Archives for December 2011

Who’s Moving to the Suburbs? Jonah Hill, That’s Who!

December 14, 2011 by

As part of my never-ending and desperate attempt to validate my deeply uncool decision to move to the suburbs, I’m DELIGHTED to report that we’ve nabbed another big name:

Fresh off his success and critical acclaim (Oscar rumors?) from his supporting role in Brad Pitt’s Moneyball and also after shedding a few pounds, Superbad Jonah Hill has decided to settle down in the suburbs. He’s sold his Hollywood condo recently for $835,000 and has now decided to throw down $2.2 million for a quaint suburban home in the Valley. Hill still has a $1.9 million casa off Mulholland Drive in the Hollywood Hills. His new home is located in upper-class Tarzana, California (named after Tarzan, no joke) Jonah has all the laid-back luxuries of the suburbs to enjoy.

The post, from something called CelebrityNetWorth.com (yikes!) then pulls all the property photos, probably from the online listing, to show you what kind of house he bought.

That’s pretty good, right? I mean, it’s not Brad Pitt, but it’s a guy who’s in a movie with Brad Pitt.  That has to count for something.

Welcome, Jonah!

Filed Under: Who's Moving to the Suburbs? Tagged With: ,

Are the Fringe Suburbs Really Dying? The Brookings Institute Weighs in Again

December 1, 2011 by

We’ve written before about the “great debate” about whether the American love affair with the suburbs is dying. Basically, it’s a debate about where people SAY they want to live, and where they are actually choosing to live.  That is, people keep saying that they want to live in dense, diverse, urban environments, but Census data keeps showing migration from cities to the suburbs.

The Brookings Institution has been the loudest banger of the drum in favor of the argument that the suburbs are dying, that people don’t want to live in that sprawl anymore.  We see this again in a New York Times op-ed from Christian B. Leinberger, a senior fellow at Brookings, who contends  that planners need to recognize the need to develop walkable environments:

Simply put, there has been a profound structural shift — a reversal of what took place in the 1950s, when drivable suburbs boomed and flourished as center cities emptied and withered.

The shift is durable and lasting because of a major demographic event: the convergence of the two largest generations in American history, the baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) and the millennials (born between 1979 and 1996), which today represent half of the total population.

Many boomers are now empty nesters and approaching retirement. Generally this means that they will downsize their housing in the near future. Boomers want to live in a walkable urban downtown, a suburban town center or a small town, according to a recent survey by the National Association of Realtors.

The millennials are just now beginning to emerge from the nest — at least those who can afford to live on their own. This coming-of-age cohort also favors urban downtowns and suburban town centers — for lifestyle reasons and the convenience of not having to own cars.

Over all, only 12 percent of future homebuyers want the drivable suburban-fringe houses that are in such oversupply, according to the Realtors survey. This lack of demand all but guarantees continued price declines. Boomers selling their fringe housing will only add to the glut. Nothing the federal government can do will reverse this.

I don’t disagree with any of that, but neither do I buy that the fringe suburbs are dying.  I agree that we need to create more density in the suburbs — as someone who works in suburban real estate, I can attest that walkable village downtown areas command a premium on the market, precisely because people love the idea of living in the suburbs while still being able to get a cup of coffee without having to drive.

But I still think that there’s a whiff of “we want this to be true, so it is true” in these arguments. Certainly, census data does not support the idea that people are migrating to dense urban environments, and my experience of both working in the suburbs and now living in the suburbs suggests that there’s still a lot of interest in traditional suburban neighborhoods: big lots, picket fences, back yards, cul-de-sacs, the whole thing.  Would those people like to see more public transportation options, and more walkable downtowns?  Yes, of course.  The question is whether they’d be willing to pay for them.  That, I’m not so sure about.

Filed Under: News, Suburbs versus Cities Tagged With: , ,

Advice for People Adopting a Baby: How NOT to Prepare for Your Home Study Interview

December 1, 2011 by

Now that we’re back in the states with our little boy, I can tell this story about the adoption process that I embargoed for reasons I’ll explain at the end.

So when you’re adopting a kid, you have to go through a whole screening process. They do criminal checks, take fingerprints, stuff like that. Makes sense, right?  Also, you have to complete a home study interview, where a social worker comes to your home for like three hours to ask you a bunch of questions about your childhood, your parenting philosophy, whether you’re ready to have a child, etc.

It’s not really an “interview” like a job interview. You already have the “referral” and are pretty far through the adoption process, so it’s really more like a final “red flag” check where the social worker just wants to make sure that you’re not living in filth, that you’re not raising baby-eating snakes, that you don’t have naked pictures of little boys adorning your walls, stuff like that. My guess is that the bar is pretty low — the social worker just wants to make sure that nothing jumps out that indicates that you’d put a child at risk.

I felt pretty confident.  We have a nice home, we’re nice people, we showed a commitment to raising a family by leaving the decadent urban Sodom and Gomorrah to come to the land of picket fences and play groups.  We’re model parents!

Of course, my wife is crazy.  So she treated the interview like it was a “make or break” moment for our adoption, as if we had to be absolutely PERFECT or they might take our baby away.  She was running around the house all week cleaning up and straightening out, basically scouring our condo to eliminate any potential sign that we’d be unsuitable parents.  Kozy the dog?  Groomed and cleaned.  Joe the husband?  Get a haircut!  Dying plant in the hallway?  Out you go!  No way we’re going to let the interviewer think that we can’t take care of a plant, or she might nix the adoption.  She was impossible to live with.

Later that week, we’re sitting down with this very nice woman answering some very predictable questions about us and our personal histories.  Essentially, you really only need to make a simple impression: I have no intention of beating my child.  Other than that, you pretty much can’t go wrong.

So what happens?  We get this question: what is your worst memory as a child? I go first, and I describe how I fell from a tree when I was about eight while I was picking apples with my father, and about how worried and upset he was. I thought it was a pretty good story, all about how much my father cared about me, worried about me, took good care of me, just like — hint! — I’ll take good care of this kid that you’re letting me adopt.

And then my wife starts answering the question, telling us about how her worst memory is about how she was fighting with her sister, and accidentally broke a closet door.  So far so good.  Then she explains how the bad part of the memory is that her mother spanked her.  Ummm, okay, but let’s try to stay away from that whole spanking thing, huh?  And THEN she goes on to say that, well, because she’d been so bad and disobeyed her mother, she probably DESERVED IT.

RED FLAG!  RED FLAG! RED FLAG!

Okay, it wasn’t that bad.  The social worker barely noticed.  It’s just that I was hyper-sensitive after watching my wife make our home a dying-plant-free-zone, telling me how important it was to make the right impression, now expressing the rather unorthodox opinion that you can’t blame parents who spank their kids because, you know, sometimes you JUST HAVE TO SMACK THAT KID AROUND A LITTLE TO KEEP HIM IN LINE!  It was hilarious. My guess is that if it was okay to say that, we probably could have kept the poor plants.

So my lesson for people adopting a child is simple: don’t do that.

P.S. My wife wouldn’t let me tell that story for the past four months until we were safely back in the states with our boy.  To the extent that someone in authority reads this blog, let me state very clearly that we would never, ever, under any circumstances hit a child. So please don’t take my kid away.

Filed Under: Humor, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs, Parenting in the Suburbs Tagged With: ,