So I’m coming home from an outdoor street festival tonight – an odd combination of band party, farmer’s market, car show, alfresco dining and assorted other stuff. There was a pop-up demonstration of a separated bike lane, there were root beer floats from a stand in front of the local small grocery, the works. And I came there straight from an errand in the city, in the Mission, on Valencia and 17th – the very beating heart of hipster heaven, currently chockablock with techies and their ilk.
And I thought about Portlandia – not least because a minibreak to Portland appears to be on the cards for later this year – and how it deftly skewers the excess of hipsters and yuppies alike. And it occurs to me there’s not a lot of difference anymore. Skinny jeans are everywhere. Surplus store clothing? Hell, military style jackets are in Macy’s. Apple products? You couldn’t get more mainstream. Yupsters? Everywhere, and for one simple reason: that’s now effectively the mainstream of a life that can more simply be called urban.
Urban is the magic word. It used to be the preferred media euphemism for “black” but now it seems to be the signifier of an entire realm of cultural experiences. Street life, eschewing cars, technologically mediated, transit-focused, the works. Consider Mountain View, perhaps the archetypal suburb (if not outright farm town) until the coming of Fairchild and the age of silicon. Now it’s one of a handful of towns around the turn of the peninsula with its own art and wine festivals, its own commuter train stop(s), its own bike share stations, a slew of restaurants with outdoor tables, and – inevitably – political arguments about just how cityfied you want it to become.
In years past, the big fight was always how to keep the urban realm from becoming suburbanized – no big box stores, no chains, every effort to preserve local character. Now, the argument seems to be about how much of the urban box you can unpack in suburbia without getting the bad bits. Denser housing without towering skyscrapers. Transit and shuttles and bike lanes without crippling the ability to move regular traffic. Business-friendly and upscale retail without pricing out the locals or destroying an affordable future for kids who might want to keep living there after college.
It’s a tough nut to crack. It’s not something you can get with ample doses of loose money and a pro-bidness-at-all-cost attitude. But it also required being urban-minded, which is why it hasn’t really taken hold in the old country at all. I suppose it’s just lucky that much of Silicon Valley already had a Southern Pacific line running down the peninsula and a tradition of interurban rail going back to the old #40 line to San Mateo. And then there’s San Jose, which went from farm town to bedroom community to quietly becoming the third largest city in California, bigger than Oakland or San Francisco, yet with a downtown that hardly seems bigger or more compelling than a cleaned up multi-ethnic Birmingham.
And these places all have their own character. If you have a specific sort of thing in mind – city grit, rustic isolation, working-class credibility, crackerbox suburbia – you can find it somewhere along the 415-650-408 axis, although you may not care for the resulting commute. Then again, the transit and transportation infrastructure has yet to scale to accommodate the true need, because stuff costs money. And it’s hard to get too fired up about the limited transit when your employer will bus you to work, or when you have to drive yourself anyway and why should you care about the shitty light rail performance anyway? Which in its way is of a piece with the ever-popular “this place was paradise up until five minutes after the person after me arrived” way of thinking. And…but then, that’s a post for another time.
In a lot of ways, I think that’s the goal for most of the area. Not Los Altos Hills or Atherton or Hillsborough, obviously, but everywhere else – if you had to pick a civic goal, I would put it on something like “Just Urban Enough – But No More.” Which, depending on the approach, is far from the worst aspiration for growing suburbs in 2014.