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Suburbia

What seems like a bland, boring and overdone topic has been bouncing around the ol’ nugget of late: the suburbs.

As is often the case, multiple different triggers have gotten me thinking about this topic. One was a recent podcast by The Zman, Transcendental Ruminations. The gist of the portion of the show in question was a dissident guy looking to build an intentional White community, but one that avoided the unpleasant parts of regular life. Only the beautiful Whites get to be part of this new experiment. Then this morning I was reading a post at The Occidental Observer, The Economic and Social Costs of Direct and Indirect Kleptoparasitism by Blacks and Jews looking at White flight. Finally also this morning some local radio hosts brought up the question of onerous home owner’s association (HOA) rules and the harassment encountered by people who didn’t follow the rules, including people getting in trouble for having political signs in their yards or parking a business truck with the name of the business painted on the side, parked in their own driveway.

Combined they got me thinking about the purpose of the modern suburbs, something that I think has changed in a subtle but important way from the original suburbs.

This is the standard genesis story of American suburbia….

Suburbs came into being largely as a result of “White flight” as Whites fled the cities we built because of blacks moving in. At the turn of the last century, just a few decades after the end of the Civil War, something like 90% of blacks lived in the South. During the “Great Migration”, millions of blacks moved North to cities like Chicago and Detroit. Around half a million stayed in Chicago and we can see the results of those black Chicagoans in nearly real time at places like Hey Jackass!. Just last weekend saw 51 people shot in the Windy City, 9 of those fatally, and most of those shot and the shooters are the descendants of freed blacks who moved North last century in the “Great Migration”.

Whites that were able moved to suburban neighborhoods, far enough away to avoid blacks while still within commuting distance of the cities where most jobs were still located. These suburbs were marked by cleanliness, neat yards, good schools, low crime and uniform anonymity. According to pop culture, the uniformity and pressure to conform drove lots of suburban Whites batshit crazy but at least the schools are good (“good schools” being realtor code for “very few black pupils”).

That is mostly accurate. It isn’t the complete picture or the current picture.

The suburbs were designed to provide a bolt hole for Whites, somewhere they could live in peace and quiet apart from blacks by distance. The thought, whether it was ever spelled out so specifically or not, was that blacks were not wealthy enough or ambitious enough to move out of the cities where their presence was cratering property values. Slowly but surely, the suburbs started to change and one way they changed that is quite significant was the advent of HOAs.

Everyone has seen stories about ridiculous rules from home owners associations, regulating grass length or how many Christmas lights you can have but I believe these HOA rules have a deeper and uglier purpose:

The onerous and often silly rules in HOA suburbs don’t exist to keep black and mestizo people out. The prices already do that. Instead they are designed to keep the wrong sort of White people out.

The “right” sort of White people are middle class Whites with some sort of office job, people that go to work and drop their one or two kids at daycare on the way. The right sort of Whites enroll their kids in the public schools, have them in activities and keep their yards clean and tidy. They preferably don’t come home from work dirty. They drive newer minivans or SUVs and get their oil changed by some mechanic, never at home.

The two times we lived in traditional suburban neighborhoods, in Independence, KY and Okemos, MI, we were outliers. Partly because we had so many kids (6 kids aged 9 and under in KY, all 8 in MI). Partly because my wife stayed home with the kids. What ended up happening is that the neighbor kids would all end up at my place just because my wife happened to be home. We were definitely oddballs because of our family size and because my wife didn’t “work”, as if caring for a household with 8 kids was a cakewalk compared to sitting in a cubicle somewhere.

Many, perhaps most, suburban Whites prefer not to think about their country bumpkin cousins. The country is something to be nostalgic about but not to live in. For all of the talk of embracing the work ethic, the idea of the kind of work that gets you dirty seems a bit repugnant to a lot of Whites. They might watch Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe but wouldn’t do those jobs.

