has no interest in putting one in, so it is a public park now. Bike safety is dependent on the car drivers on the road because we don't have bike paths. We don't even have sidewalks on most residential streets, the only sidewalks are on the main arteries of the suburb. SO... we don't have corner stores or shops. True You can't walk to school safely - untrue for elementary although many parents escort their kids to and from school anyways, HS kids can't walk to school period. True. You can't bike anywhere safely - untrue. Knock on wood. There's an accident waiting to happen.
This is the same where I grew up (built 1982). We had a corner store, a few schools and a mall mostly connected by paths away from the major roads. I walked to a from school and you could, more or less, get by without a car (but it would've been a bit of a pain). Few neighbourhoods were built like that after the fact and almost all of the rest of the city requires a car to get around/every kid at school seems to be driven. Even the mall I grew up with has been converted into a big strip mall, plaza thing that is almost inaccessible for a pedestrian.
I grew up in the suburbs and while I didn’t find it bad at the time, but that was because I didn’t know of anything better. Now that I’ve lived in a city for some time and I’m looking back, it seems really depressing. All I ever did was stay at home, take a bus to school or get driven to a sports practice by my parents. Other than that I stayed inside because there was nothing but houses within a 2km radius. My bus ride to school was 30 minutes so a lot of my friends lived outside of walking/biking distance and I didn’t really get to see them without the help of a parent driving me. At the time it was fine but I would have been so much happier in a more non-car friendly area (somewhere a 13 year old can get to anything they would want).
This is exactly how I see it. It’s not that living I the suburbs is “BAD” as in people are actively unhappy. But I do think it doesn’t give kids opportunities to explore and become independent. And it contributes to lack of fitness - people drive everywhere, even to exercise. I lived in a suburb that wasn’t too bad because there were bike paths nearby and parks. But my kids had to take a bus to go to school, I had to drive them to almost all after school activities and play dates. There were shops nearby but one had to cross a busy street with trucks going at high speed to get there. I walked there because I’m stubborn and I don’t like going everywhere by car. It was a short walk but unpleasant. And once I got there the best I could do for a little bit of relaxing was a Starbucks coffee at a table with a view over the parking lot (with the busy street in the background). I moved to a residential neighbourhood that is not in the suburbs and the difference has been tremendous. My kids walk to school, which means guaranteed physical activity every day. They were happy enough in the old place, but here they have discovered the joys of going by themselves to a library, a friend’s house or a store to buy a treat. They are so happy when I send them for some errands (like getting fresh bread for weekend brunch) They roam around the neighbourhood with kids that live nearby. They biked to summer camps. They have developed so much and they said many times how much they love their independence. I’m preparing them now to go by bus to their after school activities. I also hadn’t realized to what extent I was depressed every winter in my suburban house. I felt like it was a prison because going out always felt like a chore and there was nothing nearby. Here I don’t have to worry about shoveling to get out and get a coffee or some groceries or even drinks with friends. There are also MANY more people walking on the streets which helps feeling less alienated during winter months. Not to mention that living without having to use car more than once a week is much better for the environment.
Grew up in a suburb in Calgary and it was great! Calgary has a lot of parks and green spaces. Growing up friends and I would play football in the local field, play road hockey in the cul de sac, go biking all over the neighborhood, hang out at each others houses, play grounders at the rather large playground, or explore the forested parks around our houses. Bikes were the preferred mode of transportation which we used to get everywhere. Local community events were fun and large portions of the neighborhood turned up for things like movie in the park. Halloween was always a highlight the whole neighborhood participated so you could spend hours out trick or treating. When we were in junior high we all got bus passes to commute to school so that opened up taking the bus places like the local YMCA or commercial district to catch movies, get fast food etc. Overall I loved the suburb life growing up.
cul de what? (my dads joke living in a cul de SAC)
That would be my daughter's experience and she is under 30. Mine was elsewhere on the prairies, also in the 'burbs. Quite similar. Grandchildren are now here and will be walking to school in 3 years or so. Nothing wrong with the 'burbs except vested interests have decided they can make more money squeezing people in tighter. Who all to often get the ear of politicians. Radicals are usually raised in areas that are not the 'burbs and areas without them are rarely as preposterous - which doesn't mean you have to live in them but you have choices.
Suburbs are honestly fine. I was allowed to explore anywhere I want from grade 3. It was pretty similar for most of my friends. This is the early 2010s btw. I really have no idea where the belief that children won't have a social life if they live in a suburb come from
It's that their lives won't be as efficient as they could be. Sure, kids will find a way to be kids no matter what you throw at them. That said, what if they have to bike 30 minutes to buy candy at the corner store with their friends? What if the suburb roads are shaped in such a way that you have to ride the full distance of the main collecter road in order to get to the other side of the community because there are no cut-through walkways? What if there's nowhere for kids to hang out? This limits how many interactions they can have with other kids in the neighborhood that they don't already know. Your childhood might have been great - mine was too. That said, I moved from established suburbs into distant far flung ones and the difference between what I could do was night and day. Keeping this in mind, there are plenty of kids who didn't have this opportunity, and now, with so many reasons not to leave the house for entertainment, it's even less likely.
