Archives for February 2012

Who’s Moving to the Suburbs? Lesbians, That’s Who!

February 28, 2012 by

Here at the Move to Suma, we’ve been keeping track of all the people who are moving to the suburbs, which is really just a thinly-veiled attempt to validate my own decision.  The more people who are moving to the suburbs, the better I feel.  So in the past year or so, we’ve commented on census studies showing that immigrants and African-Americans are increasingly migrating from the cities to the suburbs, and pointed out a few celebrities who are also making the move.

So now, we also want to welcome our newest addition — lesbians!

It used to be that gay, lesbian and bi-sexual people in the suburbs found the climate less than welcoming. LGBT people had to blend in to make it in suburban neighborhoods. Not so now. These days suburban living is viewed as a real option for LGBT people and they are moving to suburbs that are close to NYC as well as towns further out.

According to Gary Gates, a demographer from the Urban Institute who did a study for HRC after the 2000 census, gay male couples largely prefer urban environments (45%) to suburbs (41.3%) and lesbian couples settle more often in suburban locales (46%) than city centers (38.2%).

The post from Its Conceivable recounts the story of a lesbian couple with a one-year old daughter who moved to New Rochelle, a lovely suburb of Manhattan, where they’ve found a community of new York City “ex-pats.”

So what do we think of those stats, showing such a mixed preference among gays and lesbians for the cities versus the suburbs?  I mean, it certainly flies in the face of conventional wisdom that the LGBT community would prefer the traditional greater levels of tolerance and diversity of the cities.  But I think key to those stats is that they come from COUPLES, not singles.  That is, it’s sort of interesting that gay and lesbian couples, particularly, I imagine, couples with children, have the same impulse to move to the suburbs that straight couples do.  My guess is that gay and lesbian singles would have much stronger preferences for the city (which is, again, not so much different from straight people).

People are people, you know?  Gay, straight, as they get older they have the same sort of changes in their lives that sometimes compel changes in where they live.

As we’ve noted a few times in this space, it is interesting to see all these demographic studies that are showing how the suburbs are becoming more ethnic and diverse: immigrants, African-Americans, and now the LGBT community.  Most of these people come to the suburbs for the same reasons: more space, cheaper living, and an easier place to raise kids. It’s a universal need as you get older.  But the nice part is that as we start to see those changes in the suburbs, we might actually find the suburbs becoming more “livable” to exiles.  After all, one of the reasons a 17 year resident of Manhattan like me was willing to move to the suburbs was the opportunity to live somewhere like Nyack, which is relatively diverse and lefty and gay-friendly and all that.  It would be nice to think that the suburbs will eventually evolve to provide more neighborhoods like that, places where you don’t feel like you’re selling your soul when you leave the city.

So welcome to Kim and Philippa, the couple from the story, and welcome to everyone else joining me in the suburbs.

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

Why Do People Move to the Suburbs? Simply Put, They Have Kids

February 22, 2012 by

Why do people move to the suburbs?  Let’s think about that for a minute, break down that question.

Note that the question is not, “why do people live in the suburbs,” which is, in my mind, a very different question.  People might live in the suburbs for a bunch of reasons. Maybe that’s where they grew up, and never left. Maybe that’s where they work, so it doesn’t occur to them to live anywhere else. Maybe they just never had the hankering for the big city lights, and prefer the quieter, slower pace traditionally associated with the picket fences and all that. Maybe it’s simple inertia.  Maybe they just like the Cheescake Factory.  It could be a million reasons.

But our question today is different: “why do people MOVE to the suburbs,” which implies that those people are currently living somewhere else, probably a city.  In that case, the answer is usually simple — they’re having a kid.

That’s what it almost always comes down to.  You don’t see a lot of happy-go-lucky 30 year olds — single, no kids, with a job — who suddenly decide to trade in their urban life so they can commute an hour or so every day to work. No single person wakes up one morning saying, “Hey, I’m just getting tired of Asian-Latin fusion takeout, and muddled drinks, and lots of 20-something single hotties who enjoy casual sexual relations, and being able to take cabs home when I decide to spontaneously celebrate Cinco de Mayo in September.  What I REALLY need is a guest bedroom!  Time to move to the suburbs!!!!”

No one does that. Single people don’t need space, they don’t care about schools, they don’t generally want the quiet. Even for married couples without kids, the tradeoffs of the suburbs versus the city don’t seem to make sense, so long as they can live in a a two room coop without ending up in a War of the Roses situation.

No, any discussion about moving to the suburbs is inexorably, invariably, going to become entwined with the decision to have kids. If it was all about you, then you’d stay in the city.  But when it’s suddenly all about a mini-you that doesn’t have a particular affinity for 20-something hotties or delivery Vietnamese or infused tequila, and who is currently sleeping in a crib at the foot of your bed, you start to re-think your priorities.

I did things a little backwards, of course. We moved from the city in 2009 simply on the anticipation of becoming parents in the near future, and our expectation that life would simply be easier for us and better for him/her in the suburbs. But for people who already have kids, who are actually living in confined space with a little child and realizing just how much becoming a parent is inconsistent with remaining an urbanized sophisticate hipster, I think the choice is even more compelling.

I was thinking about this because I came across this lovely piece by Jordan Reid in her Ramshackleglam blog, where she writes about her fear of how her life would change in moving to the suburbs: the fear that she won’t make friends, or that her friends won’t be the “kinds of friends that I have in my life now,” or that she’ll wind up feeling like she settled for a life that’s less exciting or interesting than the one she would have had in the city.