It didn’t used to be like this. Back in the day there were far fewer “office jobs” in America and most Whites were “working class”, some sort of skilled tradesman or factory worker. Where I grew up with a dad who was a doctor, my next door neighbor was an auto executive but the most down-to-earth person you would ever meet, but my best friend growing up two houses down had a father who worked the night shift as a factory worker and his mom was a part-time bank teller. Now people in that economic strata could never afford a house on the street where I was raised. Whites that don’t have “middle class” jobs are relegated to less snazzy and closer to the city working class neighborhoods or they move out into the country. Whites who work blue collar jobs and maybe like to fix up cars in the driveway in their spare time seem to be an unpleasant reminder to more advanced suburban Whites.

Charles Murray looked at this in great detail in a powerful and underappreciated book: Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. A lot of Whites think they have more in common with their Indian neighbor with a high tech job in their cul-de-sac than they do with their rural White cousins who have chickens and perhaps a car up on blocks in the yard. What these suburban Whites don’t understand is that their Indian neighbor doesn’t feel the same way. Sure they like the White suburbs but they are Indian first. The same with the tame blacks or mestizos in their suburb, they might live in a White neighborhood because it is simply safer than where they moved from but they never forget who they are.

We see a related phenomena out here in the country when some prissy upper-middle-class White family moves out of suburbia to “get back to nature” or play homesteader, only to promptly start pissing and moaning about the smell of manure or getting stuck behind combines during the fall harvest or the lack of Chinese delivery. Like Californians moving to Texas, they seem incapable of recognizing that they are lamenting the aspects of country life that allegedly drew them out here in the first place.

I have seen some of this in my own life. If you visited my childhood home, you would have seen a large suburban home with lots of books that were actually read, magazines like National Review and American Spectator alongside the Journal of the American Medical Association on the coffee tables. Shelves full of classical music records played on a Blaupunkt turntable. However, when we visited my paternal grandmother usually just once a year, it was in a lower working class Polish neighborhood where my grandparents never owned a car (see: Repost: What My White Privilege Looked Like to get a feel for their neighborhood). When I went with my maternal grandparents to visit distant relatives we ended up in the hill country of Ohio east of Columbus, in places like Zanesville and Crooksville. Those relatives were more likely to stay up late, playing cards and smoking cigarettes and drinking crap beer like Pabst Blue Ribbon than they were to drink a glass of wine while quietly reading a book.

Looking back it feels at times like my family was trying to pretend we didn’t come from such humble beginnings. To me, my family is the quintessential American success story, my father was a young man from a dirt poor polack family in Toledo who put himself through college and medical school without any support from his own family, built a practice, raised four kids who went to college and retired to his lake home with his wife as a pillar in the community. My parents though often seemed to be trying to hide that history.

In some ways I place some blame for the decline of rural White America at the feet of the suburban mindset where young Whites were encouraged to leave home, go to college somewhere else and never come back. The brain-drain has been devastating on rural White communities. This was something we saw starkly when we lived in rural northern Michigan. The smarter and more ambitious kids would flee south to state colleges and then get jobs in Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids or metro Detroit. The ones who stayed behind were, just being honest, dumb and lazy. Multiply this by several generations and you get a similar dysgenic breeding pattern you see in black ghettos, with meth and fentanyl instead of crack, minus only the insane levels of violence that mark black urban communities.

Those same suburban Whites became apex consumers, looking for cheap consumer goods made overseas even though they could have afforded to buy American back in the day. They wanted eye-popping returns in their 401k plans so mutual fund managers chased stocks of companies that cut corners to make quarterly profits, often by moving jobs overseas. Gutting the manufacturing base of America was terrible for small town and rural Whites but it was great for upper-middle-class suburban White stock portfolios. Those suburban Whites didn’t know or didn’t care, they were just happy to see their retirement account statement each month.

The American suburbs once were a place of refuge for Whites to escape the growing crime and social malaise of cities as blacks moved in but gradually became a fortress keeping not just blacks out but also lower class Whites that made suburban Whites uncomfortable. This divide between Whites has been devastating, not just for the lower class Whites who have been driven out of suburbia but also for suburban Whites who have lost connection with what it took to build this country they take for granted. Now America is full of weak, doughy suburban White kids who can’t change a tire or fight, content to spend their time locked into a phone screen while their distant cousins, without hope or opportunity, inject themselves with heroin and die in overdoses.

