Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream

Overall, this is a great book that succinctly gets a message across that most of us already feel on a day-to-day basis but cannot articulate. American towns and cities are miserable. Bureaucracy and fools proclaiming themselves wise have turned our landscape into an inefficient and demoralizing dystopia of asphalt, exhaust, and cheap imitations of the great buildings that came before us.That said, there are a few things holding the book back. Firstly, the authors have a tendency to put a great amount of information into footnotes. Sometimes as much as a third of a page is in the footnotes below it. I do not like this practice as it interrupts the flow of reading. Secondly, the illustrations in the book are very small and very low resolution, given the nature of the book it could use larger pictures to illustrate some of the things the text is talking about. And lastly, despite the book being mostly apolitical, the authors’ bias and lack of expertise in a particular area does creep in from time to time, especially in their discussion on fire departments.The authors insinuate that fire engines are needlessly large because fire marshals (the fact that they said fire marshals, who inspect buildings for code, and not fire chiefs, who are responsible for their departments equipment and personnel shows their ignorance on the subject) are men and they are “comparing the size of their equipment.” They then quip that more female fire marshals might reverse this trend, which is insultingly low cunning. Never mind the fact that I’m sure none of the authors has ever worked on a fire engine or understands what it does or how it does it. Building a machine capable of pumping thousands of gallons of water at hundreds of PSI while also carrying literal tons of equipment and personnel is not something that can be condensed down to the size of a Prius. The authors would be much better off restricting their sly remarks to the things that they know and not the things they know nothing about.

Shipped quick and came in condition as advertised! Would buy again!

My comments regarding this book differ little from the other positive reviews it has been receiving by other readers. It is important that Americans understand the social ramifications of how they develop. The architecture of our homes and communities reflects the our values and how we view ourselves relative to our community. Recent trends in home and neighborhood development reveal a highly individualistic value system that excludes it participation in the larger community and neighborhood. As mentioned in the book, Americans do a great job in making the inside of homes extremely livable, but do a poor job in integrating that home, and the family living in that home, with the neighborhood. Homes are built as insulators from other people. A community of insulated homes and isolated people is best described in the terms the authors use for modern suburban development.My only complaint with this book is that it carries an underlying hint of elitism and makes the fatal mistake of assuming poorly planned development can be blamed for all nagging social ills. True, our social values determine how we build and develop, and isolated designs can induce negative social outcomes, but these experts focus too closely on their own field of expertise and lose sight of the larger picture. For example, perhaps TV watching has a large part in explaining Americas decline in it sense of community.This book will be a source of information on how prudent and farsighted development can be acheived, but readers should be aware of the attitude these writors bring with this important work.

Like most socialists since Karl Marx, the authors of this book accurately diagnose the problem and then prescribe a solution that will only make things worse. Of course I agree that American suburbia is a horrible disaster. But what caused it? The authors hint at the answer which seems to be land use zoning instituted by local government. The authors also describe how this zoning leads to corruption, so large developers are the only ones who can survive in this corrupt and bureaucratic environment. And what remedy do the authors offer? Why, more and "better" government, of course. What they fail to mention is that most of the old towns and cities that they so admire were built without any of this regulation. What these old towns did was to do their job and let the private sector do its job. The job of local government is to take responsibility for public space and institutions. That means that local government, not private developers, should lay out and build the roads. Local government should build public parks, playgrounds, civic buildings, many nice public schools, etc. That is what local government used to do in the US. These days, instead of doing their job, local government (and all government for that matter) spend time meddling and interfering in the private sector. The nightmare that we all recognize as American suburbia is caused by both the fact that local government is not doing what it needs to do and that local government is preventing the private sector from doing what the private sector needs to do. Simply eliminating land use and density zoning would solve many of the problems described in this book.Some quotes to describe the above: "If we truly want to curtail sprawl, we must acknowledge that automotive mobility is a no-win game, and that the only long-term solutions to traffic are public transportation and coordinated land use." What nonsense. Like most Leftists, the authors hate the freedom that the car has given people. Why can't we eliminate sprawl by having high density, pedestrian friendly towns interconnected with massive highways? There is no conflict between pedestrians and cars when the needs of each are satisfied separately. And another: "a federal initiative is needed to better coordinate those policies which now govern the apparently distinct objectives of affordable housing provision, business assistance, job creation, and social services." This big government nonsense speaks for itself.So this book gets 2 stars for its accurate description of everything that is wrong with suburbia. But it is a depressing reminder that the only major forces in our country are corporate fascists and big government socialists. The enterprising spirit of individual freedom and civic duty that created those wonderful old towns and cities and all that was good in America is now extinct.

I wish the title wasn't so gloomy, but the book does off a lot of solutions and presents information in a way that I feel really drives the points, the ​author is making, home.

Very enlightening, well researched, a wealth of information, I will forever see subdivisions in a different light. It also explains the effects of living in suburbia on our children. Explains “cul-de-suc kids” and why the collector roads between subdivisions are always jamed full with traffic.

I loved the book. The issue is the photos were of such low quality I often wasn’t able to make out any of the detail that the authors were references. Also many of the pages were still connected to each other so I had to essentially rip them apart in order to read the book. Again, great book, just a terrible printing of it

Ouvrage intéressant faisant le portrait d’un monde qui a pris tellement d’importance.

Great condition, great price, what more could you ask for.