>
> On Nov 13, 2009, at 1:18 PM, Alan Rudy wrote:
>
> If I was going to break down Doug's differentiation, I'd say that the
>> "older, denser suburbs" are those built by, say, 1970, where middle and
>> upper middle income and professional classes could still raise their kids
>> -
>> at least until 1982/84 or so - in a manner that primarily focused on
>> achieving natural growth. Suburbs and ex-urbs built since 1980 are
>> infinitely more likely to be gated communities, or the equivalent, not to
>> have sidewalks or neighborhood schools, to have less public space, and to
>> have "show" living rooms and garage doors on the face of the house and
>> multimedia rooms (what we used to call the back- or TV-room), kitchens (of
>> massive scale, if little use) and porches on the back (with bedrooms
>> upstairs only having windows facing the back yard.
>>
>
> Really nice distinction. Nails it, I'd say. I do wonder how much people
> deliberately choose the physical isolation of the exurbs that you describe,
> and how much people just find themselves there.
>
> Doug
> <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk>
Thanks, I know this because my house was the last house in Union County (the last ten feet of our 1/3 acre was actually in Somerset County [I think]) as you went West away from New York city and our town held the Watchung Reservation which, when we bought our house had Interstate 78, from Harrisburg, stop on its west side and Interstate 78 start up again, headed in to NY, on its east side.
Once 78 was completed, in the mid-70s, NW Jersey almost immediately gained a bazillion condos and a million ex-urbs and what had been conservative farm communities became neoliberal residential communities peppered with corporate headquarters and enclosed malls.
I'd hesitate to guess on percentages but would anticipate that a large number of folks ended up in exurbs simply because they came of age, and came into money, after 1984, and wanted new, shiny, low-maintenance homes and neighborhoods instead of the older, regularly-in-need-of-repair homes of the more densely populated and more established high end burbs like Short Hills, parts of Westfield and Morristown, and Engelwood.... and that some simply moved out there because that's where corporations but their new shiny headquarters... but that many moved out to get away from the dirty, dark and dank city, or that other one, or that still other one over there.