Ultimately, though, she writes that it ended up not being a difficult decision, particularly once she considered not what she wanted, but what her son needed:

Most of all, though, the reason we want to move is that city life is not what we want for our son. I grew up here, and I had a great childhood, but I want something different for him. I want him to have a yard to run around in with Lucy and Virgil. I want him to go fishing on Saturdays with his Dad not because it’s a big, special production involving car rentals and long drives, but rather because that’s just what they feel like doing. I want to pick up our pumpkin in a patch, not in a grocery store. I want him to have a swing set of his very own.

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But now it’s not about us anymore, not really: it’s about a little man who smiles so much when he looks out our New York City window, even when there’s nothing to see outside but the apartment building across the way, that all we want to do is set him free to study the sky. And when we take that into account…

well…

it’s not really a decision at all.

It’s just what we’re going to do. 

It’s really a beautiful piece, certainly better than anything I’ve ever written about the subject, so I’m looking forward to seeing what she has to say once she settles in.

And it certainly reinforces the point that for some reason has eluded me for so long. I’ve been belaboring my decision about moving to the suburbs, painting it as something I did by choice, something that I could second-guess if it didn’t work out.  But the more I think about it, the more I realize that, like Ms. Reid, I didn’t really have a choice.

The bottom line: people don’t move to the suburbs because they want to, they move because they have to.  And the decision often isn’t theirs to make. So I should give myself a break….

Filed Under: Best of, Living in the Suburbs, Moving to the Suburbs Tagged With: , ,

Who’s Moving to the Suburbs? More Asian-Americans, That’s Who!

February 7, 2012 by

The Associated Press reported last week that Asian-Americans are increasingly moving to the suburbs from the inner cities::

America’s historic Chinatowns, home for a century to immigrants seeking social support and refuge from racism, are fading as rising living costs, jobs elsewhere and a desire for wider spaces lure Asian-Americans more than ever to the suburbs.

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Nationwide, about 62% of Asian-Americans in the nation’s large metropolitan areas live in the suburbs, up from 54% in 1990 and the highest ever. Tied with Hispanics as the fastest-growing group, the nation’s 4.4 million Asians are more likely than other minorities to live in the suburbs; only whites, at 78%, are higher.

Since 2000, nearly three-fourths of Asian population growth in the U.S. occurred in suburbs, many of them in the South.

This all makes sense, right?  We’ve noted before the trend for immigrants in general moving from the cities to the suburbs, so it’s not surprising that Asian-Americans are following the same path.  Indeed, it’s kind of what happened in previous generations — my Italian grandparents settled in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, but their four sons all ended up scattering to the suburbs of Dutchess, Rockland, Long Island, and Staten Island.  That’s pretty much the American experience.  Immigrants are initially attracted to urban centers, particularly those with a high concentration of fellow ex-patriates, but as they have kids, or as their kids have kids, they eventually find their way to the open spaces.  So it’s no surprise that Asian-Americans are doing the same thing.

A hat tip to the 8asian.com blog, which commented on the AP piece and shared a more personal perspective on the trend.  Unsurprisingly, as with most people who move to the suburbs, it’s all about the kids:

I later asked my parents why we moved to the suburbs in the first place. Why did my mother have to endure such a terrible commute? Why did we pick up and leave such a familiar community and move far away from our friends and relatives? For me, it was an uncomfortable experience. Besides having to make new friends, there were just so many cultural differences between the city and the suburbs.

My parents told me that they did it for the schools. More than anything else, they were worried that my sister and I wouldn’t get a good enough education in the city. What if we didn’t do well enough to qualify for entry into one of the specialized public schools? The schools we were zoned for were terrible. And not only were the schools in Great Neck strong, the neighborhoods were also quiet and safe. There, my parents wouldn’t have to worry quite as much about our safety and well-being.

Basically, my parents decided to move for the benefit of their children.

To me, that’s really the reason why so many APA families have migrated to the suburbs. It’s not merely to achieve some vague sense of the American Dream – a nice house, a front yard, and a prettier neighborhood.

It does seem like every time I come across someone writing about the difficult decision to move to the suburbs, they talk about the kids.  It’s the same for hipster urban couples as it is for people recent immigrants living in Chinatown.

All that said, I still find the suburbs pretty white-bread.  My wife and son are Asian, and it’s not unusual to look around when we’re out at a restaurant or a movie and find that they’re pretty much the only minorities in the place. But I know that in other areas of the suburbs you’ll find pretty high concentrations of ethnic residents, like the huge Korean-American population in Palisades Park and Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.

It’s a funny thing.  We call the suburbs “white,” but only because we’re largely talking about second- and third-generation immigrants who migrated in droves 50 years ago. After all, I’m “white,” but my Sicilian grandfather was certainly not “white” back 75 years ago when he changed his name from “Miserandino” to Rand. (chop off some letters on each side, and become an Anglo!).  We don’t think of Italian food as ethnic anymore, partly because of assimilation but also just because over time ethnicities weave themselves into the general fabric of society.

Now, when we talk about ethnic Americans, we’re talking about the Asian-American or Latino-American populations. But it might be that in 25 years we’ll be complaining about how the suburbs still lack diversity, but only because our understanding of diversity will have changed. As someone in a mixed-race family, I certainly would love to see an increase in ethnic diversity in my area, for all the obvious reasons.

Not the least of which is that hopefully, at some point, I’ll be able to get a decent bowl of soup without having to drive 25 miles into Manhattan.

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