Drive around suburban America today and it is hard to imagine that these people came from the same stock that explored the world, conquered the globe, split the atom and landed on the moon, the most feared warriors the world has ever seen.

25 Comments

  1. Bean Dip Tray

    Chairman Mau Mau Barry started changing the burbs with Fundamental Transformation during Year Zero of burning it all down.
    We have lived here since Max Headroom was a thing and have never left a tri county area which are all getting absorbed by the blob of egalitarian workers utopia.
    Best bud Harold the Brain (engineer) moved three counties away to Pineland right before coop de tah 2020, because he be all smart n’ stuff. (/s)
    It is out of control with congestion and wall to wall subdivision sectors from trailer park to section 8 particle board where no English is spoken to McMansions that look like something you would see in the glorious peoples republic of CommieradO.
    Harold has an open invitation with outbuildings, shed, forest, and if I’m blessed it will happen but for now I have to watch over an elder as the newcomer replacement demographic are CPUSA (D) Marxist materialism Ahrimanic delusionists, done with playing nice with them, they can go to a government office for kid gloves treatment.

  2. Anon

    >that these people came from the same stock that explored the world, conquered the globe, split the atom and landed on the moon, the most feared warriors the world has ever seen.
    Some of that still may be in their blood, asleep.
    We don’t need every single person to be a lion or a wolf, just enough.

  3. saoirse

    The only good thing about suburbs is the buffer zones they provide in case of major chimp-outs by the usual suspects. Feral shitskins, Antifags as well as cops/Natl. Guard gonna burn themselves out whooping on some cucks and normies. That, not electing Republicunts, will buy us more time to consolidate our AO’s.
    The rural area where I live has it’s share of reprobates (whites/wiggers and feather niggers oh my!) but the scale and ferocity is so much smaller than the turd-opolis I left they’re hardly visible.
    Only conscious Whites that have practical skills and aggressively prepare will survive this upcoming shit storm. Those numbers are few. The rest can virtue signal and choke on their lattes!

    • ozark homesteader

      Your last paragraph hits the nail on the head. We’ve been homesteading 15 years or so, and the number of people with a true will to survive what’s coming are so few and so far between. Even out in the sticks.

  4. Big Ruckus D

    I live in such an affluent suburb, but am the one who doesn’t fit it. Blue collar by occupation (plumbing) but intelligent and well spoken enough to pass for an UMC white collar drone if I want to put on that air (hint: I don’t). Thing is, my suburb used to be a modest bedroom community, but owing to a location that makes it highly favorable for commuters, and the proverbial “good schools” (which really aren’t, but marketing is a powerful thing), it has become a hot bed of very affluent professionals and boomer retirees, and with it the attitude and feel of the place has changed drastically around me in the nearly 30 years l’ve now lived here.

    It has lost it’s solidly middle class family demographics, and is increasingly a preferred haven for AWFLs to buy a million dollar infill house (that was built on the lot of a demolished 1920-50’s era house that was half the square footage and a third the dollar value of its replacement). This has given my fair town a much more liberal, and insufferably karenesque feel, and I hate it. While my home is paid for, real estate taxes are out of control, and even on my modest place, will probably eventually force me out to a more affordable locale unless the economic collapse comes soon and reasserts some kind of sanity in valuation.

    Speaking of which, the collapse is what will finally end the ascendancy of these Stepford Whites. Their entire lifestyle will come crashing down around them, and once their office drone job and ability to pay for (ahem, finance) their decadence and conspicuous consumption disappears, they will be ruined and psychologically broken. The fact is they already are broken, in that they are entirely detached from their roots, and have aspired to something shallow and ultimately meaningless (trying to win the rat race, when the rats have already won). But their mindset and self image will be terminally damaged in the events to come as their expectations are forced back to some sort of reality. That’s going to be a tough pill for these sorts to swallow, as it’s a lot further down for them than it will be for me.

    I say good riddance to them and everything they’ve come to stand for. They are largely a bunch of haughty, arrogant, puritanical wankers. Even when they are outwardly polite, you know they are dismissive and suspicious of anyone who doesn’t fit into their mold. These are the people who have the blm and “in this house we believe…” signs in their yards. About the only favorable thing I can say about them is that they don’t know how (or just don’t want) to do shit for themselves, and so they keep a guy like me in a decent living. They aren’t always easy to work for, but they provide a good chunk of my bread and butter. It may be shallow of me to view them in strictly transactional terms, but then that’s just how modern society works.

