Quotes About Suburbs

I grew up in Far Rockaway and then Long Island.

In 1995 Bank of America issued a famous report on sprawl in California. The bank pronounced: 'Urban job centers have decentralized to the suburbs. New housing tracts have moved even deeper into agriculturally and environmentally sensitive areas. Private auto use continues to rise. This acceleration of sprawl has surfaced enormous social, environmental, and economic costs, which until now have been hidden, ignored, or quietly borne by society.

By the mid-1950s real estate promoters of the commercial strip were attaching it to the centerless residential suburb. Both strips and tracts expanded under the impact of federal subsidies to developers, but since these subsidies were indirect, it was hard for many citizens or local officials to know what was happening.

In the wake of the tax bonanzas for new commercial projects, roadside strips boomed. Private developers responded to the lack of planned centers, public space, and public facilities in suburbs by building malls, office parks, and industrial parks as well as fast-food restaurants and motels.

Perhaps his gloom was due to his profession, that he lived among fallen empires, and in reading these languages that had not been spoken by the common man in centuries, he had all about him the ruin of language, evidence of toppled suburbs, grass growing among the mosaics, and voices that had been choked with poison, iron, age, or ash.

We now in the United States have more security guards for the rich than we have police services for the poor districts. If you're looking for personal security, far better to move to the suburbs than to pay taxes in New York.

I was born in the West Village in New York, and then when I was about four my family moved to what they joke is the suburbs, the Upper West Side. I lived there for most of my childhood.

Our building practices for the past century have been plain stupid - especially the glorification of the single-family house in a subdivision, at the expense of all other typologies and arrangements.

When he picked out the [gravesite] plot, my father had joked that he was moving, at last, to the suburbs.

We're commuter wives. These are our commuter lives. We're capable of carrying alcoholic husbands from the kitchen to the bathroom in a fireman's grip. Between trains, we train to fight with enemies we haven't met yet, battling against punching bags, leaping like the world is made of stone walls and we're storming them. There's another version of commuting of course, as in to commute a sentence. This is our sentence, these suburbs, the train that does not stretch to meet them

Feelings are facts. Look straight at 'em and deal with 'em. Work it through, as honestly as you can. If God is anything like a middle-class white chick from the suburbs, which I admit is a long shot, it's what you do about what you feel that matters.

You've got that extra gene, that sensitivity toward women. That unwillingness to objectify the opposite sex, isn't that what they say about you? That you invent a female character and put her in a marriage, a family, a king-sized bed in the suburbs, and yet you don't feel the need to describe . . . I don't know, her pubic hair in literary terms: 'a burnt-sienna nimbus,' or whatever, like the rest of your crowd would.

I love this school. I love how uncomplicated it is and the fact that we come from almost two hundred suburbs, so we have to work hard at finding something to hold us together.

It served as a symbol of the opulence and prosperity of Detroit until the summer of 1967, when the 12th Street Riot kicked off the white flight to the suburbs and the city took its first steps toward ruination. The

The suburbs are a scary place. I'm glad I live in New York City, where crime is more predictable.

Gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand in the old Transvaal during the nineteenth century, and modern Johannesburg still has within its boundaries the huge white mine dumps that look like mini mountains. While the mine dumps were on the outskirts of the town years ago, the suburbs have since expanded around them and they lie there like monuments to a golden era.

A recent Chicago study, for example, has shown that it costs $60,000 to hook up a new house in an outer suburb to the utility infrastructure as against $5,000 for the same house in an existing suburb. "Who foots the bill? Taxpayers in the established suburbs."72

How you mean, 'doughnut hole'?" Ti-Jeanne had asked. "That's what they call it when an inner city collapses and people run to the suburbs," he'd answered.

suburbs were turned into class-conscious fortresses.

In the United States, we rely on local property taxes to fund public schools, so rich suburbs enjoy first-rate public schools that are a pipeline to the best universities, and underprivileged children suffer in third-rate schools with, often, the worst teachers.