Suburban Development Quotes

Our overbuilt cities with their congestion, their trend to high office buildings and apartments, their complete indifference to the most elementary principles of civilian defense, their slums representing past neglect and greed, can to a considerable extent be rebuilt on better principles if we are smart enough to look the facts in the eye and brush off the Babbitts who hold that wherever the dirt flies there is progress. On the other hand, cities can not be revolutionized and turned into garden villages or green belts. In the suburbs and near-by country, however, we still have a chance to do the right thing without stultifying compromises....

We have to learn how to contact one another over an enormous land space, across five-and-a-half time zones, in what as once a wilderness of scattered settlements, in what is now a sprawl of suburban edge cities and satellite towns. Technology forges connections and disconnections here.

I have a new theory of history, which is certain things happen because they seem like a good idea at the time. And suburbia seemed like a good idea at the time, but it was a special time and place in history, with special dynamics. And now, we're going to have to live with the consequences of that. And the consequences will be tragic.

A suburb is an attempt to get out of reach of the city without having the city be out of reach.

The suburbs: signs of life, but no proofs.

We own a shopping center in Temecula that is occupied and making money. In Florida, I am doing a 500-home subdivision just north of Eglin Air Force Base.

The rapid growth in many of our suburbs has spawned a booming construction industry eager to hire low wage immigrants who gladly fill these jobs, many of them happy to be paid in cash, free of federal and state taxes.

I grew up in suburban New Jersey in a transitional area that was surrounded by farmland that wasn't being cultivated.

In the traditional modernist planning that created the suburbs, you put residential buildings in suburban neighborhoods, office spaces into brain parks and retail in shopping malls. But you fail to exploit the possibility of symbiosis or synthesis that way.

The social and physical construction of suburban America really was quite complex. It was a very elaborate system, and clearly a massive social engineering project that has changed U.S. society enormously.

I grew up in Columbia, Maryland, a planned community built during the sixties. During the early years, it was very integrated. I grew up being taught by black teachers with black principals and vice principals and, you know, a lot of black friends. We played in mixed groups, and I kind of thought that was how it was.

California has often led the country, indeed the world, in the technology, consumption, trends, lifestyles, and of course, mass entertainment. It is where the car found its earliest and fullest expression, where suburbs blossomed, where going to gym replaced going to church, where forces that lead so many to assume that direct democracy is the wave of the future - declining political parties, telecommuting, new technology, the internet generation 0 are all most well developed in this vast land.

Suburbia is the insidious cartoon of the country house in a cartoon of the country.

Roads get wider and busier and less friendly to pedestrians. And all of the development based around cars, like big sprawling shopping malls. Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being.

A city of homes should not be built as a business center.

A city building, you experience when you walk; a suburban building, you experience when you drive.

Detroit right now is virtually abandoned at its core to the degree that a lot of what had been slums thirty years ago are now wildflower meadows. The rebuilding of Detroit will occur a much smaller scale. It remains to be seen what will become of Detroit's vast suburbs.

Suburban subdivisions encouraged buyers to live with their “own kind,” constantly sorting people by religion, ethnicity, race, and class.

There are several ways in order to reduce the housing problem.One way is to allow a developer to buy land more cheaply if it's in an outlying area.

Des Moines is like your typical American city; it's just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city.

I grew up in the suburbs.

The suburb is a place where someone cuts down all the trees to build houses, and then names the streets after the trees.

The suburbs of yesterday do not look at all like the suburbs of today.

I doubt if there is anything in the world uglier than a Midwestern city.

But I'll tell you what, there was a lot of farmland between Falls Church and Washington.