In a recent New York Magazine profile, David Brooks, NYT columnist and erstwhile defender of the Bobo’s paradise, admitted that he now habors skepticism about the suburban ideal. While the explosion of suburbs in the mid-20th century relied on minutely-planned municipal schematics and demarcated retail and residential zones, Brooks now sees more value in certain “communitarian” values. According to Brooks (among others), suburbs are municipal machines perfectly suited for compartmentalized, consumeristic culture. 
“Good policy” the profile summarizes Brooks, “should understand that people make decisions emotionally, not rationally.”
The Brooks profile is worth the full read (HT: Patrick Deneen at FPR). It also incited a really excellent response from James Poulos, whose postmodern brand of conservatism is one of the few redeeming qualities of the modern movement. Like the latter-day Brooks, Poulos rejects the idealized suburb, but — unlike Brooks — still sees something worthy of defense in suburban life. Poulos suggests that it’s misleading to talk about “The Suburb,” as if every post-interstate exurb were alike. Some suburbs are full of childless professionals who make daily hour-long commutes to their urban offices, while other suburbs are teeming with various ethnic groups and pre-kindergarten programs at the local park district. The civic structure of suburbia can adapt to both types of community; Poulos (like Brooks) would prefer the latter, but (unlike Brooks) doesn’t see the suburbia as the root problem. Rather, the suburb is a uniquely American adaptation to the transitory nature of modern life.
We restless Americans can ruin ourselves with our restlessness. But we know that we are never really at home in the world, at the same time that we know all of America, in the most important way, is our home…. Our suburbs reflect — because they have created, and manage to maintain — a brilliantly American way of pulling strangers constantly in motion out of the narrowness of their individual peregrinations and into a broader public life. If you do not like the suburbs, I suspect it is because you do not like the American propensity, deeper than even custom and habit, to move, and move, and move, and move.
Of course, at this point Brooks, Deneen, and any other self-respecting communitarian would answer quickly, “Of course! That’s precisely the problem!” While I have sympathies with certain communitarian impulses, I found Poulos’ next move to be intriguing. While the transient nature of American life is potentially problematic, Poulos suggests that the increased mobility that the suburbs compensate for is actually a result of re-prioritizing family over land. “Democratic love,” he argues, “rightly places the destiny of our children above any aristocratic love for the soil.” As a result, democratic love, with its orientation toward family comfort over heriditary place, is a more accurate reflection of the Augustinian (or Aristotelian, in Poulos’ paradigm) sense that “we are not… here to stay.”
Much of what Poulos suggests rings true for me. I’ve lived in suburbs my entire life, apart from college, and I’ve seen strikingly different types of suburban life. I was born in Elmhurst, Illinois, which has to be one of the best-preserved products of 1950s suburban expansion (chronicled in Alan Ehrenhalt’s classic The Lost City). On the other hand, I’ve also lived in less successful developments that failed to avoid the plague of ex-urban rot. But in all types of suburbs, certain commonalities emerge which seem to undermine Poulos’ argument. Perhaps the most troubling element of suburban life, in my view, is the severe ethnic and economic segregation that runs to the very heart of the modern suburb.
Poulos and I probably share a democratic preference for social mobility over more static aristocratic virtues. I’m also attracted to the notion that our urban structures should reflect the Augustinian idea that this life is not permanent or perfectly-ordered according to some greater feudal-kingdom-in-the-sky (there are two cities, after all). However, I see Poulos’ argument faltering due to the fact that suburbs themselves propose a certain civic order that undermines democratic love. Take Elmhurst as an example. It continues to be a recession-proof, growing community full of well-to-do families, Chicago commuters, Kiwanis clubs, and white mainline churches. It is also one of the most homogenous cities in one of the most homogenous counties in the nation. As Ehrenhalt describes in his book, the influx of upwardly-mobile urban exiles in the 1950s were immediately at odds with the older community of German laborers. The working-class inhabitants of the “first” Elmhurst were quickly cordoned off into their own township, while the upper-middle class Protestants of Elmhurst proper populated the sprawling new developments of split-level single-family homes.
Poulos implies that “democratic love” will prefer the good of the family over the pride of place, which sounds fine to me. However, there is still the danger that the dimensions of suburbia are by nature designed to exclude the potential for a more diverse civic “family.” This isn’t to say that if I raise my son in suburbia he will never meet a homeless person or make friends with immigrant peers. But suburbs that “work” usually do so because they manage to stake out a demographic and economic niche. In other words, suburbs are not civic societies so much as civic clubs — they exist because of vast similarities in membership.
This seems rather undemocratic to me. Democratic love, as Poulos implies, works best when it reminds us that civil society is not ultimate, nor hide-bound to a particular hierarchy or system. And from my point of view, it is exactly this democratic virtue that suffers most in suburbia.
