Defective Attitude Towards Suburbia
I’ve seen Columbus Mayor Mike Coleman speak, in person, in a relatively small venue. He strikes me as a decent, competent, sincere guy. If he runs for a fourth term, I’d be happy to vote for him. Heck, I’d probably vote for him for President of the USA.
But I have to take exception to something he said in the January issue of Columbus Monthly. The article centers around what is to be done with City Center, a three-story, downtown shopping mall that has steadily declined in recent years to the point that it now stands mostly unoccupied. How did it get to this miserable state?
In hindsight, Coleman says it’s easy to explain City Center’s downfall. “It’s a defective suburban mall plopped into the middle of an urban community,” he says. “It was doomed for failure from the beginning. There’s one window in it.”
A “defective suburban mall?” What does that mean?
It seems to me that Mayor Coleman, as the leader of a mostly urban constituency — the suburbs around Columbus are generally their own, incorporated cities — would like to portray the failure of City Center as a failure of suburbia. And the fact that big shopping malls are usually found in suburbia can be exploited to make that case. But the logic is twisted in the extreme.
There are four large shopping malls in the Columbus area: Easton Town Center, Polaris Fashion Place, The Mall At Tuttle Crossing, and City Center. The first three are suburban, and they’re all flush with success. Nothing “defective” about them. The fourth is urban, and — whaddaya know — is teetering on the edge of total death, to the point that people are crying out for the mayor of the city to find a way to get rid of it.
Something I’ve noticed over the years: People who like, or in any way stand for, an urban area, tend to be defined more by a specific dislike of suburbia than by anything they actually like about the inner city. Suburbia is “sterile.” Suburbia is “cold.” Suburbia has “no history.” Suburbia has “no character.” Suburbia is “too spread out.” Suburbia is “cookie cutter.” Suburbia is “full of snobs.”
But all of these criticisms are defensible only within the mindset of, “I’m an urbanite, and I have to find something to hate about the suburbs so I don’t look second-rate.” It is in this mindset that clean becomes “sterile.” That neat becomes “cold” and “lacking character.” That spacious becomes “too spread out.” That new becomes “without history” and “cookie-cutter.” That prosperous becomes “snobbish.”
And it is in this mindset that block upon concrete urban block of tightly packed, towering buildings, dozens of stories high, filled with bored, frustrated, cubicled office workers during the day, and empty as a tomb at night, is somehow “cool” — while a suburban neighborhood with comfortably spaced houses, each lightly populated both day and night by families watching TV, playing sports, surfing the internet, mowing the lawn, swimming in their backyard pools — and maybe working remotely on their computers — is to be viewed with utter contempt.
Some people just detest success. But maybe I’m reading too much into Mayor Coleman’s comment about City Center. I hope he’s not one of those people.
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