Suburbs are a state of mind.

American suburban life has influenced the Canadian perception of suburbia.

Randy Richmond, The London Free Press reporter out to discover London Ontario's soul, has a blog called Urban sub. Striving for interaction with his London followers, Richmond has a page encouraging readers to: Ask me anything. I took him up on his request and asked the following:

"How do you define a suburb? I think of suburbs as distant places, involving long commutes to work. If I walk does that mean I do not live in the suburbs? I have walked from The Free Press to my London home; I often biked to the paper in 15 minutes. You live in the city, Randy. You live in a newer neighbourhood but little different from many older ones. I think you live in London, not a suburb of London."

Randy replied quickly and in some detail:

"Hey, thanks for the question.

I think suburbs are defined by their nature, not their distance from the city core. (My drive in rush hour is about 20 minutes. * People in Byron have about a 30 minute drive. That is getting to commuter status.)

Suburbs are traditionally laid out in a non-grid road pattern, with dead ends and crescents, with wider lots, garages for each home. In general, they don’t have a shopping core such as a downtown or Wortley Village has. There’s a sense in a suburb, right or wrong, of having streets with less traffic, wider lawns, more space, more community parks, shopping centres, bigger but a bit blander of everything.

Having said all that, in London, a lot of suburbs do have some qualities of village neighbourhoods and even the downtown.  You are right about that.

As well, not all the suburbs in London are the same. Westmount was built with the idea of having services close by to everyone. Oakridge seems a little more like the suburbs of the 1960s, where everyone had to drive. Some of the newer ones seem a little like that as well.

In some ways, I guess, suburbs is a state of mind."

First, you have to admit that Randy gave a good answer to my question. When he says, "In some ways, I guess, suburbs is a state of mind," he may be onto something. He is certainly onto something when it comes to London.

In the somewhat distant past suburbs were the residential, bedroom communities lying outside the city limits. They were bedroom communities for the big, urban centres. Living in the suburbs was often cheaper than living in the city proper as the homes had neither city water nor city sewage. Septic tanks were the norm and can still be found in some distant outlying developments. (There are still a few homes inside the London city boundaries that retain their original septic tank systems.)

My original London home sat near the Forks of the Thames and my mother, who lived with me at the time, used to walk to Simpsons and Eatons in the city core. I thought I lived downtown, technically I lived in London West as downtown ended at the river, it certainly wasn't a suburban home, but a 102 years earlier that area had been the municipality of Petersville, a London suburb.

Byron, where I live now, was a separate community until it and the surrounding land was annexed in 1961. My entire neighbourhood was built decades later. One could argue my home is not suburban; It has always been in London. My neighbourhood is not a bedroom community and never has been. I have city water, city sewage and I pay city property taxes, yet almost everyone agrees that I live in a suburb. Yes, Randy is right, "suburbs is a state of mind."

Wider lawns and more space is often more myth than reality.

Until relatively recently, garage-forward houses jammed onto to narrow lots were relatively rare in London, except in the pages of The London Free Press. The local paper carried a lot of stories about suburbia that sounded far more like a description of life in Pickering, Markham or Mississauga rather than Byron or Masonville.

I used to argue this with the former editor-in-chief Paul Berton, even backing up my arguments with pictures as evidence, but to no avail. The mythological suburb was too deeply etched into his consciousness. As Randy said, "There’s a sense in a suburb, right or wrong, of . . . "

Newspaper all too often report the sense, even though it is wrong, rather than reporting the reality.

* [I figure 15 minutes gets me from my home in Byron to the paper. My wife who worked near the paper said it never took her more than 20 minutes to make the trip. Byron is getting to be a big place and I figure there might be some distant spots where the residents are 30 minutes from downtown but I cannot imagine that there are many spots like that. I used to drive the local news editor home occasionally and he can confirm that it never took me half an hour to get him home, not even with a requested stop at Tim's.]

The thing of it is, it isn't true.

Five tracks level crossing in downtown San Diego.

As I have said before, Randy Richmond is a poet. On Friday he posted almost a poem, The Thing of It Is, a visual and verbal ode to the rail system dividing London and messing with its traffic patterns. He tells us, "Only small towns have downtown railway crossings." 

Huh? Where do these ideas come from? Level crossing are not uncommon in even very large cities.

Last summer I spent six weeks bumping across the United States and Canada in my old British roadster. Morgan roadsters have a notoriously hard ride. I joke my 43-year-old car still has its original shocks because the damn suspension doesn't do any work.

