I Only Wanted Something Else To Do But Hang Around The
first photo of me (not technically, but with poetic license) was shot
as my heavily pregnant mother and ruggedly bearded father ran the
rapids on Canada’s Black River. At age six I had my own backpack and
was proud to have hiked the Big Carp River trail in the Porcupine
Mountains. By the time I was 20, I’d worn a hole through a very pricey
pair of Vasque boots – the kind with lug soles made for strapping
crampons onto. At 26, I secured real employment with the Michigan
Environmental Council, cementing what most thought was a permanent gig
where my long hair and penchant for holey jeans wouldn’t disrupt a
fiery passion for community organizing and political change.
So, less than a decade later, here I am, hair shorn, neck wrapped in a tie, shilling for suburbia. What the hell happened?
In my nascent years in environmental advocacy, I started to hear a
mantra from conservationists, home builders, realtors,
environmentalists and urbanites. It was best encapsulated by Michigan
Farm Bureau president, Jack Laurie: "We can’t save our farms until we
save our cities." As I spent day after day fighting urban sprawl by
pushing for development regulations and urging funding for farmland
preservation programs, Michigan’s system of funding unsustainable
development contradicted what I heard everybody asking for. My
frustration built with every new highway lane to the hinterland and
each “economic development" dollar we spent moving jobs from one
struggling city to its low-tax neighboring township.
Until someone said, come run the Michigan Suburbs Alliance. Much to
the horror of friends and family (“You work for who?!”), I took the
job.
The suburbs have gotten a bad rap over the past couple of
decades. Depicted as homogenous bastions of fast-food and white faces
where rich kids smoke pot and commit petty crimes out of boredom,
suburbia became synonymous with blandness and despair. Influential
social critics like James Howard Kunstler in his landmark book "The
Geography of Nowhere" laid heavy blame on modern development for the
demise of the American dream:
The tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing
tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes
up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work [is]...a
land full of places that are not worth caring about [and] will soon be
a nation and a way of life that is not worth defending.
In truth, there are many faces on the suburban die. I’ll be the
first to admit that there are those communities where beige is the
pervasive color, sidewalks are anomalous, and green grass is the
product of chemical dependency rather than a sign of a healthy
environment. But there are a number of suburbs that share a deep
connection with traditional cities. Places where culture abounds,
people congregate, and front porches outnumber garages.
According to the Brooking Institute, a fifth of America’s population
lives in these "first suburbs." In southeast Michigan, they are cities
like Dearborn, Royal Oak, Ferndale and Hamtramck, renown for art
galleries, ethnic festivals, great restaurants and social
diversity. Nation-wide, inner-ring suburbs are more reflective of
America’s population than any other group of communities, mirroring the
country’s growth in racial diversity over the past three decades. They
offer better access to the American dream with higher than average
employment, college graduation rates, housing values and median
incomes.
Simultaneously, there is a strong economic link between first-tier
suburbs and their core cities. In fact, CEO’s for Cities notes that
there is a multiplier effect between cities and their suburbs in which
dollars generated in one have ripple effects of 15-25 percent in the
other. We know from practical experience that when a core city
declines, its suburbs follow. Sadly, in Michigan our response to core
city degradation has been to create protectionist policies that
insulate neighbors from the inevitable impact of decline rather than
embracing metropolitan programs that recognize our essential
interdependency.
These are the hard questions that are facing our region today. Call
it an urban agenda, a blueprint for economic revival, or a plan for
21st century sustainability, all of the region’s leaders are beginning
to understand that systemic change is an absolute necessity if we are
going to thrive in the new economy that is being thrust on us. Other
MetroMode bloggers have articulated the dynamic opportunity before us:
Jacob Corvidae’s call for an energy revolution,
Lizabeth Ardisana’s plea for pragmatic action,
Kerry and Bryce Moore’s transformational plan for sustainable manufacturing,
John Austin reminding us that we’re just one of many loops on the rust belt . .
This week, I’ll try to add the small-city component to their
thoughts in what is obviously becoming a consensus call for change.
No city or suburb can offer everything to all of its residents,
especially in this rapidly globalizing world, so it behooves us to
better understand how we can work together to strengthen the vitality
of true urban communities in Michigan.