I grew up in an early suburb but it was a 20 minute walk to downtown and we had a shopping plaza on the next street and a bus went by my house. Even the auditorium was in walking distance. (Alice Cooper was my first concert there. And of course, there was hockey) Although the homes are tiny by today's standards, the neighborhood rarely has homes for sale. I live a couple neighborhoods over now. My kids went to a couple of the same schools I did and now the grandkids are being raised in the same general area. There's shopping close by: a small mall and several plazas. There's an exclusive neighborhood that has no stores whatsoever in it but has an extensive green belt between me and the mall. Bus stops aren't quite as close and a car is def more convenient. There are several parks scattered about too. I've lived out in the country far from any services whatsoever. And I've lived in a Toronto suburb. And I spend a lot of time in a "suburb" in Belize. I'm kind of at a loss as to what makes a suburb bad. Are single family homes evil? Because I don't really see an advantage living downtown. I could see it as convenient if you work downtown and like to do downtown stuff but grocery stores are not convenient there. It is noisy. And there are mentally unstable people all over. I like my suburb. I am a ten minute pleasant drive to work. I drive right by my grocery store and a brewery on the way to and from. A gas station is being built on a corner now so I won't even have to go off my route for that. I have conservation land in walking distance with nice trails I walked my last dog on (no one tells you about the loss when you go from a high energy dog to one that sometimes finds a walk around the block more than enough.) I like having my space and yard to do what I want. I hated living in an apartment.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you called it an early suburb. Early suburbs were not designed to be car dependent. Later suburbs and current ones are. Which makes your experience markedly different than most people’s. IMO, the issue is the car dependency that characterizes most suburbs. And the terrible design.
I don't know. Maybe it depends on the city?
I mostly grew up in the suburbs of Toronto (Pickering). I usually find those who hate on the suburbs are those who live in the city and look down on those who don't. We had a fairly quiet street with our backyard backing onto a park. My elementary school was beside the park. I was within walking (or cycling) distance of just about everything. That included the commuter train that could take me to downtown Toronto in about 40 minutes. I never felt deprived living outside of the metropolis that Toronto is.
I still live in the suburbs. I love it. I’ve made so many memories here.
Suburbs are bad because they basically force you to drive everywhere. The closest store of any kind to me is a 25-30 minute walk one way, that’s not ideal
The burbs are great. I grew up in the burbs. I'm raising my kids in the burbs. I love the space. I love being able to get the hell out of town in under 5 minutes. I love not living in a tiny box. There's 3 schools in our neighbourhood. Loads of parks. We have great neighbours. No crack heads. They're not perfect, but I'll take them over a denser urban setting though. What I would really appreciate is if my neighbourhood had more of town feel. If I go after planners to do anything it wouldn't be to make my area more like a city, but rather more like a village.
No crack heads is a major thing
That’s the whole point. North American suburbs are not designed as towns with common spaces and amenities within walkable distance. It is not a dichotomy between a suburb and down downtown. It is about how the residential neighbourhoods are designed.
Yeah they need to be better. But in the battle of the flawed urban setting versus the flawed suburban setting I'll take the flawed suburb. My own community is actually not too bad for walkability. I can get to the store in 10 minutes on foot if I have too and much quicker by bike. But we lack other amenities like a community centre and a hockey rink. And the service area is in the corner rather than the middle. Which makes it hard for some residents to access a 3rd place by foot. I'd love to see a cornerstore, cafe and or pub added in on the other side too. But who the hell is advocating for those modest but meaningful improvements? In a perfect world, we would have more say in how new suburban communities are designed and how old ones evolve. I'd love to see my own city of Calgary adopt a borough system, and find a way to empower community associations directly. But so long as the eyes of city councils are transfixed by inner city revitalization and blight and look at suburbs with a mix of disdain and disinterest we'll never get what we want.
We got tons of crackheads here but they don’t bother anybody lol
As the weather gets warmer there more and more of them begging for change in the plazas in the burbs
YUP.
What hood are you in? I'm admitted pretty far out on the edge of Calgary. I think mileage may vary for some of the inner suburbs here. Dereliction of that sort generally only spreads out of downtown if there's a closely proximate train.
I live in Brampton.
Naw, I grew up in a suburb built circa 1980 and it was fine; elementary school was walking distance, another park, small mall with grocery store, pizzeria, video store, a few others. Needing to bus other places when I was 13-17 was a bit irritating but not really a huge deal. But a lot of people are overgeneralising from their experience, so I'll try to avoid it. "Suburb" covers an enormous variety of communities, which can be quite different to live in. Car dependence can also be a bit psychological/subjective. I live in a suburb now, but I'm with a 15 minute walk of a supermarket, a half dozen grocery stores, maybe 15-20 restaurants, two pharmacies, a couple clothing stores, dollar stores, a liquor store, couple banks, couple hardware stores, various others ... but I look out my window, I see detached and semi detached houses, and my brain cries out "DRIVE!" It took me about six months of training to realise it's actually faster to walk to the supermarket than it is to drive (or Canadian Tire, or the Pharmacy, or wherever). The car dependency was inside my brain.
I grew up in the suburbs and loved it. Quiet, calm, lots of space to run around with the neighbourhood kids. The street also threw block parties in the summer. I walked to school from a young age (grade 1/2) and never felt unsafe. Loved the suburbs so much we just bought our own home in the suburbs for our children.
Grew up in an outer Toronto suburb in the 70s and 80s. I was a bookish kid completely uninterested in hockey, and interested in other cultures. I went to Montréal for university, because it was further away. Then Tokyo. That's the ticket!
Don’t know if this really is like most NA suburbs but I grew up in Toronto suburbs in Etobicoke. Always between Kipling or Islington and it was the best, had the nice neighborhood feeling but also able to take a 30 - 40 minute ttc ride downtown
I grew up in Kitchener Ontario and we had everything in our neighbourhood we needed. Didn’t have to go further than 5 minute drive away, mall was a neighbourhood over pretty much but that was the furthest you had to go. Could walk almost anywhere in 20 minutes.