When I'm doing extra bumping, such as when I'm bumping over level crossings, I notice. And I noticed lots of them in both large cities and small towns. And I cursed every single one of them.

Even a well maintained 5 track crossing, such as the one I found using Google Street Views, can be a teeth jarring experience for a Morgan driver. And where exactly is this level crossing? Why, it's in downtown San Diego, California. Not exactly a small, boring, backwater of a place. (Photo at top of post.)

Note how Montreal's Ave. Clanranald is broken by a rail line.

With 53 level crossings, London actually may have earned some bragging rights. Unlike many, many towns and cities, I haven't checked this thoroughly, but from the high number it seems possible that London boldly builds level crossings rather than simply allowing train tracks to cut streets in two.

Roundabout/Overpass: Amazing, innovative but that's London.

And as Randy mentions, London just built a new overpass and it's a $16.3 million doozy. This baby is an amazing, innovative solution to a decades old traffic snafu at the intersection of Hale Street, Trafalgar Road and the CN tracks. The City of London floated a roundabout above the main CN Rail lines into London. Wow!

Have you ever seen anything like this? In North America, how many roundabouts are also overpasses? Even naysayers like me have to admit it's a pretty cool solution.

(In the interest of accuracy, I must say lots of places have done away with many of their level crossings or, like Brantford Ontario, never have had them at all on certain major roads. Admittedly, there is tension between railroad right-of-ways and the city streets they cross, but it is not a problem unique to London.)

Level crossing are common in Windsor, a city two hours west of London.

Who's London? The London Free Press examines The Forest City.

London, The Forest City, as seen from my Bryon home.

The London Free Press is running a series, Who's London, and reporter Randy Richmond is putting this Southwestern Ontario city under the journalistic microscope. He is out to discover the "city’s identity, or lack of identity."

Richmond has a blog, Urban Sub, on Tumblr where he tells us:

"Every workday morning, I leave the suburbs and cross the river to the downtown, where I write stories for the newspaper."

I'm not sure where Richmond lives today but when he started at The Free Press I took his picture posed in his London neighbourhood in the western part of the city. Back then Richmond lived about seven kilometres from work, or a few minutes by car from the paper. I could walk from Randy's home to The Free Press, given the time, he lives that close to work.

Since moving back to London, Richmond says he finds London dull, just as his father did before him. His dad was "a little too comfortable in London." He uprooted his young family and moved to Hamilton. I don't know if his dad found Hamilton suitably uncomfortable but maybe he did; He stayed.

I enjoy reading Richmond's stuff, but he's often more of poet than journalist. His words in that first story got me thinking about suburbs and how one defines them. I have often felt Richmond has a love/hate relationship with suburbs and I have wondered why he lives in what he thinks of as a suburb.

Richmond's Urban sub blog invites his readers to Ask me anything, and so I did. I asked: "Why do you live in the 'suburbs' and not downtown?" Here is his reply:

"Space, bit of nature, and a comfort zone.
Got three kids who like to run around the yards and the street they live on.
Needless to say, I needed space for them and for me to escape from them from time to time.
I grew up in the suburbs of a small town. (A strange thing in itself.)
I have lived in downtown neighbourhoods and felt a bit cramped. That’s just me though.
I know I will be tempted by a downtown condo when I get older."

What a great reply. Very honest. And now I know why I am often at odds with Richmond when it comes to his views on cities. I, too, grew up in what I thought of as a suburb, of sorts, Windsor. When I was a young boy, Windsor felt like a suburb of Detroit. Driving north on Windsor's main street, visitors often mistook the tall skyscrapers of Detroit for Windsor's downtown.

As a young boy my friends and I often spent our Saturdays bumming about Motown. It was as easy to get to Detroit back then as taking the bus, the tunnel bus. We could leave home and be in Detroit in less than thirty minutes. The big city offered lots to do: The Detroit Zoo, Belle Isle and its aquarium, and two amusement parks. There was Bob-lo if you had the time and Edgewater if you didn't.

As a teen I often went to Detroit for clothes. J.L. Hudson's was great for conservative stuff, everyday high school attire. But for that special look, the Friday-night-sock-hop look, it was Todd's Clothes which was opened in 1931 in downtown Detroit by Nathan "Toddy" Elkus who gained fame as the designer of The Zoot Suit. No one carried a better line of shark-skin fabric clothing than Todd's, or tighter men's slacks or had a better selection of narrow-brimmed hats. If you were not careful, you could leave Todd's with the look Lou Rawls' gently mocks in his mid 60s' release of Street Corner Hustler Blues.