    Rant off.

    • dagobaz

      Speaking as a woman in a professional role myself, I think the term AWFL is marvelous. I know hundreds of these women professionally, and they are insufferable. To a one, they are where they are because of credentialism, and are never thankful or decent. The most striking them about them, collectively, is they are NEVER WRONG. EVER !

      I sincerely hope you are correct, and the crash comes soon, because these people if left to continue in their ruination of this land, will do so much damage before they collapse as to be irreparable.

  5. Anonymous

    The house I grew up in was a typical middle-class suburban ranch of about 1300 square feet on a flat quarter acre. Two bedrooms other than the master – enough space to raise four kids. No basement. I don’t recall ever feeling cramped there.

    Our current main home is fairly typical for the area, which is perhaps a step up in status from my boyhood neighborhood. But at nearly 3200 square feet on a single level with 10′ ceilings this place is an echoing barn by comparison. We don’t need a barn for just me and my wife. But there is literally nothing smaller than about 2800 square feet in this entire community. Even the condos we looked at before settling on this place were all huge, occupying multiple levels.

    They don’t seem to build modest homes any longer. Not in any community where Whites could live safely. We honestly looked for one, but only found monuments to ego.

  6. 3g4me

    Excellent post. Husband and I were both raised in the suburbs. Traveled the world and lived in cities. Moved back to the suburbs and raised a family. But . . . the suburbs we grew up in and remembered and wanted for our kids were White and filled with children, who were always outside or over playing with a neighbor. The suburbs we moved back to were filled with subcons and east asians, and no one did their own yardwork or allowed their kids outside unsupervised. So our boys grew up with arranged playdates and private Christian schools.

    Now – we’ve moved rural – couldn’t wait to get out of the faux suburbs and the exponential diversity. Most of our ‘neighbors’ here (half a mile and more away) work(ed) with their hands and remember when all of the local roads were dirt. Good, solid White people. Many of their kids leave for better educational and job opportunities, but many remain and return, which is heartening. We love the sense of community here, the neighborliness, the rootedness. That is what Whites lost in their suburban exile. This divide is unhealthy and dangerous for the future. I don’t have a quick and easy solution, but I believe if there is to be a future for White families, it will and must be rural to start with.

    • Big Ruckus D

      I’ll agree they are unnatural, and so are cities for that matter. But with population at the scale and density that has been achieved by humanity, some sort of planned higher density living arrangement is inevitable, as there isn’t enough room for everyone to have a 100 acre rural spread. And even if that were possible, it would take us back to subsistence level living. One could argue that might not be a bad thing, even. But I’m not yet prepared to make that claim.

      Now, if the globalists get their way as to population reduction, sparse rural homesteads may be the only remaining humanity of any consequence. Though clearly they are gunning for an even higher density of human cockroaches in 15 minute cities. But any outcome that leaves independent, self sufficient and critical thinking sorts out in the sticks doesn’t comfort with their grand plan, since the good guys who tend towards that kind of living are the biggest, most capable and most dangerous pain in the ass of globohomo, and therefore the ones they’d most like to see eliminated.

      Now, it may well be that any sort of planned living arrangement of any real odensity will eventually lead to human psychological dysfunction ala Calhoun’s mouse experiments. And I’d say a case can be made that there are many uncomfortable parallels between those experiments and the current state of the typical human life in modern western society. So if we are going down that road, we may have to admit that humans simply aren’t capable of successfully adapting to anything more than subsistence hunter gatherer type living over the long term. Modernity certainly has left us in a terribly fucked up state.

      • Lineman

        Modern day cities yes are unnatural but the cities of old I would say more aligned with nature… Suburbs though were spawned from our displacement from the cities we built…

      • saoirse

        @Ruckus
        “Modernity certainly has left us in a terribly fucked up state.”
        It is unsustainable hence the ones that will be fucked the most will be the ones that rely on it the most.
        I can see them trying to ramp up the housing density here ten fold but it ain’t gonna work for very long.