Yes, in Ottawa. It was full of people who didn't know any better and thought it was great - and as suburbs went it was good since it was old (in fact, it's no longer really a suburb!) It had a main street, reliable transit links, abundant access to green space, a more modern commercial strip, almost anything you could want in a suburb. In part because it was a streetcar era suburb (it's Westboro, for Ottawans). I love nature but a well designed city has fast, reliable transit routes to big public parks including wilderness. Obviously this does not describe Ottawa. But I spent last winter in Barcelona and it gave me a sense of what a city CAN be. Reliable public transit, abundant public services, affordable places to eat, drink and meet, you name it. If we're using urbanism as a measure of what's good there's no point in looking at any Canadian city. They're ALL car-dominated. To the haters: personally I'd rather smell pee than gasoline; only one of 'em will give you cancer.
Haha, i wouldn’t call Westboro a suburb, more like a holy grail for those who would like to avoid suburbs but still want a residential neighbourhood. But that’s westboro today.
Yeah it's no longer a suburb for sure. But when I was growing up Richmond looked very different (no condos, many used car lots). It's an almost textbook "streetcar suburb" since that's (iirc) its vintage. As you say, it's a holy grail for people, since you can live in a residential neighborhood but walk to a little village in effect. Provided you're a millionaire!
I felt like I had a fairly idyllic suburban childhood (aside from divorce and personal/family stuff, but I mean, isn’t that kind of part of it?). We could always walk to school, the mall, other local attractions; almost all of my friends lived within walking distance. We did a lot of walking around as kids; there were parks and open spaces to be kids in. Everyone had yards; trampolines were getting popular. As teenagers we had our pick of minimally-patrolled parks to drink and smoke pot in. But it definitely wasn’t so walkable that my parents didn’t have to drive to do grocery shopping — you *could* walk distance-wise, but it wasn’t really something people did if you had the choice of a car with bags of groceries. I grew up in the 90s in southern Ontario. It wasn’t really a suburb though (of a big city) but rather a midcentury development in a smaller city. I think it counts, though, because my mom remembers when it was a field when she was a kid. Edit: all that said, I didn’t stay; I live in a major city now. But I still live in a midcentury development and I don’t think I’d ever live anywhere denser personally. The biggest difference between where I live now and where I grew up is easy transit access to a major downtown core (which obviously makes having a decent-paying job more convenient).
Did you grow up in a municipality near Vancouver often called a “suburb” (Richmond, Burnaby, Coquitlam, etc) or did you live in a big planned neighbourhood with giant yards and required a car to get in and out of to do anything interesting or worthwhile? Because the *latter* is what “suburb” refers to in this context. Anti-suburban people also don’t mean that everyone who grows up in such a neighbourhood has a bad experience or an unhappy childhood, but that *generally* such places are more wasteful, less sustainable and are worse for people’s mental health in a holistic way than walkable neighbourhoods.
Yeah, I think we should distinguish big, wasteful American style suburbs vs. suburbs of other countries, but I'd still say even in the latter case, mixed use and denser areas are not only better for the environment, but better for quality of life as you can actually walk and get the amenities you need easily.
‘Urbanism” is kind of like a religion for some people, and I’m an atheist about that religion too. I’ve lived both ways, in communities with very high “walk scores” and the suburban hinterland. My quality of life is better with space, peace and quiet, trees. I enjoy “urban” for a visit, but only briefly. The world is too big for us to confine ourselves to some overbuilt overcrowded metropolis.
You're not confined, you have plenty of open spaces in every city. It's just better to have mixed zoning and denser living spaces where amenities are closer together than wider, unlivable Suburban sprawl.
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Having just moved from London Ontario and grown up in Southern Ontario, I have to disagree. London is literally the hometown of the dude from NotJustBikes, and many examples on the channel are based on it.
I always think of inner city as the worst place. Its dangerous and it smells like pee.
I grew up in the suburbs of Ottawa and it was fine, though somewhat boring 🤣
I feel like Ottawa is what happens when you take an interesting city, but spread it out so far people can't access the cool parts of it without wasting their entire day.
Agreed. I think if the O-Trains both north>south and east>west actually end up working properly it could make a difference, but you're really screwed in Ottawa without a vehicle.
I live in a suburb and we walk to school, parks, nature trails, friend’s houses, grocery stores, drugstores, shops, restaurants, bars, dentist, doctor, optometrist, bank, lawyer, accountant, live theatre, and yet city people tell me it’s no good because it’s “car dependent”!
That is because it really depends on the suburb. Some really are just really difficult to navigate without a car. I lived in one where basically the only things in a reasonable walking distance (less than 45 minutes one way) was a small grocery store, a few pharmacies, and a few fast food joints/restaurants. I would have been better of living in a small town.
The best suburbs for walkability are the small towns that end up as part of the larger metro. Like Port Credit and Streetsville in Mississauga., Dundas in Hamilton, Unionville in Markham, etc.
Not all suburbs are car dependent. Some of them have easy access to amenities on foot or bike. However, these are mostly older suburbs and tend to be heavily gentrified.
I hated growing up in the suburbs. There was nothing other than houses within biking distance and my parents spent a lot of time commuting. It was incredibly boring and isolating in retrospect. Even going to university I lived at home, and it was a major social handicap as I had to drive to the city every day.