I'm very comfortable in cities. Downtown neighbourhoods don't make me feel at all cramped. Certainly not London's. My first home here was just across the Thames River from downtown. I lived on Wilson Street and collected hardballs knocked high and foul by batters at Labatt Park.

My lot went back about 185 feet and I never longed for any more yard. I had more yard when I lived near the core than I do now in Byron. Randy's reason for living in the suburbs, I had "three kids who like to run around the yards and the street they live on," rang completely hollow with me.

His talk about needing a "bit of nature" also rang false with me. When I sought a hit of nature back when I lived near the core, I portaged my canoe to the nearby Thames, launched it at the forks and paddled past herons and turtles to Springbank Park and back.

Richmond writes: "I know I will be tempted by a downtown condo when I get older."

I'm already older and I am already tempted but I'd rather live in downtown Byron than downtown London. Let's be honest, when you get right down to it, is downtown Byron all that distant from downtown London?

It rarely takes me more than 15 minutes to drive downtown. Mapquest agrees.

(I think of suburbs as distant places, involving long commutes to work. Some urban experts put the cutoff at half an hour. If it takes more than thirty minutes to drive downtown, you live in a suburb. If it takes less, you may  not live in the core but you do live in the city.)

Question: Are the suburbs our future?

A new apartment soars above the core. It has a suburban twin.

When I read the question in The London Free Press that became the title of today's post, I thought the question was at least sixty years out-of-date and getting a wee bit stale.

By some calculations, the suburbs of North American cities have been outpacing inner city neighbourhood growth for more than a half century. In the past, many believed the suburbs were the future, today many still believe it, and in the world of tomorrow there are numerous reasons to believe the suburbs will remain the urban growth sweet-spot.

That said, cities once gave every sign that they could sprawl outward forever but a change may be in the offing --- but I wouldn't hold my breath. It seems for the first time in years, some urban cores are growing faster than their outlying suburbs.

Builder reports an EPA study, Residential Construction Trends in America’s Metropolitan Regions, that found permits in certain central cities and first-ring suburban neighborhoods are outpacing greenfield developments.

Smart growth proponents have long predicted that the ever-greater expansion of suburbia would one day reach its limit, prompting a renewed interest in central city living. A new EPA report suggests this trend is well underway, with residential permits in downtown areas and close-in suburbs more than doubling since 2000 in 26 of the largest metro regions in the United States.

The shift has been especially pronounced in some big cities, such as New York, which saw its share of regional permits increase from 15% in the early 1990s to 48% by 2008. In Chicago, housing permits inside city limits rose from 7% to 27% over the same time period.

Will this trend come to London? Is the inner city core our future?

[I doubt the core is our future. But look for more high density infill developments right across the entire London urban landscape and definitely watch for more residential and high-rise office development throughout the core.]


Addendum:

I found this on the Web. It seems the suburbs may have been hailed as the future as long ago as 539 B.C. Supposedly, the following comes from a letter written on a clay tablet to the King of Persia:

"Our property seems to me the most beautiful in the world. It is so close to Babylon that we enjoy all the advantages of the city, and yet when we come home we are away from all the noise and dust."

No dust? Must have been all those suburban lawns.

Sun News asked Bell to suspend the broadcasting of their signal

If you read the story in The London Free Press today, you might have thought that it was the decision of Bell TV to suddenly deny Bell subscribers access to the new Sun News Network. According to the article Fans demand: I want my Sun TV!:

"Sun News fan, Susannah Sears, has created her own Facebook group for people who're upset they can't watch Sun News through Bell."

"Luc Lavoie, head of development for SUN News, is encouraging Bell satellite TV customers to give Bell a piece of their mind."

I found the Facebook page to which the article refers and read a posting reportedly from Sun News itself. The new network posted the following:

"We have asked them [Bell] to suspend broadcasting the [Sun News Network] signal."

It was the Sun Network itself that cut the feed! I tried to post a link to the online version of The Free Press story but could not find the story. I did fine a version of the article carried by the Toronto Sun. The Toronto version I found admits in the last paragraph that "Quebecor actively shut down the channel."

After finding the article, I added a comment and read a number of the others. Here is a sampling:


pauljensen75 wrote: 

"Read any other media outlet and you'll soon learn Sun removed the service from Bell because Sun wanted more money for the signal. This "news" article is a lie brought to you by a company with a vested interest in the outcome. Can you say "conflict of interest"?

This is an example of a news organization writing news to serve the corporate parent's purposes.

