When I moved from Ames, Iowa to the DC area, I was excited to live in a place with character. In cities like Alexandria and Georgetown, you are greeted with beautiful brick shops and row-houses as you make your way down the main streets. Assuming you had a house near public transit or close to downtown, you could easily walk anywhere you needed to go. Those neighborhoods provided a friendly outdoor space that was exciting and pleasing to the eye. It was then that I wrote off the midwest as a boring wasteland of parking lots and farms.
When I moved to Michigan, I began exploring the areas around Lansing and Ann Arbor to get a sense of what the state was like, from the factories to the parks to the small towns. What I found most appealing was the multitude of beautiful, small towns that dot the countryside, situated along rail lines. These towns grew up from the mid-1800′s to the birth of the automobile. Each town features beautiful brick, Victorian houses and main streets lined with inviting storefronts. The same aesthetic I found pleasing on the East Coast was just under the surface here in Michigan. Towns like Chelsea,Belding, and Mason. However, these quaint towns in Michigan have long since been forgotten as rail travel declined and the smaller factories that supported the towns ceased operation. Michigan is now dotted with factories that sprawl hundreds of acres, surrounded by sprawling, lonely suburban developments and sterile, big-box stores.
In a way, Michigan was a victim of its own success. The success of the automobile is what pushed people out of these small cities into the larger factory cities and eventually into the sprawling suburbs we have today. Interestingly enough, Henry Ford hated to see what was happening to these rural cities as workers moved to the larger factory cities. He began a Village Industries program that sought to establish smaller factories in these smaller, rural cities that made various automobile parts. Unfortunately, the costs associated with this program were too high to compete with the centralized factories. Ford built Greenfield Village as a living museum to demonstrate what small town life was like before the mass-produced automobile. It’s quite telling that the man who brought the automobile to the masses simultaneously strove to keep this old way of living alive or in memory.
Visiting rural Minnesota, I see the same thing. Beautiful, small farming towns that boomed in the late 1800′s to early 1900′s, now largely abandoned as small farms become factory farms and consumption shifts to larger retail stores thirty miles away.
To the laissez faire economist, this is natural. The cheapest, most efficient means of manufacturing won the day. But what did we lose in order to have cheap cars? What did we gain? I enjoy automobiles – they’re fast, look cool, and are fun to drive. But I believe we’ve sacrificed too much of our quality of life in return for the perceived advantage of being able to drive anywhere we want, when we want. There has to be some balance between the freedom of movement we get from automobiles and quality of life in our communities.
I have yet to visit an automobile-dependent neighborhood that has the same social and economic vitality as one that can be travelled easily by foot or public transit. Our cities and neighborhoods simply cease to function as healthy social environments as soon as we transport ourselves alone within moving steel boxes and situate our dwellings as far as possible from each other. We need to change our cities to promote healthy social environments.