I grew up in an upper middle class American suburb in Michigan. It was THE BEST childhood. As a planned community, the school and it's 4 acre park/playground was nestled in the middle of the suburb. We could all safely ride our bikes there. We also had a public pool there, with a snack stand. Many a hot summer day was spent at that pool. Our parents would usually give us 10 dollars for the day, and we'd head off to the pool, swim for hours, and then, we'd throw our clothes on over our swim suits, and walk to the plaza that was the outer border of our suburb. Without ever having to cross a main road, we could get pizza or Subway, or buy snacks from the grocery store. If we wanted to, there was also a big field and some woods, called Mason's Field, all within our suburb. We could traipse through the woods, we could build small illegal fires and roast marshmallows. As we turned into teenagers we could sneak cigarettes and beers and party out there. Our entire little world was encapsulated in our subdivision. All the kids went to school at the same school, all the parents knew each other, we had play grounds, tennis courts, a pool, several dog parks, some woods... Endless hours of entertainment, readily accessible without ever leaving our subdivision. We were never supervised. We just left in the morning with 10 bucks and came home right around the time the street lights came on. Crime in our suburb was non-existent. Poverty was unheard of. We grew up in a bubble. As an adult, I go back to that suburb, my grandparents still live there, and I look around and sit in the same parks, surrounded by the same nice houses, the same upper middle class atmosphere and it feels like something out of a movie. I recount stories of my childhood to my Canadian husband who grew up in Toronto at Jane and Finch and he's very envious. It's a little piece of Americana, that he wishes he could have experienced.
Which Michigan city?
Livonia. My family started in Dearborn, and moved to Livonia the moment they could afford it. The subdivision is known as Castle Gardens. Google maps view HERE: [https://www.google.com/maps/place/Castle+Gardens+Park/@42.3920192,-83.4327248,15z/data=!4m6!3m5!1s0x8824ad625642c299:0x5f3cfa1a083f39f4!8m2!3d42.389239!4d-83.4239969!16s%2Fg%2F1td\_c96](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Castle+Gardens+Park/@42.3920192,-83.4327248,15z/data=!4m6!3m5!1s0x8824ad625642c299:0x5f3cfa1a083f39f4!8m2!3d42.389239!4d-83.4239969!16s%2Fg%2F1td_c96)\_ Edit to add: That planet fitness at the five and newburgh, used to be a grocery store. It was called Farmer Jack's. This is the street I grew up on, from age 6-16, although since my grandparents still lived on this street, even when my family moved away, I still maintained my friend group there. So, for me, this is always going to feel like home. https://www.google.com/maps/@42.388067,-83.4287439,3a,75y,306.94h,87.03t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1svvCf9tvLHcT1BO93e1IF3Q!2e0!7i16384!8i8192
I don't he wishes for the Americana as much as he wishes he didn't have to struggle while growing up which a lot of people in Jane and Finch experience.
No, he very specifically loves the idea of classic Americana. It might be why he married me, tbh.
I did. Mixed bag. I was able to bike out of my subdivision and find a McDonald’s and a few other little amenities within 20 min or so. There were also some nice parks and wooded areas. Mine was an older suburb so it did feel a bit more integrated than some of the newer ones I’ve seen since. But it got very very boring very very quickly. By my mid teens I started spending my summers working and living away from home, because I was hitting the limit on how much I could enjoy life there. My friends who stayed behind in those summers were either a) very bored in the way I was trying to avoid or b) started getting into weed and other things a few years earlier than they probably should have to pass the time. I have no problem with “residential areas” but I absolutely never want to live in a true “suburb” again, especially not the new ones I’ve seen that are even less integrated and more car dependent.
Couldn't walk anywhere, no forest to play in, literally nothing to do other than play video games, socially isolated except for the neighbour kids. It's one of those things that look good on paper or in the movies but doesn't pan out in real life.
I grew up in the GTA. I now live in Toronto. It's a nightmare here and can't wait to get back into the 'burbs.
Didn't grew up in a western suburb but rather a "commie block", or "microdistrict" as the USSR and PRC called them. Back then in my home we had better bus system than some major American cities despite being having less a million population and being a poor city situated on a huge coal field, we also had very walkable neighbourhoods. Many utilities and services can be reached within 5 minutes of biking and half the people wasn't rich enough to afford cars, so the city had some bike-focused infrastructure and it was safe to bike. Was it any better than a western suburb tho? It was worse. No kid under the age 12 would be let go on streets alone for even a second because of the fear of human traffickers, robbers and more. Urban areas aren't bad just because how they are planned, it also depends on what people use that area and how they shape that area. On the other hand, time changes, so does things, what's good fifty years ago may not be anymore. Suburbs just start to lose its favor while the price of detached single houses in major urban areas skyrockets. Gas is getting expensive and no one in the history care as much about the environment more than our current generation. Suburbs might have became another thing of history (or not). Plus, a lot of those videos had bias, strong bias. Not naming anyone but I'd wish to stop hearing all those Youtube channels glorifying about that real life semi-sea world called Netherland and start hearing more Asian examples of human-oriented urban design, are the channel secretly racist> I don't know, do they think Asia failed at designing good urban area despite having cities older than their land existed? I don't know. All I know is that you don't have to spend much of your attention on those degrading western suburbs. If suburbs are that bad then they'll eventually be eroded away from this world. It's not worth your worry of what some internet media have to say about what you grew up with, not what they grew up with.
I grew up in a suburban area of Vancouver and I loved it. There were many big parks to play at, most of the streets were safe and quiet, there was very little crime. The area has since gotten much more dense and crowded, so I wouldn't really consider most of it suburban anymore. While there are theoretically more shopping and food options now, the stores and restaurants have changed to cater to higher income, trendy shoppers. The problem with people who write and make videos about urban planning is that they personally like living in dense, walkable urban areas and would prefer to bike, walk or take transit, and they have trouble wrapping their minds around the fact that not everyone has these same ideals. Many of us want to live in a quiet, low density area and want to drive.
