Cost Of Suburban Lifestyle Exacts A Price

Normally, just to avoid telemarketers, I let the machine answer the phone. This time, though, I’d picked it up myself. And I’d actually bought what the telemarketer was peddling.

As she took the order, she asked me where I live. I told her.

“Where’s that?” she asked.

“It’s an Albany suburb,” I explained.

“I talk to 200 people a day,” she said. “You know, everybody seems to live in a suburb of someplace else.”

Well, not everybody. But every other somebody, certainly. When I was born, just after the war, most people lived in cities. Those few people who didn’t lived in the country, where most people lived until the last half of the 19th century.

Thanks, however, to the G.I. bill and Eisenhower’s interstate highway program, more than half of America now lives in what not long ago was forest and farmland. As the country’s population has boomed - America had 180 million people when Kennedy was elected president in 1960; it now has 250 million-plus - cities have shrunk dramatically.

I grew up in a bustling city of 50,000 people in southern New York. Today, Elmira is a relatively seedy city of 30,000 - although the suburbs around it have blossomed. Albany, the state capital, is 30 percent smaller than it was three decades ago.

Suburban growth has been breathtaking in the last half of this century. But suburbs have changed in recent years, and not necessarily for the better.

James Howard Kuntsler, a thoughtful writer of fine books who lives in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., argues that today’s suburbs are tomorrow’s slums. It’s already happening, he writes. Just look around. And just wait. There’s little argument that suburbs originally burst into life as tangible shrines to child rearing.

The idea was that Dad would leave for work every day in the city, duking it out in that nasty urban jungle before fleeing back to the nest at night. Meanwhile, Mom would stay home to care for the house and to be on hand with cookies and milk when the kids came home from school.

It hasn’t worked out quite that way, though. Drive through any suburb on any week day, and you see what is essentially a deserted community - a ghost town that might have been hit by a neutron bomb.

You see mail sitting in mailboxes from late morning until early evening. You see large, comfortable houses dark and vacant. You see kids stepping off the school bus and opening the front door with a key to sit alone in front of television sets in what builders created to be “family rooms.”

Sure, Dad went to work in the morning. But so did Mom. That’s the gritty reality of the modern economy. To support one family living the suburban lifestyle, two incomes are required.

In a country where nearly three-quarters of the population now lives in single-family homes, certain adjustments have had to be made that never occurred to Donna Reed or June Cleaver.

Or, for that matter, to their husbands and kids.

Drugs made their journey from city to suburb during the late afternoon, when kids sat idle and unsupervised in empty houses.

Every study of teenage pregnancy in the middle class shows that the hours between the end of school and a parent’s arrival home from the job is the most common time of conception.

We live in an ironic, perplexing time - when the necessity of earning enough money to support gracious child rearing undermines the very act of child rearing itself. In the suburbs, families tend to live as families only during the early morning hours and at night.

During the day, we’re all pretty much on our own.

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