David Brooks - On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense

LETS TAKE A DRIVE.

Lets start downtown in one of those urban bohemian neighborhoods, and then lets drive through the inner-ring suburbs and on to the outer suburbs and the exurbs and the small towns and beyond. Lets take a glimpse at how Americans really live at the start of the twenty-first century in their everyday, ordinary lives.

As we go, well find some patterns that are intriguing but probably not that important. For example, did you know that 28 percent of Americans consider themselves attractive (a figure I consider slightly high) but only 11 percent of Americans consider themselves sexy? Did you know that 39 percent of eleven-and twelve-year-olds say that Chinese food is their favorite food, while only 9 percent say American food is? Did you know that a quarter of all women have considered breast-augmentation surgery, which is kind of depressing, and so have 3 percent of all men, which is horrifying.

But well find other patterns that are probably more important. For one thing, we are living in the age of the great dispersal. As Witold Rybczynski has observed, the American population continues to decentralize faster than any other society in history. In 1950 only 23 percent of Americans lived in suburbia, but now most do, and todays suburbs are sprawling out faster and faster and farther and farther, so in the past few years, many exurban places have broken free from the gravitational pull of the cities and now float in a new space far beyond them.

Americans are still moving from the Northeast and the Midwest down to the South and the Southwest. But the really interesting movements are outward from cities. The people who were in move out, and the people who were out move farther out, into the suburbs of suburbia. For example, the population of metropolitan Pittsburgh declined by 8 percent over the past two decades, but as people moved away, the amount of developed land in the Pittsburgh area increased by 43 percent. The city of Atlanta saw its population grow by twenty-three thousand over the last decade, but the surrounding suburbs grew by 1.1 million.

The geography of work has been turned upside down. Jobs used to be concentrated downtown, in office buildings, stores, and urban-manufacturing zones. But 90 percent of the office space built in America in the 1990s was built in suburbia, and most of it in far-flung office parks along the interstates. The sprawling suburbs now account for more office space than the inner cities in every metro area in the country except Chicago and New York. In the Bay Area, for example, there are five times more companies headquartered in Santa Clara County than in San Francisco.

That means we have a huge mass of people who not only dont live in the cities, they dont commute to the cities, go to movies in the cities, eat in the cities, or have any significant contact with urban life. They are neither rural, nor urban, nor residents of a bedroom community. They are charting a new way of living.

These new places are huge, and hugely attractive to millions of people. The fastest-growing big counties in Americasuch as Douglas County, Colorado (between Denver and Colorado Springs), and Loudoun County, Virginia (near Dulles Airport)are doubling and tripling in size every decade or so. A vast suburb such as Mesa, Arizona, now contains more people than Minneapolis, St. Louis, or Cincinnati and will soon pass Atlanta.

Its as if Zeus came down and started plopping vast towns in the middle of the farmland and the desert overnight. Boom! A master planned community! Boom! A big-box mall! Boom! A rec center, pool, and four thousand soccer fields! The food courts come first, and the people follow. How many times in human history have two-hundred-thousand-or five-hundred-thousand-person communities materialized out of practically nothing in the space of a few years? What sorts of institutions get born there, and what sorts of people emerge?

This suburban supernova subtly affects every place in America. The cities and inner-ring suburbs are affected because only certain kinds of people get left behind. Quite often the people who stay are either the very poor, because they cant afford to move; or the very rich, because they can afford to stay and live well in upscale enclaves. In the exploding exurbs, there are no centers, no recognizable borders and boundaries, and few of the conventional geographic formssuch as towns, villages, and squaresthat people in older places take for granted. Up till now in human history, people have lived around some definable placea tribal ring, an oasis, a river junction, a port, a town square. You could identify a certain personality type with a certain place. There was a New York personality, an L.A. personality. But in exurbia, each individual has his or her own polycentric nodesthe school, the church, the subdevelopment, the office parkand the relationship between those institutions is altered.

People have a different sense of place. They dont perceive where they live as a destination, merely as a dot on the flowing plane of multidirectional movement. Life is different in ways large and small. When the New Jersey Devils won the Stanley Cup championship, they had their victory parade in a parking lot, because no downtown street was home to all the people who love the team.

Virginia Tech demographer Robert Lang compares this new exurban form to the dark matter in the universe: stuff that is very hard to see or define but somehow accounts for more mass than all the planets, stars, and moons put together.

When it comes to suburbia, our imaginations are motionless. Many of us still live with the suburban stereotypes established by the first wave of critics. Yet there are no people so conformist as those who fault the supposed conformity of the suburbs. From The Organization Man to Peyton Place to The Stepford Wives to American Beauty to the vast literature on suburban sprawl, generation after generation of American writers and storytellers have paraded out the same clichs of suburban life. Suburbs are either boring and artificial, or else they are superficially boring and artificial but secretly sick and psychotic. If you were to judge by the literature of the past century, nobody is happy in suburbia.

But driving through the suburbs, one sees the most amazing things: lesbian dentists, Iranian McMansions, Korean megachurches, nuclear-free-zone subdevelopments, Orthodox shtetls with Hasidic families walking past strip malls on their way to Saturday-morning shul.

At some point in the past decade, the suburbs went quietly berserk. As if under the influence of some bizarre form of radiation, everything got huge. The cars got huge, so heads dont even spin when a mountainous Hummer comes rolling down the street. The houses got huge. The drinks at 7-Eleven got huge, as did the fry containers at McDonalds. The stores turned into massive, sprawling category-killer megaboxes with their own climatic zones. Suburbia is no longer the land of ticky-tacky boxes on a hillside where everything looks the same. Its the land of the gargantuoids.