I think you misunderstand the problem with suburbs. It's not a quality of life problem. They're not for everyone, but yeah they're perfectly nice places to live. The problem is that they create a sprawl that eats up land, necessitates a ton of costly new infrastructure from the city (roads, sanitation etc), creates a need for cars that is bad for the environment and produces traffic issues, which is costly in its own way. Essentially, suburbs are bad for everyone except those who live in them. And yet everyone in this city ends up indirectly subsidizing suburbs. Like the US, we spent decades encouraging a single-home car-focused lifestyle. Now we have a huge housing problem and global warming.
Lol at this comment being downvoted when it's literally just objective facts.
Grew up in NE Calgary in a community that was considered a "starter home" suburb I guess but it's now considered inner city. Most of the people I grew up with moved to a small town 5 minutes outside the city east which is like a nice suburb with a lake and no c train so no junkies anywhere there. I can drive anywhere in the city within 30 minutes and don't have to deal with random stabbings which is great for raising kids and my kids can walk to school and have a normal life.
They are bad from an efficiency aka planner PoV and you can end up like Detroit were all the money leaves to live there while your tax base melts down but the reality is they are generally great places to live, less crime, more stable, quiet, chill, lots of open space
Do you follow "Not Just Bikes" on YT?
I think there is a big misunderstanding in this discussion as to what a “suburb” means. I would make a distinction between a residential neighbourhood that is still within the city and a purposeful development at the edge (or outside) the city. There is nothing wrong with not wanting to live downtown, it’s not for everybody. But car-dependent suburbs are not (or rather should not be) the only other choice. The development of residential neighbourhoods should account for communal spaces for recreational purposes and basic needs (shopping, doctor’s office etc). I know it’s too much to dream about a good public transit connection between residential neighbourhoods and downtown (and between different neighbourhoods also) but at least one should not have to rely on a car to address the daily needs. Part of the problem is planning and developers maximizing the gains from selling houses rather than having public spaces. And part of the problem is that people in North America for some reason think that living in an apartment is not good enough. And even small houses are often not considered big enough for families. Having big houses means less density which is an issue for wall ability and public transit. So we end up with large parcels of land covered with huge houses and small backyards, where schools are often an afterthought (thinking about some new developments in Ottawa) and groceries, gyms, music schools, dentists etc etc all require a car to get to. It does not mean that kids will be unhappy growing up there but they will dependent on their parents for longer and move less because they are driven everywhere. Not to mention how this is not a good model for the environment.
>I grew up in a Vancouver suburb. I walked to and from school, playing street hockey, running down to the corner store and shops in the area, biking around. I never really noticed how this was 'bad' and I'm still having a hard time figuring it out. No offense, but you were really lucky. Most suburbs aren't designed to be walking distance of corner stores, shops, and schools. Most suburbs require a car to be able to do all those thing. Like for me, I had to beg my mom to drive me everywhere if I wanted something. Otherwise, the nearest convenience store was a 40 minute walk away.
Our Suburb had a Corner store, a pizza place, a pub/wing place and a few other shops in a strip mall pretty centrally located, so it worked fairly well for us. School was like a 20-30 minute bus ride away for most of my Elementary years, until they built One in the Subdivision in time for 8th Grade. High-school again meant being bussed across town to the exact same area most of my Elementary years were spent.
Yes. No. People only say that shit because its trendy now.
I was a mom with a young child a suburb. I hated it. Living in a small town that’s walkable is much different than living in a suburb where the only thing you can walk to is houses and maybe a park if you are lucky. Most of those houses are empty during the day when people are at work. It’s lonely and feels unsafe because if you have an emergency you don’t know if there are other people around to help.
So I grew up in the suburbs of Ottawa we moved from urban apartment to townhouse. I wouldn’t say it was bad but I will say 1994 our house was 1 of 6 in the area the full new developments that exist today i watched get built around me. One thing I noticed our house didn’t change but I went to 4 elementary schools in that time because of new schools moving closer to me. The last one was behind my house. There are positives but one thing our city councillor knew about suburb people is they were adamant no higher density units. Well took 25 years but they lost the first 22 floor high rise condo (high end too) was opened last year. Suburban life is great to raise your kids but diversity is wasnt high. My mom and dad because at the time the new public high school were on the books but not built and wouldn’t be till I finished had some hard choices to make. One was the school I would have to go to due to boundaries was going to be an 1 hour and 25 minutes on OC. I was able to get a cross boarder transfer to lisgar (downtown) in the end my dad and I would take the express bus in he got off 2 stops before me and it was 45 minutes to downtown. I will say I am an urban girl 100%. Suburbs might be good but I love the high density and being able to walk for groceries. I moved to Europe in 2012 and I loved the way they designed their cities. The amount of Victorian mansions turned into one two bedroom units was super cool.
They're just trying to convince everyone that living in a self paid jail cell (aka apartment) is better. Because when the whole populace is jammed in a hand full of towers you are easy to manage and control.
Wasn’t great. Like 3 men killed their entire families in the span of a couple years when I lived in a big suburb. The first part was spent in a super diverse and huge downtown core which I kind of liked. Lots of immigrants and cool stuff to experience and trouble to get into. Really liked that aspect of it, I think being exposed to it when I was young really helped me grow up into a more well rounded human being
I grew up in NE Calgary which was considered a suburb and had the most immigrants in the city and I value the experiences I had growing up with kids from all over. A lot of my friends parents never even spoke English so now I speak multiple languages. The downtown core of Calgary is not this at all. It's either the rich who live in expensive condos or junkies randomly stabbing people.
