Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (9 page)

Wait a minute, you might say: these days, most of us have friends all over town. Mobility has liberated us from geography, just as urban freeways enable us to travel sixty miles across a metropolitan region to work. This is only partly true. Distance raises the cost of every friendly encounter. Let’s say that you and I want to meet for an ice-cream cone at the end of our workday before heading home for dinner. First we both must chart the geographic area each of us can reach in that time. Then we must see if our territories intersect. Then we need to figure out if the journey to and from a rendezvous point in that zone leaves enough time to make the meeting worthwhile. Each of us has an envelope of possibility on the space-time continuum. The more our envelopes intersect, the easier it is for us to actually see each other in person.

Using this model, the geographer Steven Farber and his colleagues at the University of Utah set out to calculate how easy it is for people living in America’s biggest cities to meet in a hypothetical 1.5-hour window after work. They used a supercomputer to crunch the numbers on city size, population, geography, form, and land use to come up with hundreds of millions of possible space-time meet-up envelopes. The result: a rating of what Farber calls the social interaction potential of each city.

The most powerful drag on Farber’s social interaction potential should now come as no surprise. It’s decentralization: the more thinly a city spreads out, the less access citizens have to one another. “As we continue to sprawl our cities, we are actually making it harder for social interactions to occur,” Farber told me. “If you live in a big city, unless you are living and working in the core, you are paying a huge social cost.”

But urban distance does more than just limit face-to-face time. It actually changes the shape and quality of our social networks. This was borne out by a 2009 study of commuters in Switzerland, where many people drive to international centers such as Geneva and Zurich. Not surprisingly, the study found that long commutes created a dispersive effect on people’s social network: the longer the commute, the farther apart one’s friends tended to live from one another, like a web being stretched in all directions. (To be precise, every extra six miles of commute meant that one’s friends lived an extra 1.39 miles away from her, and an extra 1.46 miles apart from
each other
.) The upshot of this stretching: long-distance commuters’ friends were less likely to be friends with one another, making it logistically more challenging to get face time with each of them. So while the long-distance commuters may have had lots of friends, they just weren’t able to get as much support from them.

How much does social time matter? One more survey: a 2008 study by the Gallup Organization and Healthways found a direct relationship between well-being and leisure time. The more people hung out with family and friends in any particular day, the more happiness and enjoyment they reported, and the less stress and worry. It’s no surprise that it’s good to hang out with people we like. What is remarkable is just how much socializing we can handle. The happiness curve doesn’t level off until it hits six or seven hours of social time a day. And yet, like Randy Strausser, more than three-quarters of American commuters now drive to work alone. By the mid-2000s, after a half century of massive investment in highways and urban road expansion, Americans were actually spending more hours commuting than they got in vacation time.

When Kids Pay for Distance

In 2010, I returned to San Joaquin County to see how the exurbs were recovering. I took a cruise through Stockton’s Weston Ranch, which had noticeably changed. Lawns and shrubs were shaggy and under-watered. Fences were faded and broken. I stopped to chat with a group of teenagers in the middle of a sidewalk drinking party. They were sons and daughters of parents who had moved to the exurb from Oakland a decade before, hoping to escape the urban gang culture. After proudly showing me their own gang colors—
Norteño
bloodred, on belts and scarves and hoodies—they did what suburban kids have done for generations: they whined about where they lived. They said they were stuck, trapped, miles from anywhere. It was not a new complaint, but it was especially true in this city without a city. Here they were, on the cusp of adulthood, virtually helpless to access jobs or education or stores, never mind parties or movie theaters or restaurants, for that matter. I told them I was researching cities and happiness. One girl pulled her hoodie back over her dreadlocks and said, “You know what would make me happy? A store—something, anything, right here on the corner.”

“Quit dreaming,” her friend shouted over her. “What we need is a
car
and a tank of
gas
.”

