The suburbs.

There's something about the suburbs that always unnerved me. And I think, as I write this, I'm just figuring out what it is.

The city, like humanity as a whole, is mixed. It's diverse. Not just in ethnic makeup, but in terms of zoning, more simply, where things are.

Housing, business, residence, industry, commerce. All together, in varying degrees. To get home, you pass the little store on the corner, the laundromat, the lawyer's offices, a strictly residential building, duplexes, houses, gas stations. All these things can exist on a single block. And to go from home to school as a child, and home to work as an adult, you must, on the most basic level, pass them, if not interact with them on a personal level.

But the suburbs are completely different. In one part, you have houses. No little stores, no barbers, no things linking families to the businesses. In the next part, you have strip malls. In these strip malls, you have your shops. Built en masse, 15 stores move in at once. Chains, mostly. Then next to this strip mall, you have your other strip mall. And down the block, another strip mall.

And the exurbs are even more defined. It's not just residential and commerical. It's subdivisions looking at other sub divisions from across the street, or down the block. Park Oak Glens sits across from Shady Pines Vista and every person has their own prefabricated house which looks exactly like the other 64 houses in the subdivision. And strip malls are secondary to the big box stores like the Wal-Marts and Home Depots, and flank them in their own strip mall complexes, and you can even do away with some of the more popular small chains for the homogeneity of the "Every Day Low Prices™" of a single store.


The further out you go, the more physical space you may be able to afford in terms of acreage and square footage, but the less it's actually yours. Obviously you physically own it, but it's exactly like your neighbors. And his neighbors. And the other 62 people with the exact same house in your subdivision. And the fewer stores or restaurants around you, the less you actually choose what you can consume/buy. And if there's the chain strip mall/big box stores, you're really limited in the kinds of products you buy, as are all your neighbors. And independence of how much you can wall yourself off becomes greater, but the amount you interact with humanity as the whole becomes less.


But really, it's just a personal preference. Maybe it'd be different if I had kids. Or if I wanted to buy a nice big house and drive an SUV, and care about things like golf. But I really don't. Regardless of how much money I have or don't have, I don't think I need a 5 bedroom house with a family room, sitting room, dining room, and finished basement for all the kids' toys because they just couldn't possibly fit into a regular sized room. But really, I'll take a city any day of the week.