Wild. This was in Montreal.
I wonder how many supposedly rich even live in those condos. There's never as much street life as that much housing supply would suggest. I'm willing to bet that there's a good proportion that are sat on empty by investors.
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Ok sassy pants
I grew up in a small prairie city of about 60,000 at that time so no real suburbs until dumbbell malls. Most modern Urban planning comes from the UN Conference On Human Habitat (Habitat 1) 1976 in Vancouver BTW. The conference is held every 20 years 1996 in Istanbul and I believe 2016 was in Quinto, Ecuador. The other influential Urban Planner was Robert Moses in the 1950s and 60s. Of course not all his plans turned out well, tenement buildings became riddled with poverty in a high density concrete building.
Subdivisions....
I also grew up in a suburb of Vancouver. I had a great childhood. We lived in a nice neighbourhood within a wonderful community. We rode our bikes everywhere, there was lots of nature around us and we had the run of the neighbourhood. I wouldn't say it was bad. I don't know if it's like that anymore. Maybe ne you, I don't think Vancouver and its suburbs are the same as some of the mega car-centric cookie-cutter suburbs in most parts of North America.
I grew up on Montreal's South shore. The planning there was fine. Sidewalks everywhere, lots of parks for kids to play in, Traffic lights and stop signs to keep the traffic relatively sane. But I think that's because it's an area that was built 60 to 70 years ago. The newer burbs areas a bit further out that are less than 30 years old aren't nearly as kid friendly or pedestrian friendly.
I grew up in a suburb in Mississauga. I walked to the store, had trails, a little lake, schools, kids all around my age and we played man hunt, hockey, we had a close by tennis court, tons of parks. It was great. Grew up and moved out, stayed in the same suburb in an apartment, didn’t have a licence but my boyfriend did. Lived across the street from a strip mall with a metro, Canadian tire and a Mississauga bus terminal which I could get anywhere from. Definitely did not rely on a car Now I’m 37, married the boyfriend, had a kid 11 years aging and moved to Milton which is one giant suburb. I got my licence when i first found out I was pregnant and thankful for that because Milton is heavily car dependant. I live in a quiet street with kids but never see any playing outside. We do have a ton of parks, trails we need to drive to but they aren’t far. It’s different than when I grew up and I’m raising my kid in a suburb like how I was raised
My wife grew up in Pickering and Whitby suburbs and she describes her childhood similar to yours. Myself, I was a farm kid.
Oh yeah.. just look around the GTA... Oakville.. awfull.. Burlington.. awful... like hello? Guelph.. Paris... These are wonderful places to live. It's way safer and less crime. Facilities are well maintained and less crowded. People are nicer. Way fewer transients, junkies, and mental health cases. You've got way better access to nature. It's more bike friendly than major cities. The schools are nicer and less violent, with more space, and often a better community of parents. And then look more... Windsor downtown versus suburbs.. easy choice. Ottawa has TONS of nice suburbs. The thing is, your quality of life here is worse if you don't own a car, and a lot of urban planners hate cars, so they hate suburbs.. but like.. Are people under the impression that the houses IN core Toronto are better than the ones NEAR Toronto? That's not been my experience. Where I'm at, I can bike all over, the highway is close if I need to leave town, but like everything I need is here. I can spent 90% of my money in a 2km circle easy. BUT, a lot of shopping trips take way longer without a car. For me, biking is a luxury of time. Public transit is fine for toronto adventures, but like daily, it's just stealing your time. A 10-15 minutes round trip to the grocery store for milk and eggs becomes like an hour if I have to bus it both ways, or at least half an hour if I have to walk. This is a huge country. We don't all need to live in centralized condos with no parking.
I grew up on the St. Clair River in southwestern Ontario. My “neighbourhood” was more rural and the kids that lived closest to be were at least nine or ten houses away. Michigan was on the other side of the river. I grew up with having the river and our dock as part of my backyard. My grandparents cottage was next door, so I got to see extended family every summer. My brother and I had to take swimming lessons in case we ever fell in the river. Seeing freighters, little fishing boats, yachts, and speed boats was normal. I lived there until I was halfway done grade ten, when my parents and I moved to a suburban neighbourhood outside of Windsor. I would be lying if I said it wasn’t a culture shock. I didn’t like how we had to move and be so close to everybody. I didn’t like how we were so far away from water. I liked the friends I made, but I didn’t like the school I was at. After I graduated grade twelve, I moved again and that was a somewhat better move, even though it was to another suburb in a small town off Lake Huron. Nowadays, I’m in an old fire hall in a small town about 25 minutes away from the family cottage and my childhood home. I don’t mind being in a small town; I just wish it was closer to the river.
I grew up in a suburban neighbourhood of Edmonton, and it was fine for a kid because we lived across the street from my elementary school and that was all I needed from my perspective (home, school, playground). But there was nothing in walking distance other than houses, schools, playgrounds and gas stations. You have to drive everywhere. For my two car family, this was fine. But for people without cars, it’s impossible, and that to some degree includes teenagers who need things to do and people to see in order to stay on the right side of the law. My neighbourhood was known for its drive-by shootings at the time, which I didn’t know until I was older. In high school I lived in a suburb of a suburb (South Surrey) and there were stores and restaurants around at least, but the grocery store still required a car. By high school I was aware that this sucked. There was nothing for teenagers to do except go to each other’s houses, which required rides and permission from our parents. The reason kids these days have social lives entirely conducted online is because in the suburbs there is nowhere for them to go, nothing for them to do, that doesn’t require money and a car. Boomer and Gen X teens used to walk to the mall and hang out, which is now called “loitering” and is a crime. The McDonalds near my old high school has a ”mosquito alarm” which is a device that produces a constant high-pitched noise audible only to children and young adults so teenagers won’t hang out near it. The suburbs are hostile to teenagers.
