The cover story in the latest Toronto Life claims that downtowners are fleeing for the suburbs in droves. Edward Keenan argues the piece is misleading—the subjects profiled within have simply traded in their urban-neighbourhood existence for a similarly styled small-town one. Where are the stories of the people who've fled to actual suburbs?
I was at Sunnyside Beach on the weekend with my wife and our two kids. We’d been skipping rocks and my son Colum and daughter Irene were practicing their bike-riding on the concrete of the drained wading pool when a six-year-old boy came over from a nearby picnic table and asked if I had a lighter. He and his family needed it to light the candles on an immense birthday cake they had prepared for his 12-year-old brother. I went over and helped them light the candles, and the kids and I joined in as they sang “Happy Birthday.”
Then we were all invited to join the party—the mother supervising the crowd of about eight kids (four of them her own offspring) insisted they had too much cake (and pop, and chips) and didn’t want to haul it all back to their apartment on Jameson Avenue. I was offered a beer and Colum and Irene had cream soda, even though they normally aren’t allowed to drink pop. Our kids admired the pink-princess tent the other kids had set up nearby, and my wife Rebecca, who is pregnant with our third child, shared notes with the other Mom, whose oldest is 18 and whose youngest is four. I ate cake and talked about the bike trails along the lake with one of her teenagers.
There’s not really much significance to this story: we had an unexpectedly good time with a bunch of friendly strangers in downtown Toronto. What else is new? Except that just that day Rebecca and I had been discussing Philip Preville’s cover story in the current issue of Toronto Life (the full story is not online, but an excerpt is). “Exodus to the Burbs,” the cover screams, “The houses are bigger. The people are nicer. The commute doesn’t suck. Why diehard downtowners are giving up on the city.”
In that story, headlined “The New Suburbanites,” Preville claims the kind of friendliness I experienced last weekend just doesn’t happen in Toronto anymore. “In the city, we live every minute cheek by jowl. As a result, all the social conventions—don’t make eye contact, don’t eavesdrop, don’t assume anyone is watching your kids—are designed to protect privacy.” He says that in Toronto you can’t count on your neighbours to watch your kids. Preville relates how this privacy turned him into an asshole, cutting people off, frowning, littering: “Because I can, because I’ll never see these people again and there will never be any repercussions. Everybody else behaves much the same way, because it is how we all cope with the constant encroachments of high-density living.”
There is much to be said about the potential (and the drawbacks) of being “alone in a crowd” in the city, but nothing about Preville’s portrait of mutual urban hostility and outright incivility squares with my own experience of city life. Perhaps everyone else seemed like a jerk because he was acting like one—you reap what you sow, I suspect. I encounter assholes, and sometimes I behave like an asshole. But mostly I am friendly with my neighbours and with everyone else in my neighbourhood. We watch each other’s kids, absolutely, and we make small talk and help each other haul furniture around and generally behave like neighbours should. If I wanted to, I could fill a shelf of books with little stories like the one above.
Anyhow, Preville has his anecdotes, and I have mine. Although it was a neat bit of happenstance to wander out and find a counter-example hours after reading his piece, the vast gulf between his experience of neighbourliness and my own is not one of the main observations I wanted to make about his piece.
The first thing I thought noteworthy when I read the piece—I went straight to it when I got the magazine precisely because suddenly everyone seemed to be talking about it—was that, despite its headline and its own apparent thesis, the story is not about the suburbs. I repeat: the story is not about people leaving the city to move to the suburbs. As John Lorinc points out on the Spacing Toronto blog, that would be the oldest story in North America. Dog bites man.
The new twist here is that Preville is discussing people who think of themselves as city types moving to towns and cities on the edge of the GTA rather than to suburbs, to essentially urban places. Downtown Cobourg, Uxbridge, Dundas, Creemore—as Preville says, “19th-century towns built of brick and stone, with elegant and durable housing stock shaded by giant leafy canopies, picturesque old city halls and quaint, lively downtown commercial avenues. They look nothing at all like the cookie-cutter, aluminum-clad, cul-de-sacky Mississaugaish, soulless wasteland of the downtown imagination.” He even acknowledges that most people would not define these areas as suburban, saying, “You could argue that some of these places are small towns, not suburbs. But the march of sprawl swallowed Port Credit and Oakville, and it will swallow East Gwillimbury, too.”
I think this is an issue that is not so easily dismissed. Preville’s saying that if people move to an area outside the city “while still making a living off the big-city economy,” then they’re effectively making wherever they go a suburb. I understand the point—that many satellite cities function as bedroom communities to the city. But Preville’s project is in part an attempt to dispel some of the cultural snobbery urbanists feel towards the suburbs and those who move to them. And that’s why the bait and switch is kind of pivotal, because I do not think downtown residents feel any snobbery at all towards the kinds of places he is discussing. Quite the opposite, actually.
Next page: how Toronto Life missed the opportunity to tell the story of real suburbanites
