Lady, I should have your problems
Michael Bates, Tulsa urbanist and Western-swing fan, excerpts a plea for help from a woman trapped in the Tulsa suburbs:“Dear Architects:“I am a mother of four children who are not able to leave the yard because of our city’s design. Ever since we have moved here I have felt like a caged animal only let out for a ride in the car. It is impossible to walk even to the grocery store two blocks away. If our family wants to go for a ride we need to load two cars with four bikes and a baby cart and drive four miles to the only bike path in this city of over a quarter million people. I cannot exercise unless I drive to a health club that I had to pay $300 to, and that is four and a half miles away. There is no sense of community here on my street either, because we all have to drive around in our own little worlds that take us fifty miles a day to every corner of the surrounding five miles.
“I want to walk somewhere so badly that I could cry. I miss walking! I want the kids to walk to school. I want to walk to the store for a pound of butter. I want to take the kids on a neighborhood stroll or bike. My husband wants to walk to work because it is so close, but none of these things is possible. . . And if you saw my neighborhood, you would think that I had it all according to the great American dream.”
Oh, no, you have to drive? Here in America? Shocking.
So get in your car. So walk the two blocks to the grocery store. So bike in the street. So bake a casserole and take it over to your neighbors. So exercise in your home. So adapt, improvise, overcome.
You live in one of the greatest little cities in America, lady. I’d love to have your problems. I’d be up at Grand Lake this weekend, buzzing around in my bass boat with the rich people. I’d go all Lileks on one of the most beautiful Art-Deco downtowns in the country. I’d take my kid to the JM Davis gun museum or Woolaroc or Gilcrease or Philbrook or out to wander around in some little brick downtown with an Indian name like Warneka or Beufala that still has its feed stores right there on Main Street. I’d make friends who had horses and skeet ranges and sandy patches in the north forty where they used to find arrowheads when they were kids and some days, they still do. And I’d wear my car out doing it, but gas is about two thirds of what I pay for it here in Northern California and I bet renting and heating and cooling—or heck, paying off a mortgage—on your cookie-cutter suburban house would cost less than renting my little apartment.
My streets are safe, but that’s not true of a lot of urban living. I can walk three blocks to a grocery store here, too, and it’s a fancy-pants rinky-dink Whole Foods knockoff that’s never open when I need it. Safeway is two miles up a commuter-jammed highway. I could walk to church, but to find one that actually believes in the Trinity requires a five-mile trip in the family truckster.
Bad city planning exists. Bad architecture exists. Both are depressing and irritating. But, lady, but nothing stops you from going for a walk if you want to. So why don’t you take responsibility for your own happiness instead of depending on the architects to do it for you?
Or, move. Or better yet, let me come house sit.