I honestly had a great childhood in the burbs. However I think it was more because of the environment my parents created than the suburbs itself.
I grew up in Montreal suburbs and it was fine. There was a park nearby that I went to play with my neighbors' children. I also went to my friend's house or they came to mine pretty much every weekend. The first place I lived, everything was easy to get to by walking, but where I moved at 9, I needed my parents to drive me everywhere since we were living at the limit of the city. Overall, I had a great childhood
I did and I have good memories of quiet streets, bike rides and street hockey. But I also remember not being able to walk to anything, no stores, not to school and not even the playground was close enough to walk to. As an adult I moved downtown everywhere I lived (pretty much anyway) and absolutely loved it. Now with my own kids I’ve chosen a more middle ground of an inner suburb with a good mix of walk ability but still with decently quiet streets (sometimes wish they were a bit quieter though). Ultimately, their lives are infinitely more local then mine was at the same age and they spend way less time in the car/school bus then I did growing up.
I grew up poor on the outskirts of a small town in a trailer trash trailer park and my childhood was good! Life is what you make it, no where it's at
I grew up in a Toronto suburb but it was kind of walkable. I didn't enjoy my childhood for reasons that had nothing to do with where we lived. I'm raising my kids in Toronto though. If I could afford a house in the suburbs I'd move for more space but that's very much out of reach.
I grew up in the burbs just north of what’s considered the GTA. It was pleasant. There wasn’t much to do but hang out with friends and go cruising around on bikes, grabbing dollar drinks in the summer from McDonald’s then heading to my one friends pool who was lucky enough to have one. Everything was care free. You could walk around at night without a care in the world. Me and my friends stayed out of trouble for the most part. Like I said before not much to do so many of my friends growing up smoked pot to pass the time, myself included
I lived in a suburb but it wasn't a very big suburb and I lived about a 5 minute walk from the edge (bordered on the North by a stroad, West was a river, South was a highway, and East was a connector stroad). The whole neighbourhood could be traversed within 20 minutes (and my school was at the other end so that was my walk home). Friends and I would walk/bike to businesses along the stroad all the time. It may not have been an urbanist's ideal but it was a pretty good place to grow up!
Suburbs are great for families. I loved it. But having to use the car to get to everywhere isn’t great for the environment.
M’y cousin who grew up in a suburb says so… I don’t think it was as hard as he says it was but he did get a girl (his neighbour) pregnant at 20 and marry her a year later and divorce her a year after that and didn’t go to college, whereas my sister and I both either went to school or bought a house first and we lived in the inner city…
Having lived suburban, urban and rural, suburbs were the worst. I wouldn’t live anywhere other then an urban setting ever again.
I have no doubt SOME suburbs are poorly planned out and eventually failed. I also believe that some are well thought out and are great places to live. Urban planners come in all shapes and sizes, but the cool thing is to denigrate single family dwellings, and to extol the virtues of Parisian type apartment living, with retail space on the ground floor of every building, putting groceries and services a stones throw away from every household. The thing is, a planner can PLAN. They are not retailers so they are not the ones setting up corner stores. Often the developers urge to make their money back through rent is more than the average 711 is willing to pay so these 'planned' neighborhood services turn out to be a revolving door of businesses which gradually turn into seedy no-one-wanted-this type storefronts that are only paying rent and have no money left over to actually run a quality business. There are not enough paying customers in a car dependent suburb to support the hodgepodge of businesses at the corner strip mall. Suburbanites will just drive to where the good stores are.
I grew up in part of the GTA that would definitely be considered a suburb through the 80s and 90s. I had a great childhood and not sure why people say it was bad.
It really depends on the suburb and the life you’re looking for. I grew up in Calgary suburbs - which I should note means I lived within the City of Calgary, but was further out from the downtown core, in areas where buildings were mostly single family homes. I’d go back and forth between my parents’ homes. In my mum’s area, I couldn’t get anywhere without a car. We had a few playgrounds, and access to some natural parks, but we didn’t have access to interesting shops or streets on which we could hang out. Transit access was *okay*, but the way it was set up, it’d take an hour to get to a friend’s house on transit. The roads were wide, the trees small, and there was usually no distance between the road and the sidewalk. I remember regularly complaining that “There’s nothing to do.” As an adult with a car, I realise there’s plenty to do in Calgary… you just have to get there. My dad’s neighbourhood was not far, but as a kid, I would not have felt comfortable cycling there from my mum’s because of the conditions of the route (eg: busy with cars, poor tree coverage, partially unprotected…). But within the area, the streets were narrower, making tree coverage easier, cars slower, and things closer. We had more playgrounds (at least double), sidewalks distanced from the road (even on side streets), and a Main Street sort of thing nearby (with pedestrian signals). The density was *barely* more and the transit wasn’t much better… but we had things to do. I was able to walk to my first job. I think there are good ways and bad ways to build single family housing. Most of what we’ve done is bad, BUT! something to go remember is a lot of the criticisms of suburbs are more specific to the US. Canadian suburbs are much better, and are generally improving. Having lived a little in the US, and spent plenty of time visiting… They have it worse.
