Kate Hackett
As an American, our suburbs are so ubiquitous, I admit that I didn’t even realize that someone from Europe may have no earthly idea why or how we decided: this is a great idea!
Last week, a Slovakian Reddit user posted to Reddit with many questions after watching a YouTube video about the American suburbs. The questions reflected a level of confusion that is guaranteed to be surprising to most Americans.
Here’s what the Redditor wanted to know:
My questions are:
- What do you actually do? Are you always stuck inside? What did you do when you were a child and couldn’t drive?
- Why do you have these sorts of strange regulations? Are your officials so incompetent? Is this due to lobbying from car or oil companies? I don’t get it.
- Why is there no public transport? It seems like the only thing is the yellow school bus, idk.
- He says there can be only one family houses. Why? Why can’t you have idk a commie block in the middle of such a suburb? Or row houses or whatever.
- Why are there no businesses inside these? I mean, he says it’s illegal, just why? If I lived in such a place, I’d just buy a house next to mine and turn it into a tavern or a convenience store or whatever. Is that simply not possible and illegal?
- These places have front and backyards. But they’re mostly empty. Some backyards have a pool maybe, but it’s mostly just green grass. Why don’t you grow plants in your yards? Like potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes or whatever. Why do you own this land, if you never use it?
The questions also made their way to Twitter, where people quickly chimed in with thoughts about suburbs.
