“The subprime crisis is just the tip of the iceberg. Fundamental changes in American life may turn today’s McMansions into tomorrow’s tenements.”
good piece by by Christopher B. Leinberger in the Atlantic

Subdivided is an Official Entry in the Utopia Film Festival 

Screening Information:

Opening Night Film: Screening Friday, October 26 at the New Deal Café. Pass holders and invited guests only.

Second Screening: Saturday, October 27 at 1:30 pm with AMERICANA LOST at the P&G Old Greenbelt Theatre.

I have a short quote in an article in the Christian Science Monitor today about extreme commuting.

The thing that strikes me about the extreme commute is how something absurd has become normalized. As Andres Duany said in my interview with him, “time in public means time in traffic” and its a competitive, hostile experience.

The article is partly in response to the Texas Transportation Institute’s 2007 Urban Mobility Report which, among other things, says

• Trips take longer

• Congestion affects more of the day
• Congestion affects weekend travel and rural areas
• Congestion affects more personal trips and freight shipments
• Trip travel times increasingly are unreliable

They have some suggested solutions, but they mostly have to do with traffic engineering (not surprising considering the source). It’s a kind of myopic viewpoint, restricted by the profession. A more comprehensive view would consider urban planning issues, including multiple design theories and scenarios.

Then there’s the personal angle:

“There’s the philosophy that people buy houses on Sunday and discover on Monday that it’s a tough commute.”

The Subdivided DVD is now available! Get yours here.
They will ship August 10th. (I know, it’s taken forever!)

For Library & Institutional purchases, or if you’d like a discount on more than 10 copies please email list (at) subdivided.net.

Next screening at a decent hour is TUESDAY 7/3 at 11pm

Other screening times for the Tivo, VCR, or DVR (or early risers / insomniacs):
Saturday 6/30 4am
Sunday 7/1 5am

Comments from previous screenings are here.

I received this letter from a person who works for one a North Texas city similar to the ones profiled in Subdivided. It reminds me all over again why I made the film, and how I felt in the beginning, especially.

I currently live in a North Texas suburb and I am employed by one of the cities of North Texas just outside of Dallas. We (both citizens of the area and especially the city employees) are repeatedly assured that this is one of the best areas of the U.S. to live and raise a family. This is supposed to be the “gold standard” of life in the U.S. and even the world….and yet I feel that something is horribly wrong. It’s all fresh, new, clean, and strangely……soulless, isolated, and impersonal. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of very decent people living here…most of them in fact. I also don’t want to bite the hand that feeds me. There is no doubt that the various city administrators mean well. That doesn’t change the fact that there is a lot about this area that seems to be…well… just “wrong.”

When I came to work here, kids were dropping like flies from heroin overdoses, parents were in complete denial/ignorance, and the construction of cookie-cutter homes and shopping centers was moving ahead with all the fury and intensity of the Manahattan Project. Today, construction continues, brick boxes erupt everywhere and there seems to be a pervasive “sameness” all around me…. I watch as families and children live isolated lives among the millions who reside here.

…. After several years of critical thought and cautious observation, I am more convinced than ever that there really is something terribly wrong with this way of life. Strangely though, even the mere mention of such thoughts in this area of the world will trigger some mighty passionate denials that there is anything wrong; sometimes the denials come from those in whom the pathology is most apparent.

We lived in this house for three years before I ever even spoke to my neighbor across the street. He actively avoided me all that time and I never made the effort to walk all the way across the street. I strongly suspect that the only reason I met my neighbors on either side of me is because they are older and retired and are thus more available and sociable. All of my friends and colleagues report similar behaviors in their own subdivided neighborhoods.

Making the film helped me with these feelings, helped to put them in perspective and to understand what creates and sustains these conditions. My hope is that the examples given will inspire people to work a bit harder at their communities, and to pressure civic leaders to do do their homework and do what’s good for democracy and people, not just cars and buildings.

Subdivided won an award for Creative Excellence at the Worldfest International Film Festival in Houston!

Thanks again to all who were involved and supportive!

Subdivided will play the USA Film Festival Sunday April 22nd @ 3pm
. And what a great group of folks they are by the way - really.

From the Wall Street Journal:

THE COSTS of Americans’ ever-expanding commutes might outweigh the benefits of the higher-paying job or the more prestigious house in the suburbs. Long commutes can increase loneliness and cut back social activities, undermining happiness.

The number of people who travel 90 minutes to work — deemed an “extreme commute” by the Census Bureau — has doubled since 1990, reaching 3.5 million.

Nine out of 10 commuters travel by car, and 88% of those drivers do so alone. Long periods in the car not only provoke loneliness, they reduce time for sleep, sports and socializing. …

This is another example of how design on the macro level is critical to democracy itself.

Chris Dovi and Scott Bass have written a fine piece called “Rethinking Suburbia” for Style Weekly in Richmond, Virginia. In it, they chronicle the change in suburban communities “that once held the suburban dreams of many have become havens for crime and the all-too-familiar problems of the inner city.”

“I’m worried about many of our older, kind of modest neighborhoods built in the ’60s and ’70s. We’ve got to work to prevent blight and insidious decline in these areas,” says Tom Jacobson, Chesterfield County’s director of community revitalization.

“I agree that the challenge of these areas in the future may be more than the challenge in city neighborhoods,” he says. “The houses are not cute, in many respects. The neighborhood infrastructure is basic: no sidewalks, no curb and gutter, no neighborhood parks, not close to a lot of services that you have in city neighborhoods.”

It’s difficult for many to fathom that the old suburbs, even in their grimiest state, could somehow foster the kind of crime and dereliction that plagues the inner city… But it’s already started.

Little Forest Hills in Dallas, profiled in Subdivided, was in a similarly poor state when I grew up there in the 1970’s. What I hope the film shows, however, is that through a strong community network and the leadership of a core group, the whole thing can be turned around. Without that leadership - the caring and the love of place - neighborhoods spiral downward.

(one) … reason older suburbs are worse off is a housing trend that would seem to defy conventional wisdom: The older the housing, the higher the quality… Older homes in the city are sturdier structurally and more significant architecturally than their later counterparts. Through the years, as the cookie-cutter suburbs took hold, new-home construction became geared toward speed and mass production.

In fact, the country’s biggest developers modeled their production of houses after automobile manufacturers. One of the biggest, Levitt and Sons, in the 1950s pushed the standardization of home building much like an assembly line, envisioning communities where homeowners traded in their houses for new ones every year, much the same way people trade in their cars. Resembling the mail-order houses manufactured by Sears & Roebuck, Levitt and Sons took the approach and applied it to communities with hundreds and hundreds of houses.

Dolores Hayden, quoted in this piece and also featured in Subdivided, has an excellent book on this topic called Building Suburbia. It was instrumental in my research for the film.

And the suburbs will only get poorer. “I think it will get worse, precisely because of the combination of aging structures and obsessively low-income populations,” William Lucy (Universtiy of Virginia) says. “The question is, who would step in to help?”

Unfortunately, I these folks are going to have to help themselves. I hope the Little Forest Hills example in Subdivided is inspiring to them.