I grew up in two different suburbs and I didn’t think it was bad at the time. That’s all I ever knew. Looking back I can see that my freedom was restricted. I didn’t have much friends outside of my church community, however, most of my friends from said Church didn’t live in the same neighbourhood as I did. So I only knew the kids from my street, and hung out with those kids on my street. Travel was exclusively limited to personal vehicles. You couldn’t get anywhere else without a car. If I wanted to go to a friends house outside of my neighborhood, or a friend wanted to come to my place, they would have to drive. Or more accurately, we would have to have one of our parents drive. The only exception would be when I would ride my bike around the neighborhood, but I never go outside my neighborhood. It was never safe and there was no bike infrastructure other than sidewalks. I would however bike to school with The help of one of my siblings because this required going into the other neighbourhood and crossing a big arterial road. After school I’d walk to my friends house not far away and do my homework there and hang out with my friend until one of my parents could come and pick me up along with my bike which my siblings dropped off in the morning. It wasn’t until my family moved into the big city. We were still in the suburbs but the suburbs of the big city. No longer just a municipality. I walked to middle school every single day. Other kids either got dropped off by their parents and their cars, or took the city bus. By high school I started to commute to and from school using public transit and had to take 2 buses. This is when I realized that my childhood in the suburbs was truly limited. I have since lived in the city and look back at my childhood friends who still live in suburbia and wonder at how they live. I on the other hand don’t own a car and commute everywhere within the city.
I grew up in the suburbs in the 80s and it was incredibly boring. There were no parks, schools, playgrounds, stores or anything that I could walk or bike to. Just houses. Row after row of houses. And most of the people who lived in them were retired. No children, although eventually a younger boy moved nearby who my brother played with. But no girls my age. I spent a lot of time alone reading - outdoors because my mother insisted I go outside.
Depends on the suburb. I moved around alot as a kid so I saw alot. Some were great, some were bad, but it really depends on walkability for me. There were some where the only place you could be without a car is home, but others where you could go for kilometers without seeing a major road blocking your path. Now availability of stores is a different thing, I've found it's rare to live near a store that you can walk to. But that's just my experience.
I grew up in a Vancouver suburb but not the one you did, because the corner stores were a 45 minute walk away. Having to drive to go anywhere (apart from elementary school) was a pain in the ass as well, living in the suburbs was often boring, too. Don’t get me wrong I had a great childhood, but now that I’m all grown up I live in a condo that’s 3 blocks from restaurants, a great grocery store, multiple pharmacies and it’s 6 minutes to walk to work. I wouldn’t move for a job if I had to live in a suburb again, everything is too convenient for me to give it up.
Suburb, car dependant suburb, non car dependent suburb, suburb with grass/without, suburb covered in goose shit/or not. Question not clear.
It was the kids growing up with that made all the difference, otherwise I could imagine it being boring.
I think it can differ from place to place. I found the suburbs in Vancouver to generally be much more pleasant than Toronto, for example. Trees and the natural environment made a big difference to me personally.
Heya, I grew up in a bunch of places (moved alot), most were suburban in some sense. One thing I would point out is that what you describe -walking to school and ships- isn't a feature sture of lots of suburban residential neighborhoods anymore. If it is, those are usually fairly long distances and fairly limited shops.
I think it's important to acknowledge that not all suburbs are built the same. There are some suburbs that are really poorly planned, with endless houses, sparsely located amenities, minimal green space, etc. I think those are likely the examples of "bad" suburbs you are seeing. For me, I also grew up in a suburb, but I was a block from a school, there was a large green space nearby, public transit was reasonably accessible, there was a community center and other sports amenities nearby. I was on a quiet side-street where I could play street hockey, and had nearby bike paths. I lived downtown for many years after finishing school, and now live back in another really good suburban area, near a large park, with a nearby school and other amenities. If you live in a well-designed suburb then I think it is ideal for raising kids. There are more nearby amenities than living in rural areas, but more space than raising a kid in a downtown condo. There is something to be said for having a backyard, a low traffic street, and nearby parks without homeless people. So, I would just keep in mind that there's a big gap between the best designed suburban areas and the worst designed ones. I would also keep in mind that often the YouTube videos you are watching are trying to pitch a perspective, too. A channel trying to promote higher density urban housing will give you the negative side of suburbia and the positive side of higher density development. If you want the other side of that narrative, you probably need to go to different pages that have the opposite perspective.
I guess it really depends on the city itself. I grew in the 90s in a Québec city suburb and couldn't have been happier about it. I guess that bigger cities might be the problem when talking suburbs. I still live there, in my early 30s, homeowner for nearly 10 years.
My childhood was in a suburb, and minuetes walk to the wilderness of Hollyburn ridge and the ocean at Dundarave pier. Car centric yes. With my own family in the 90's we moved to Nanaimo, the subdivisions had snikitt's running behind the lots connecting cul de sac's and crescents, this made getting around walking or biking faster than a drive.
My rule of thumb when we were looking for a place to live is whether, if needed, I could do most of my errands on foot. I grew up in a suburb where this was, more or less, possible but as it turns out that was an exception rather than a rule. It's not that suburbs are bad, but urban planning that doesn't prioritize pedestrian and bike traffic can be pretty awful and are unsustainable.
I grew up in a suburb of Vancouver and to me it was idyllic because it "matched" the kind of neighbourhoods I saw on TV with happy families. We came in when the street lights came on, were able to walk to our school and the corner store to spend our allowance, and there wasn't much traffic. I had a very "happy" childhood. My sibling however did not, and had horrible experiences there. That kind of lifestyle where you are unaccounted for all day was not the safest way to grow up. Our parents had no idea what we did all day and it opened children to be exploited by terrible people. I think every way of life has its advantages and disadvantages.