Anxiety in Suburbia
It is a bit frightening to live here
I’m 25 and live with my wife in the leafy, almost-idyllic Reston, one of the more distant suburbs in Northern Virginia. We own a condo on a quiet street, in walking distance from a supermarket and surrounded by Reston’s famous trails and forests.
Walking along those trails — there are more than 50 miles of them — the ubiquitous low-rise condos are half-disguised by trees and hills, and the pleasant landscape feels like it might go on forever.
But sometimes I look at the satellite map, and what I see is a little pocket, a tiny bubble of ill-gotten affluence, achieved by the asset-stripping of the middle class and the inexorable growth of the military-industrial complex. I see myself living in a gated community writ large, ringed by a vast decaying country. What happens if the gates are stormed — figuratively, of course, or even (because who knows these days) literally? Will it help that my income, such as it is, is not connected to the region’s predatory industries themselves?
Our social configurations generate their share of existential questions—thankfully, they’re the sort of thoughts I can turn on or off at will. Sometimes, though, they mix with my own personal uncertainties which are harder to turn off. Some of it is that inkling that something’s bound to go wrong just when everything seems to be going right. Some of it is coming to terms with no longer being a child or student, no longer living in my parents’ house, or in my dorm or apartment. You don’t really feel like a homeowner the day you move into your house; you feel like you’re staying in a hotel or dropping by for a visit, and the permanence of the shift hits later. Some of it is that “adulting,” to use a phrase I loathe, really does hit you like a ton of bricks. That’s the downside of growing up in a stable, functional, affluent family: you’re largely insulated from dealing with things like taxes, broken appliances and service calls, health insurance applications, collection agency letters, credit scores, HOA disputes, and on and on. All of these realities produce an element of foreboding that sometimes intrudes on our peaceful suburban dream.
And then the personal and the political mix. There’s my awareness that I’ve hit these traditional adult milestones at an age when some of my college classmates still haven’t graduated. I feel a twinge of guilt and dread that what I’ve managed is chronically out of reach for so many people, even many of my friends. It is a sort of social loneliness, something almost resembling survivor’s guilt. How do you interact with people three or four or five years your senior who are still trapped by higher-education debt or splitting aging midcentury houses into four or five barely-legal makeshift apartments? How do you talk about family and marriage and homeownership without seeming to boast or belittle?
Some of my friends don’t want that life, and that’s their call. But some do, and for them there is increasingly little choice. Housing is expensive; weddings are expensive; children are expensive. My wife and I slowly realized, as we planned our wedding (planners are expensive too) that there wasn’t much expectation that anyone our age would be getting married. Marriage is increasingly the cherry-on-top after everything else is on track, not the foundation for starting a new shared life. Starter homes? In Fairfax County, that’s a line in a stand-up routine. (The cost of a condo here can creep uncomfortably close to the average national price of a single-family house.)
All of this means that after accumulating our savings, blessings, and luck, we’re now somewhat alone, with no one to share it all with. There is a lot of transience, a lot of ladder-climbing, and very little rootedness in a local culture. There is no ecosystem, no critical mass of young families in which we are embedded.
Having trouble finding people like me was never a problem I expected to have.
I’m a big fan of James Howard Kunstler. The famous urbanist and declinist’s original critique of suburbia, crabbily set forth in The Geography of Nowhere, has expanded over the years into a broader critique of our financialized, debt-driven, tech-worshiping economy. Kunstler’s core hypothesis is that we’re on the cusp of a “long emergency,” a total collapse of our overly-complex systems and — in the best case — a return to a 19th-century standard of living for most of the population.
Reading this stuff in my comfortable suburban condo or on the Metro ride home from my downtown D.C. office makes for good entertainment; it can feel a lot like reading ghost stories in the dim light. Kunstler has been blogging about the long emergency for over a decade. It’s about as distant as the Apocalypse, entertaining exactly because you know it won’t really happen.
Unless it’s already happened.
Maybe I’m not part of “most of the population,” and maybe our vibrant, diverse corner of America is really a Potemkin Village, simultaneously covering up and hastening the slow-motion collapse of much of the rest of the country. Princeton professor Rob Nixon has a name for this kind of thing: “slow violence.” It is hard not to see that term as an apt description of the concentration of wealth and opportunity in a handful of family-unfriendly metros, and the corresponding and countervailing decline of so many small towns, rural areas, and disfavored cities. This has all produced a country so deep in decay that researchers are increasingly identifying the United States as lapsing back into developing-country status.
Even here in Fairfax County, which, year to year, is almost always among the top three richest counties in America, the real estate market has not entirely recovered (“entirely recovered” implies, of course, that it one day will recover, which is by no means guaranteed). Some houses in the more distant D.C. suburbs have never again reached their pre-Recession values. To think that our staggering and increasing inequality — not only of income but of opportunity, of lifestyle, and of future possibilities — can go on forever is to believe in a fairy tale.
One gusty evening last winter, the power went out. I ran outside with a flashlight to see if there were any trees down on the property. There was nothing, not even any wind; eerily quiet and completely dark. It is surreal to point a flashlight at a block of condos with no power, hulking and completely useless monoliths. If you have an electronic, app-operated lock, you might not even be able to get back in.
There are places in America — remember that Puerto Rico is America too — where the power grid is worn out and unstable. There are plenty of people for whom a flat tire or busted axle can begin a downward economic and social spiral than ends with eviction, homelessness, or prison. There are people who practice “money hacks” second nature, things that would never occur to me and which I read about with guilty curiosity. I can scarcely imagine being in such a situation.
Yet as I imagined a wealthy Northern Virginia suburbanite, his gee-whiz electronic gadgetry leaving him locked him out of his home on a freezing winter night, the long emergency didn’t seem so distant or impossible — and neither did the possibility that we are currently undergoing it.
Being a husband, an employee, a homeowner, requires a certain cognitive dissonance. If you only ever think about collapse and blight and income inequality, you can’t be a functional person. But the fact that such thoughts paralyze or demoralize us doesn’t make them false or without value. Politics is part of the answer, of course. It’s probably a bigger part of the answer than right-leaning folks like to admit. Living my own life well may be virtuous, but it won’t change the broken structures that may have made my successful life possible in the first place. That’s why you need that cognitive dissonance again.
But there’s no point feeling guilty over something you can’t change and did nothing to put in place. The best we can do individually is get outside of the “matrix of rackets” (to use another Kunstler idiom) that constitutes much of the D.C.-area economy. There are apple orchards, farmers’ markets, local restaurants, and beautiful mountain walking paths just outside of the metro area. Two hours’ drive or less can get you to Virginia’s wine country or the Shenandoah Valley, to Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where a rural waterman culture endures, or to Pennsylvania’s Amish Country. These are places genuinely connected to the land, the ultimate source of wealth, and are emphatically not sustained by the Washington racket. There are also affordable country homes out there, and plenty of families living joyful, boring lives.
There’s a great big country out there, full of diversity, local culture and lore, and unique folkways. A real economy is not a centralized aggregation of national chains, weapons manufacturers, and big-money politics that views people and places as inputs, widgets, and ledger entries. A real economy is dense local and regional networks of people and families engaged in mutual support.
This is not something that we observe or join, only; it is something we must produce and create. No problem worth solving has a single, simple answer, and suburban alienation and geographically-determined income inequality is no exception. There’s room for politics, activism, localism, and — not to be overlooked — plain old boring working, homemaking, and good neighboring. Those, after all, are ultimately the things that make communities tick.