        No need to devolve back to the caves to survive. Conscious Whites can adapt and thrive in the most adverse of situations but must eliminate, first and foremost, the jews, their henchmen and their toadies, from White countries…. preferably from the earth!
        The fight will be extremely difficult but I do believe they’ll help us immensely by crashing their dystopia down upon themselves – which is why I stay far away from the initial shock waves, prepping and networking.

        Just curious; seeing that you live in a suburb in Texas (I believe), what do you plan on doing when the fires get too hot down there? I have a brother in Houston that laughs when I tell him that he’ll soon be paying his exorbitant property taxes (also lives in an affluent burb there) to the Mexcrement cartels.

        • Big Ruckus D

          I can’t argue with any of that. It is most assuredly unsustainable, and I figure a large swath of population that has become utterly reliant on all the trappings of modernity such as it is will not survive what is to come. I could live comfortably without most of what is now popular as time sinks for most “normal” people (sportsball, tv/movies, concerts, all that sort of leisure and consumerist stuff that dominates the modern NPC existence) but damnit I would really like to hang on to electric power and modern sanitation (drinking water and treatment/disposal of sewage) as well as modern HVAC for the benefit of comfort and storage of food, if at all possible. Honestly, I figure we may have difficulty maintaining even those basics the way things are shaping up.

          As to my plans when my AO goes south? I’m not in Texas, but in solidly midwestern red state territory (not that such is worth a pinch of coon shit generally, I’ll admit, but at least I’m not in an ultra bluish hellhole state) and if I’m being brutally honest, I’m not really sure what I’ll do when it pops off.

          I’ve spent a lot of time and funds laying in supplies and tools, expanding my practical knowledge and skills, and have studied and memorized lesser known routes out of my area both by vehicle and on foot. I’m well attuned to stuff happening locally and regionally, and so would like to think I will be far enough ahead of the curve to bail before the opportunity to do so safely evaporates. But, I also acknowledge I may well be delusional to believe that will work out the way I envision it. If I’m at home when things go hot I can be on the road and rolling in mere minutes. If I’m on the job, probably not so much.

          I have friends and associates in more remote areas who will accommodate me (assuming I can get to them when needed) as they know I can pull my own weight and make useful contributions to building, repairing and doing other useful things, among other skills.

          Of course, as the old saw goes, one’s best laid battle plans never survive first contact with the enemy. So perhaps my most important skill is the ability to think on my feet and improvise my way out of bad situations, and into beneficial ones. That’s really the best I can come up with that wouldn’t entail completely upending my life and everything familiar to me as a pre-emptive measure, so that I could essentially bug out in advance. And realistically, I’m not prepared to make that jump since all my surviving immediate family is local to my present AO, and I don’t relish the idea of distancing myself from them, even if it would better ensure I’d be outside the blast radius when it arrives.

            • Big Ruckus D

              Heh, I didn’t figure to go on a lengthy rant regarding Texas here, but for all their talk of being a solidly conservative and traditional place, they sure love themselves a lot of policies that fly in the face of that way of describing their state.

              Just things like their oppressive property taxes are more in line with a blue state hellhole, but hey, they gotta fund their preferred forms of collectivism somehow, right? And nobody talks bigger than Texans about breaking away and telling the fedgov to go get stuffed, since the state Constitution (supposedly) provides specifically for doing that. Well, I don’t know how bad things need to get to trigger that eventuality, but being overrun by invaders strikes me as all the cause they need to make the jump, and yet…crickets.

              in fairness, I see the same problem there as everywhere else; lots of big talk and performative political bullshit that amount to nothing substantive.

              At any rate, my AO is about an hour drive time from solidly rural parts of the state, 2-3 hours drive (at legal speeds) gets me to the middle of nowhere without even leaving the state. The terrain here is highly varied, lots of hilly country, forest, caves, and other interesting and helpful natural features (it isn’t Kansas, with endless miles of flat open land with nowhere to hide, anyway). Population is much lower even in the principal cities here than it is in any of the major cities in Texas (as just one example, since we were talking about it already) even if the demographics aren’t great. So, it isn’t ideal, but it is better than many of the possible alternatives for places where I could find myself when it all goes to hell.