Hey Sun (TV, online, in paper, etc.): you only get one reputation. And it's "news stories" like these that make it obvious where your rep is headed."

pieridy wrote:

"I'm happy to have a right-leaning network on the air, but from what I've seen so far, they take the same approach to the facts as FOX down south - that is, omit details, twist, distort until all that remains is spin, conjecture and implication. From what I've seen, the right has no other way to support their arguments; as soon as you look for evidence to support their positions, everything falls apart."

Sun News struggles with numbers and truth

Ezra Levant — The Source

The Sun Media story claimed, and we are using claimed in its correct sense, that the new Sun News network has been on roll. I saw the story by Terry Davidson in The London Free Press. My local paper obediently carried the filler supplied by Sun Media and QMI.

The story was headlined New network buoyed by viewer stats. It went on to say, "Around 37,000 viewers across Canada tuned in to watch the news channel when it launched April 18 . . . " No one disputes that number. The problem is that today is April 29, not April 18, and the numbers have plummeted with each passing day.

The London Free Press tells us The Caldwell Account, hosted by Theo Caldwell, had 20,000 views coming out of the starting gate. What The Free Press doesn't say is that Theo wilted fast. Marketing Mag Canada reports:

"Sun News commentator Theo Caldwell was drawing 11,000 viewers at 7 p.m. last Friday, CBC News Network had an audience of 263,000 viewers across Canada. [Even the American network] CNN’s estimated audience in Canada at 7 p.m. on Friday was 38,000 viewers."

The numbers in the Free Press story are old news. But then some of the stunts being pulled by the Sun News network to attract viewers are pretty stale. Ezra Levant, host of The Source, in a blatant attempt to create controversy, broadcast the infamous cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that sparked riots around the world.

Despite the Islamic faith's prohibition against any depiction of Muhammad, these cartoons were published in a Danish newspaper in 2005. The New York Times reported "at least 200 died and many more were injured."

This did not stop Levant from displaying the cartoons on The Source as part of  free speech segment. This is not the first time Levant has displayed the cartoons. He first published them years ago in the The Western Standard. The topic was red hot then and he succeeded in stirring up the correct amount of controversy.

The Vancouver Sun spoke with Chris Waddell, director of the school of journalism at Carleton University, who said it's hard to understand why it's important. What can you say? It's recycling a very old story.

A week after launch, Levant’s show was down to 19,000 viewers. This is a big drop from the 40,000 viewers The Free Press story linked to Levant's show.

Will Sun News succeed? It is too early to tell. Personally, I'm not pulling for them.

Downtown Core Summit a success!

London Mayor Joe Fontana makes an enthusiastic pitch for the future of downtown.

London Mayor Joe Fontana kicked off the Downtown Core Summit by posing a challenging question to the crowd of more than two hundred assembled at Covent Garden Market Wednesday: "Are we ready to rebuild downtown London?"

And for many in the large crowd, the answer was a resounding "yes."

The attendees were drawn from the ranks of business and government, and even from the general public. Possibly the largest property owner in the core, real estate mogul Shmuel Farhi, was there. But this group was not as diverse as one might think: They all shared a love of London and a desire to see the downtown a healthy, vital part of the city again.

The focus of the event was London's aging city hall. Should the decades old building be kept and its useful life extended by leasing downtown office space; Should the present building be patched up and enlarged; Should the city simply build a new city hall? These were the three options originally on the table.

But Wednesday night's brain-storming session may have enlarged the number of options. For instance, Alan Cowey, CEO of Ashfield Group Inc., has his own creative vision for the core. His dream proposal sees city hall being moved to the site of the present London Life complex. He would retain the elegant, historic facade but gut the core of the aging complex. The new city hall would rise from this hollow shell.

London Life today may no longer require the large footprint of its present operations and would be encouraged to move a short distance and build new.

Bud and Paul Gowan watch Alan Cowey sketch his dream.

Cowey's dream was infectious. He had the others at his table, among them Phil McLeod , Bud Gowan and his son Paul, all hunched over the aerial map of downtown London that decorated every table, while he gave form to his well-thought out vision. He quickly and dramatically put his creative thoughts to paper using a large felt-tip pen perfect for his large, dramatic ideas.

Drawing heavy lines through Clarence Street above Dufferin Avenue and through Kent Street as well. Cowey said he'd close these. Clarence is a dead end already, he explained.

But the Downtown Core Summit was not a dead end; With the caliber of people attending, it was clearly a beginning.

Councillor Judy Bryant closing the very successful Downtown Core Summit.