These kids had bigger worries than picking up more beer. Before I left them, they warned me to get out of Weston Ranch before dark, when the guns would come out. The warning struck me as pure bravado, but my scans of headlines in
The Record
, Stockton’s local newspaper, have since revealed a parade of shootings and assaults in Weston Ranch—from the kid who took a stray bullet in his head when he peered out his window in 2009, to the rapper who was executed on a bench in nearby Henry Long Park in 2012.

Stockton has developed the worst youth gang problem in California. The city faces issues of poverty and immigration, but poor parent-child bonds and weak social ties were key contributors to gang membership. “If we have parents who take care of their kids, provide love and affection, how much of this gang activity would we be curtailing?” asked Stockton mayor Ed Chavez in frustration back when the county was still pitching itself as a rosy alternative to the inner city.

Geography was not helping. One survey found that, with a quarter of all workers commuting to other counties, others driving between San Joaquin’s various hamlets, and kids geographically isolated from community services and relatives, nearly half of fifth and seventh graders had no adult supervision at all during afterschool hours. For all its middle-class aesthetics, Weston Ranch was an especially rich gang-recruitment area, Ralph Womack, head of Stockon’s youth gang intervention program, told me. Great Valley Elementary School in Weston Ranch resorted to scheduling parent conferences late at night in a desperate attempt to catch those long-distance parents. When latchkey kids have no parents around to guide them, many end up finding a substitute in gangs, he explained.

Many people move to the suburban fringe and suffer the commute as a sacrifice for their children. Unfortunately, that quiet cul-de-sac is a less ideal place to nurture kids and teens than we once thought. This landscape doesn’t simply leave them stranded; teens from the suburbs—even affluent suburbs—have proved to be more prone to social and emotional problems than their urban counterparts.

When she studied teenagers from affluent suburbs in the Northeast, Columbia University psychologist Suniya Luthar found that despite their access to resources, health services, and high-functioning parents, these teens were much more anxious and depressed than teens from inner-city neighborhoods who were faced with all manner of environmental and social ills. The privileged suburban teens smoked more, drank more, and used more hard drugs than inner-city teens, especially when they were feeling down. “The implication,” explained Luthar, “is that they are self-medicating.”

Unhappy youths in these studies all seemed to have one thing in common: they lacked the peace of mind that comes with strong attachment to parents. Kids who actually get to eat dinner with at least one parent get better grades and have fewer emotional problems. Lots of things keep parents busy these days, but it stands to reason that marathon commutes, long-distance shopping trips, and the stringing together of distant appointments unique to the dispersed city can starve children of those crucial parental hours. This phenomenon is certainly not unique to the exurbs. But these communities undoubtedly design time deficits into their residents’ lives.

None of this came as a surprise to Randy Strausser, who admitted that his own family had paid the price for his stretched life. Randy first took up the super-commute life when his own daughter and son, Kim and Scott, were toddlers. When the tech boom hit Silicon Valley, real estate prices went through the roof. Like so many people with kids, Randy hit the new highway over the Diablo Range to Tracy, in San Joaquin County. His children barely saw him during the week. His first marriage failed. When they reached their teens, Kim and Scott moved in with Randy’s previous wife. But she was an exurban super-commuter too.

In those years, the teens had to fend for themselves most nights. Kim got used to heating up frozen dinners to serve her little brother for dinner. But she could hardly be expected to parent the kid. Scott slid off the rails. First he got into tagging. Then skipping school. Then shoplifting. His troubles got worse and worse.

“Now,” said Randy gravely as we finally hit the turnoff for Mountain House, “he is a guest of the county of Salt Lake City.” By which he meant Scott was in jail, and it was time to change the subject.

The End of the Road

Sometimes it takes an entire generation to see the life lost between freeway off-ramps.

Randy’s daughter, Kim, told me she was drawn into the long-distance life commute herself not long after graduating from high school. That’s when she married her high school boyfriend, Kevin Holbrook, and gave birth to a boy. They moved into a modest ranch house in Tracy, as the passage to adulthood seemed to demand. They had bills to pay, but in the dispersed city, it was not as though they could just work around the corner. Kim got a job as an administrative assistant at the Hewlett Foundation in Menlo Park, fifty miles west.

