Why Do People Move to the Suburbs? Simply Put, They Have Kids

Why do people move to the suburbs?  Let’s think about that for a minute, break down that question.

Note that the question is not, “why do people live in the suburbs,” which is, in my mind, a very different question.  People might live in the suburbs for a bunch of reasons. Maybe that’s where they grew up, and never left. Maybe that’s where they work, so it doesn’t occur to them to live anywhere else. Maybe they just never had the hankering for the big city lights, and prefer the quieter, slower pace traditionally associated with the picket fences and all that. Maybe it’s simple inertia.  Maybe they just like the Cheescake Factory.  It could be a million reasons.

But our question today is different: “why do people MOVE to the suburbs,” which implies that those people are currently living somewhere else, probably a city.  In that case, the answer is usually simple — they’re having a kid.

That’s what it almost always comes down to.  You don’t see a lot of happy-go-lucky 30 year olds — single, no kids, with a job — who suddenly decide to trade in their urban life so they can commute an hour or so every day to work. No single person wakes up one morning saying, “Hey, I’m just getting tired of Asian-Latin fusion takeout, and muddled drinks, and lots of 20-something single hotties who enjoy casual sexual relations, and being able to take cabs home when I decide to spontaneously celebrate Cinco de Mayo in September.  What I REALLY need is a guest bedroom!  Time to move to the suburbs!!!!”

No one does that. Single people don’t need space, they don’t care about schools, they don’t generally want the quiet. Even for married couples without kids, the tradeoffs of the suburbs versus the city don’t seem to make sense, so long as they can live in a a two room coop without ending up in a War of the Roses situation.

No, any discussion about moving to the suburbs is inexorably, invariably, going to become entwined with the decision to have kids. If it was all about you, then you’d stay in the city.  But when it’s suddenly all about a mini-you that doesn’t have a particular affinity for 20-something hotties or delivery Vietnamese or infused tequila, and who is currently sleeping in a crib at the foot of your bed, you start to re-think your priorities.

I did things a little backwards, of course. We moved from the city in 2009 simply on the anticipation of becoming parents in the near future, and our expectation that life would simply be easier for us and better for him/her in the suburbs. But for people who already have kids, who are actually living in confined space with a little child and realizing just how much becoming a parent is inconsistent with remaining an urbanized sophisticate hipster, I think the choice is even more compelling.

I was thinking about this because I came across this lovely piece by Jordan Reid in her Ramshackleglam blog, where she writes about her fear of how her life would change in moving to the suburbs: the fear that she won’t make friends, or that her friends won’t be the “kinds of friends that I have in my life now,” or that she’ll wind up feeling like she settled for a life that’s less exciting or interesting than the one she would have had in the city.

Ultimately, though, she writes that it ended up not being a difficult decision, particularly once she considered not what she wanted, but what her son needed:

Most of all, though, the reason we want to move is that city life is not what we want for our son. I grew up here, and I had a great childhood, but I want something different for him. I want him to have a yard to run around in with Lucy and Virgil. I want him to go fishing on Saturdays with his Dad not because it’s a big, special production involving car rentals and long drives, but rather because that’s just what they feel like doing. I want to pick up our pumpkin in a patch, not in a grocery store. I want him to have a swing set of his very own.

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But now it’s not about us anymore, not really: it’s about a little man who smiles so much when he looks out our New York City window, even when there’s nothing to see outside but the apartment building across the way, that all we want to do is set him free to study the sky. And when we take that into account…

well…

it’s not really a decision at all.

It’s just what we’re going to do. 

It’s really a beautiful piece, certainly better than anything I’ve ever written about the subject, so I’m looking forward to seeing what she has to say once she settles in.

And it certainly reinforces the point that for some reason has eluded me for so long. I’ve been belaboring my decision about moving to the suburbs, painting it as something I did by choice, something that I could second-guess if it didn’t work out.  But the more I think about it, the more I realize that, like Ms. Reid, I didn’t really have a choice.

The bottom line: people don’t move to the suburbs because they want to, they move because they have to.  And the decision often isn’t theirs to make. So I should give myself a break….