I have, perhaps you could spell it out for me?
All right, Glen, as Archivist correctly pointed out, I never said that nobody chooses suburbia for the very romantic and clicheed notion of living in a low density environment with a yard. There are people out there that fit this description, whose primary motivation for moving to suburbia is to enjoy the creature comforts of a single family, detached house with a yard and a garage, but they represent a minority of the people who live in suburbia. People are much more pragmatic; if they "choose" to live in suburbia, their primary motivation is almost certainly more complex: family are nearby, their job is nearby, the school district is better, it is affordable, they grew up in suburbia and are unaware of different lifestyle choices, there are cultural support mechanisms for their ethnic group, etc. These all seem like much more plausible reasons for living in suburbia than "space", "a yard" and "barbecuing" and, yet, that is exactly what pundits like Kay and Brooks ascribe the growth of suburbia to.
The majority of the real factors influencing suburban growth are outside of the control of individual people: they are socially-embedded or perpetuate a legacy. For example, if every North American city is hooked up to a freeway network, the towns that will fail will be those that aren't on a highway node, and thus the
structure of the automobile hegemony
imposes demands on how development takes shape around North American cities. The dominance of the automobile and decentralized suburban development is not due to its inherent superiority over public transit and centralization, it was a long, steady process involving rewriting tax codes to support Keynesian theories of consumption during the Great Depression and, in that vein, a federally-sponsored project to build roadways (interstate highway act) and provide extremely subsidized mortgage assistance to returning WW2 veterans under the condition that they buy newly built houses. Along with policies of racial discrimination in central cities, overt redlining of inner city neighbourhoods, writing off taxes collected on suburban shopping malls and funding schools through localized property taxes, the fix was in for the inner city and suburbs "won" out. Of course, in Canada we didn't have nearly these many constraints but we did have the substantial constraint of being completely tied to the American economy and transportation infrastructure and therefore we, naturally, fell in line.
You now see that once this physical style of development became manifest, it was very hard to reverse and so, over 50 years later, suburban-style sprawl development remains the dominant form of development in North America. This is the extremely well-documented story of the origins of suburbia and any fanciful notion that it was based on consumer choice is completely and patently false. In fact, in surveying all the literature on suburban origins and dominant growth patterns, I have never, ever seen any defense of suburbia and auto-dominance put forth by someone who was not beholden to libertarian economic theory. That includes you, Glen. In fact, the whole concept of market-driven choice in urban growth was pioneered at the University of Chicago's school of policy, conveniently during the Milton Friedman years. Many of the pundits who believe in your theory that suburbs are desired by conscious consumers was advanced by people who either attended or teach at the University of Chicago, including David Brooks and urban theorist Robert Bruegemann, the author of the controversial book "Sprawl".
So I hope I have enlightened both you and Whoaccio on why suburban sprawl is not motivated by personal choices. Again, I freely admit that there are some people who would rather live a suburban life but are bound by structural restrictions on where they live and I can't think of a better example than our old, ex-communicated forum member, Dichotomy. Now, here was a man who hated the noise, density and hustle of living in downtown Toronto and really enjoyed driving his car. I really think he would have been happier, and perhaps less aggressive on the forum, had he lived where he wanted to out in the 'burbs. And, yet, he was confined to living in the gay village of Church and Wellesley because he was a homosexual and the sorts of social support systems which he and his partner rely on are nonexistent in Vaughan or Milton or Whitby. People aren't open to choice as much as they are confronted by obstacles. When you take the sum of these barriers, you can easily why the decision on where to live -whether urban or suburban - suddenly boils down to picking between a very small sample of nearly identical properties in a nearly identical locations.
), there was decent transit service (iExpress) within a 2 minute walk, and 24 hour shopping plaza across the street. Sure, I hated every minute of the surroundings, but it was quiet, and the mature suburban single family housing neighbourhood had its appeal--nice manicured front lawns, large tree canopy, etc. Most people who lived in this neighbourhood worked nearby, or went to the nearby universities.