That’s how she found herself crawling out of bed at five each morning, dropping her toddler, Justin, at day care, then hitting the highway for two hours, up over the Diablo Range, down through the Castro Valley, across the shallow south end of San Francisco Bay, up to the 280, through the hills above Redwood City, and down into Menlo Park. When she could, she’d catch a ride with her grandmother, Nancy, who also worked for the foundation. Otherwise, she’d go solo in her Chevy Malibu. Two hours in, two hours home. She was living the long-distance life, just like her mother and father, her grandmother, and her husband, too. It was exhausting, but she endured it for the sake of her son.

One day the phone rang at Kim’s office. It was the day-care center back in Tracy. Her little boy had turned beet red. He was as hot as a kettle, and he was vomiting the contents of his stomach all over the playroom. Kim panicked. Her child was dying, she thought,
and he was fifty miles away
. She sprinted downstairs to her Chevy and hit the highway. Her heart pounded as if it were going to break right through her chest. She had no idea how fast she was traveling, but no speed seemed fast enough.

Hot tears were streaming down her face when she heard the sound of a police siren and pulled over on Eleventh Avenue in Tracy. She didn’t have the energy to explain her haste to the officer. She just let him write the ticket and kept her eyes on the road ahead, waiting for him to let her go.

By the time Kim burst through the doors of her son’s day-care center, his vomit had been mopped up and his fever had settled. She picked him up, wiped the sweaty hair back on his forehead, held him. The boy was on the mend. But that night Kim told her husband that she could not, would not, live as her parents had lived. They vowed to find a way to unstretch their lives.

Kim Holbrook has not been alone in reconsidering her relationship with the city. In the past decade the tide of dispersal has slacked. Central cities from Manhattan to Vancouver to Mexico City have seen an influx of new residents willing to give proximity another shot. But escaping from the effects of dispersal is not as easy as you might think. The system that stretched Kim’s life actually flows through architecture, public spaces, infrastructure budgets, laws, and mobility networks, infecting every part of every metropolis in the United States, Canada, and, increasingly, cities all around the world.

If we are going to escape the effects of dispersal, we need to understand it as a system of building, planning, and thinking. We need to consider how it was born in the first place.

4. How We Got Here

The modern city is probably the most unlovely and artificial site this planet affords. The ultimate solution is to abandon it … We shall solve the City Problem by leaving the city.

–Henry Ford, 1922

The city we saw from the Repo Tour bus is not a naturally occurring phenomenon. It is not organic. It is not an accident. It was not fashioned by the desires of citizens operating in a free market. It was shaped by powerful financial incentives, massive public investment, and strict rules defining how land and roads can be developed and used. But these are merely tools, put to work in the service of ideas about urban happiness that were born during an age of acute urban trauma. To understand the dispersed city, it helps to take a quick detour into cities that were so full of factory smoke, ugliness, crime, and deprivation that they seemed to threaten the very societies that created them.

Andrew Mearns, a reformist clergyman, produced this report after a trudge into the slums of industrial revolution London in 1883: “Few who will read these pages have any conception of what these pestilential human rookeries are, where tens of thousands are crowded together amidst horrors which call to mind what we have heard of the middle passage of the slave ship.” The poor lived several families to a room in filthy tenements, their broken window holes stuffed with rags to keep out the cold. The air was thick with soot and the water infused with cholera.

The city was a flood of sin and misery, which Mearns warned was strong enough to destroy society itself.

The urban slums of America were not much better. In New York City, the 1894 Tenement House Commission noted that the city’s crowded tenement districts were “centers of disease, poverty, vice, and crime, where it is a marvel, not that some children grow up to be thieves, drunkards and prostitutes, but that so many should ever grow up to be decent and self-respecting.” In 1885 a contributor to
The American Magazine
described New York’s tenement population as “so ignorant, so vicious, so depraved that they hardly seem to belong to our species,” adding cruelly that it was “almost a matter for congratulations that the death rate among the inhabitants of these tenements is something over 57 per cent.”