Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery Page A

and kids geographically isolated from community services and relatives, nearly half of fifth and seventh graders had no adult supervision at all during afterschool hours. For all its middle-class aesthetics, Weston Ranch was an especially rich gang-recruitment area, Ralph Womack, head of Stockon’s youth gang intervention program, told me. Great Valley Elementary School in Weston Ranch resorted to scheduling parent conferences late at night in a desperate attempt to catch those long-distance parents. When latchkey kids have no parents around to guide them, many end up finding a substitute in gangs, he explained.
    Many people move to the suburban fringe and suffer the commute as a sacrifice for their children. Unfortunately, that quiet cul-de-sac is a less ideal place to nurture kids and teens than we once thought. This landscape doesn’t simply leave them stranded; teens from the suburbs—even affluent suburbs—have proved to be more prone to social and emotional problems than their urban counterparts.
    When she studied teenagers from affluent suburbs in the Northeast, Columbia University psychologist Suniya Luthar found that despite their access to resources, health services, and high-functioning parents, these teens were much more anxious and depressed than teens from inner-city neighborhoods who were faced with all manner of environmental and social ills. The privileged suburban teens smoked more, drank more, and used more hard drugs than inner-city teens, especially when they were feeling down. “The implication,” explained Luthar, “is that they are self-medicating.”
    Unhappy youths in these studies all seemed to have one thing in common: they lacked the peace of mind that comes with strong attachment to parents. Kids who actually get to eat dinner with at least one parent get better grades and have fewer emotional problems. Lots of things keep parents busy these days, but it stands to reason that marathon commutes, long-distance shopping trips, and the stringing together of distant appointments unique to the dispersed city can starve children of those crucial parental hours. This phenomenon is certainly not unique to the exurbs. But these communities undoubtedly design time deficits into their residents’ lives.
    None of this came as a surprise to Randy Strausser, who admitted that his own family had paid the price for his stretched life. Randy first took up the super-commute life when his own daughter and son, Kim and Scott, were toddlers. When the tech boom hit Silicon Valley, real estate prices went through the roof. Like so many people with kids, Randy hit the new highway over the Diablo Range to Tracy, in San Joaquin County. His children barely saw him during the week. His first marriage failed. When they reached their teens, Kim and Scott moved in with Randy’s previous wife. But she was an exurban super-commuter too.
    In those years, the teens had to fend for themselves most nights. Kim got used to heating up frozen dinners to serve her little brother for dinner. But she could hardly be expected to parent the kid. Scott slid off the rails. First he got into tagging. Then skipping school. Then shoplifting. His troubles got worse and worse.
    “Now,” said Randy gravely as we finally hit the turnoff for Mountain House, “he is a guest of the county of Salt Lake City.” By which he meant Scott was in jail, and it was time to change the subject.
    The End of the Road
    Sometimes it takes an entire generation to see the life lost between freeway off-ramps.
    Randy’s daughter, Kim, told me she was drawn into the long-distance life commute herself not long after graduating from high school. That’s when she married her high school boyfriend, Kevin Holbrook, and gave birth to a boy. They moved into a modest ranch house in Tracy, as the passage to adulthood seemed to demand. They had bills to pay, but in the dispersed city, it was not as though they could just work around the corner. Kim got a job as an