Stegall in CT on Suburbia
July 13, 2006
Maybe this is the sort of thing that irks the Sacramone and Con-Crunchy types, lifted from Mr. Stegall’s review of David Goetz’s book, Death By Suburb: How to Keep the Suburbs from Killing Your Soul, a study in bourgeois honkey angst in Wheaton, IL:
The problem Goetz runs into is his unwillingness to offer the prescription of Christ: If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. If suburbia is a spiritual “Alcatraz,” as Goetz describes it, I suggest literal escape plans, even if they must be carried out patiently over the course of a lifetime. Instead, Goetz advises the inmates to live a disembodied spiritual life as the only “escape” available. But we are creatures, the material world is ever present with us, and Goetz’s solution, while perhaps sufficient for a few saints, is unworkable for the rest of us, who require an external and embodied expression of life ordered under God.
A certain mind illogically concludes that this is a demand that one become a farmer.
Goetz also gives an interview here which concludes with some confusing remarks about either “fleeing the city” or bringing “monastic practices” into suburban life to abate its “toxins.” I thought he was talking about the suburbs. Might one flee the suburbs for the city? For Kuntslerite, New Urbanist, or Crunchy Con reasons? RJN had a long piece in FT a few months ago in which he noted just how bad the inner cities have gotten without him paying it much mind for quite a while. It was a good an revealing piece, noting much of the disabling and dividing racial politics that may well lead–coupled with other linked causes–to the spread of the Detroit model of urban failure. Now is the time to rebuild and preserve, or fleeing will likely be the only alternative.
Speaking of which… Here is an article by Congress for the New Urbanism head and former Milwaukee mayor, John Norquist, on Frank P. Zeidler, ardent Lutheran and the last “sewer Socialist” mayor of Milwaukee. (Zeidler’s funeral took place yesterday.) There are substantial remarks on the anti-urban animus of the Milwaukee suburbs which, as in many northern cities, developed by means of “white flight” and the many pressures generating it:
Shortly after his election, Zeidler embarked on an aggressive effort to expand the city’s municipal boundaries. As a candidate for the state Senate in 1982, I campaigned on the far west side near St. Theresa’s in an area annexed from the Town of Wauwatosa during Zeidler’s time. I knocked on the door of Carl Quast, a retired city planner who had been Zeidler’s annexation director. Quast told me that Zeidler had launched a plan calling (quietly) for the gradual annexation of what later became New Berlin, Brookfield, Menomonee Falls, Germantown and Mequon, not to mention most of today’s suburban Milwaukee County.
Capitalizing on suburban thirst for city water and sewer services, they almost succeeded - annexing large portions of the towns of Lake, Greenfield and Wauwatosa and setting in motion the annexation of Granville (now the northwest side). But in 1955, the Legislature passed the Oak Creek Law, which allowed all unincorporated towns adjacent to Milwaukee and only Milwaukee to incorporate as separate municipalities, without losing their claim on city water or sewers. The discriminatory law ended the annexation program and set up the situation of today, where poor people live in a city surrounded by suburban enclaves zoned to exclude low-cost housing.
Zeidler knew the law was unjust and, in the long run, harmful to the whole metropolitan area, so he opposed it. He said the city would have to grow vertically without annexation power and advocated improving transit to help that happen.
At the end of WW II, Milwaukee enjoyed a complex network of trains and transit. Zeidler saw the 198 miles of interurban, 300 miles of streetcar lines and 110 miles of electric trolleys as a valuable public asset even though they were owned and operated by private investors.
When government expenditure on highways undermined the viability of the private tax-paying transit companies, Zeidler felt a responsibility to try to get the government to intervene and save at least some of the system. Unfortunately, he stood nearly alone, and in October 1958, the last streetcar line was removed. He knew the decline of transit would hurt the Milwaukee region and its people. He lost, but he was right.
This is Stegall in CT on Suburbia in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Intellectual diversity is conformity. Conformity is freedom | Next: Have it Your Way | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)
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