“Clustered living, whether in a rural village, small town, or city, can offer many advantages, ecological, social and otherwise. I’m not against it at all. Most people don’t especially want to live in remote rural areas, don’t have any intention to, and never will. The reality is that most folks are choosing between urban settings and suburban settings, not between urban settings and remote rural settings.”
May I assume that you agree with all of that? If so, perhaps you can recognize how much effort has been wasted over the past decade by those who have seemed oddly obsessed with creating greater obstacles to the relatively small number of people who wish to live in rural areas, while meanwhile the vast majority of new homes built in the county have actually been the very sort of “American Dream” suburban cul-de-sac homes you see on your cable channel — mostly in McKinleyville, Cutten/Ridgewood, the outskirts of Eureka and Arcata, and in the Fortuna area. While the self-styled Smart Growthers have been busy making themselves the opponents of homesteaders and other rural smallholders, and wearing themselves down and losing credibility battling the phantom menace of “massive conversion of rural resource lands to residential subdivisions,” the trend towards suburban sprawl that both rural residents and Smart Growthers dislike has rolled merrily along its sprawly path.
To be fair, there is no easy answer to the problem that you correctly identify as a cultural one, where most home buyers choosing between denser urban settings and the more sprawled out suburban settings you see on your cable TV real estate channel have been opting for the suburban options. To a significant extent this is due to the perception (not an entirely inaccurate perception, unfortunately) that crime and blight and lack of affordable housing and family-friendly neighborhood facilities have made the in-town options less attractive to many. But when even the great local champion of “Smart Growth,” Mark Lovelace, chooses not to live in a dense smart-growth “cluster” characterized by mixed residential and commerical uses, a mix of single family and multi-family housing, and so on — but instead chooses a typical suburban home, in a typical single-family suburban cul-de-sac neighborhood at the very edge of the suburbs in Sunny Brae, across from a golf course and at the edge of the redwood forest — it’s clear that the attractions of living in that kind of setting are a deeply-embedded part of the mainstream American view of what counts as nice, safe, pleasant surroundings in which to raise one’s family.
While it may be convenient to place the blame on cable TV real estate channels, greedy developers, Rush Limbaugh, and other external forces, the less comfortable truth is that when it comes to the preference for suburban living, the phrase “we have met the enemy, and they are us” really comes into play. I wish I had an easy answer for this, or that I believed that the wave of a magical planning pen will change people’s preferences, but I don’t. I tend to think that the best hope lies in creative initiatives to improve our urban residential neighborhoods, schools and family-friendly facilities to make the in-town options more attractive — for instance the exemplary work being done by the Jefferson School project in Eureka.
