The Weekly Standard

I subscribed to the Weekly Standard, a "neoconservative" (whatever that means) magazine, and the first article I read from the first issue I received was worth the price I paid for the entire year. You see, ever since I moved to the Bay Area (and coincidentally read "Suburban Nation The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream"), I've had conflicted feelings about the type of neighborhood I want to live in. For example, I like the open, smaller town that both I and my wife were raised in. Of course now, both of those places have changed as their respective populations grew -- my memory is the only way to see them now. Where I live now, I own a modest home with an astronomical price tag and a property lot size that is measured in feet, not acres. The traffic is horrible, the public transportation is a joke, and the zoning of property appears to be the work of monkey who went blind from smoking crack. I live in a town/city called Fremont, which has over 200,000 people in it, but bears no similarity to a city of any form. The other issue is the people in Fremont; everyone rallies around diversity, sharing culture, exalting the great melting pot that America is. The reality is not so wonderful. I find many immigrants socially gravitate towards similar immigrants, and few prefer to "melt" as it were. The melting will be left for the children and their children to do. As a result, first generation immigrants have little, if anything in common with people from different cultures, and maintain a minimal level of social interaction with other groups. The result is a fragmented society with bland and uninteresting interactions between different cultural groups.

These ideas had been swirling in the fog of my mind since I moved to California, but after I read the article "Patio Man and the Sprawl People", certain elements of my own life became clearer. Patio Man is an archetypal white American suburbanite. The article discusses what Patio Man wants from life and why he is motivated to constantly move into new suburbs, named Sprinkler Cities. While I don't want to be Patio Man, I identify with who he is and what he wants. The following passage is what really hit me. The old suburbs have become socially urbanized. They've become stratified. Two sorts of people have begun to move in and ruin the middle-class equality of the development you grew up in: the rich and the poor. There are, first, the poor immigrants, from Mexico, Vietnam, and the Philippines. They come in, a dozen to a house, and they introduce an element of unpredictability to what was a comforting milieu. They shout. They're less tidy. Their teenage boys seem to get involved with gangs and cars. Suddenly you feel you will lose control of your children. You begin to feel a new level of anxiety in the neighborhood. It is exactly the level of anxiety—sometimes intermingled with racism—your parents felt when they moved from their old neighborhood to the suburbs in the first place. And then there are the rich. Suddenly many of the old ramblers are being knocked down by lawyers who proceed to erect 4,000-square-foot arts and crafts bungalows with two car garages for their Volvos. Suddenly cars in the neighborhoods have window and bumper stickers that never used to be there in the past: “Yale,” “The Friends School,” “Million Mom March.” The local stores are changing too. Gone are the hardware stores and barber shops. Now there are Afghan restaurants, Marin County bistros, and environmentally sensitive and extremely expensive bakeries. And these new people, while successful and upstanding, are also . . . snobs. They’re doctors and lawyers and journalists and media consultants. They went to fancy colleges and they consider themselves superior to you if you sell home-security systems or if you are a mechanical engineer, and in subtle yet patronizing ways they let you know it. ... And so Patio Man is not inclined to stay and defend himself against the condescending French-film goers and their Volvos. He’s not going to mount a political campaign to fix the educational, economic, and social woes that beset him in his old neighborhood. He won’t waste his time fighting a culture war. It’s not worth the trouble. He just bolts. He heads for the exurbs and the desert. He goes to the new place where the future is still open and promising. He goes to fresh ground where his dreams might more plausibly come true.

As Patio Man is described, and his life tracked, I noted all the things that I dislike in him: the avoidance of political/religious discussion, the support of sprawl, the need for everything to be clean and meticulously organized. The utter futility of Patio Man is obvious, there are only so many places left to build, and you'll always be followed. I dislike Patio Man, but am uncomfortable with my similarities to him.