    • saoirse

      @Lineman
      Correct! Suburbs are the spawn of cheap oil and a phony dollar economy. Neither of which are sustainable. They are, like big cities, anathema to the spirit of conscious Whites.

  7. Xzebek

    The soft suburbs will become free fire no go zones when the chimps and other ferals leave the city to raid or escape. The people there will become casualties because they are unwilling and unable to defend themselves. It will be ugly.

  8. SirLawrence

    Excellent assessment. I have a similar background. I reckon this is the story of our generation and is thus reflective of what we see in the suburban landscape, i.e. the rise and fall of the american dream and our personal experience, the bittersweet memories and crushing sense of loss.

    I grew up mostly on the frontiers of our people. First in nowhere then gradually becoming absorbed into suburbia. But our 1100sf rancher in a development, for all its suburban faults was idyllic. 95% white. A bunch of kids. School close enough to walk/bike. Surrounded by forests and fields and streams and working farms to explore. All of the things that shaped us growing up. There are still those places. But those people are no more.

    The post-war boom saw urban-burbs with the brick ranchers and little plots out front and back for grilling. But they had lotsa kids. Boomers were going to need a place to boom. Proximity to cities and their parents in those urban-burbs was a feature as multi-generational families were still a thing.

    The post war generation stayed put and many paid off their homes, worked the same job their whole life, and retired where they last clocked out. All of that changed into rootless pursuit of the economics of the global economy and then the “information economy”. “Real Estate” was totally commodified and financialized. The boomer burbs was a transient model of economic trade that followed their ascension in wealth and thus status. That is a culture problem, not an urban planning problem.

    The path to “success” was written from the sticks to the bricks to the towers of commerce. As kids in that era, it was clear we were to leave and seek our fortunes elsewhere. The soullessness and facades and rules and conspicuous consumption and status signaling of the burbs are all just a symptom of a people who were undergoing a dismantling in real time, a sea change in who they are and how they come to define that. The death zone that we call suburban is a reflection of dead people more so than a flaw of its design and purpose. Family homes became investments.

    “What these suburban Whites don’t understand is that their Indian neighbor doesn’t feel the same way”.

    This is absolutely true but far from limited to the burbs. Projection of our civic mindedness, our bootsrappy economic minded work ethic, our conditioned deracination and outgroup fetish, and biblical perversion of our notion of People and Nations have all worked to turn us into whales.

    The HOA/CC&R’s stuff is part of that but also part of the overarching financialization and social capital being made derivative into asset economics. The culture gave way to those economics and that is what defines us today. You need rules to protect the value of your assets so the next striver will pay you your profit that you in turn pay up to the better asset.

    What we see in these places and despise about the lies they hide, and all those plastic facades and onerous regulations meted out by lumpy karens – hell, lumpy karens are another symptom, are a reflection of the forces that allowed us to become gutted spiritually, culturally, economically, and physically and then skin suited by a global sea of invaders, opportunists, parasites, and scrappers that have risen to become our neighbors and owners.

    Humans have always sought to remove the unpleasant things about what lies below our quotidian lives. Aesthetics abound so that we don’t have to observe the sausage being made. There is certainly a spiritual problem with cities, with the aggregation of people and material around the gods of commerce, but I’d still argue that what we build is a reflection of who we are and there is where the problem resides.

    The difference is on our watch the unpleasantness was apparently the very essence of who we are and our right to exist as a people. Our transacting generations of a way of life and stewardship of tradition, family, values and aspirations into things and social status defined by our captors the future was set.

    Failing to preserve that is what is ugly about the burbs. It is an ugliness about ourselves, not merely a flawed aesthetic. And this continues to define us, suburban, urban, and rural.

  9. dagobaz

    When the collapse occurs, it will be mostly due to the stupidity of the modern educated liberal female’s embrace of cultural relativism and the derivative choices they made because of that embrace. They will, if they survive being raped sufficient times, begin to understand that the jew’s promulgation of endless immigration of inferior ferals had consequences, just as the nativists always said. I have 0 sympathy for them, they voted for their own hell.

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