The Infrastructure Origins of Psychological and Metabolic Disease
When I was a young man I lived in Salt Lake City during and after the 2002 Winter Olympics which, in preparation of, the city had done quite a lot to clean up and provide amenities like good public transport. One of the most important was the installation of a light rail line that went from the University of Utah to Downtown. I lived one block from a station and would take the train into work which would drop me off at another station right across from my job at Channel 2 News. I still had a car and would use it to go to the gym or getting groceries, but the first time I took the train to work I was absolutely shocked at how peaceful and wonderful my day was because of it, just sitting in a seat watching the beautiful city go by, especially the brand new library and the historic city hall, and the parks and shops which before I never could really take in during a driving commute, having to pay attention at all times to traffic.
Walking the 45 seconds to and from each station was also wonderful, standing in the sun on a cool day or enjoying the heat of a raging summer while sitting in the shade on a nice station, watching people and saying hi to strangers both young and old whom I would never normally even see let alone strike up a random conversation. One wintertime over a foot of snow fell in one storm and I got to walk to the station in my stylish boots and winter trench coat, scarf, and hat, while the snow muffled every sound the city could possibly make. It was early out and the plows hadn’t gotten to the street on which the train rode, and when it came down the hill in near total silence throwing snow like the freaking Polar Express it was nothing short of magical.
As an adult I had a period during my recovery from cancer, alcoholism, and a painful breakup in which I could not afford a car and took the bus and walked throughout Los Angeles, which was not as inconvenient as I assumed since the transit system has been greatly improved over the last decade. But it still required some extensive walking and while this added time to my commute it also put me outside for a great deal of time, and exposure to the sunshine and moving my limbs was extremely therapeutic to my recovery.
My route often also took me by Echo Park, which is one of the most beautiful places in Los Angeles often full of people hanging out, walking, biking, and just enjoying life. At one apartment in LA I could literally walk up the street to the Sprouts grocery store beneath a brand new six-story apartment complex so beautiful it literally looked like something out of the movie Her, which imagines an incredible futuristic vision of Los Angeles not as a Blade Runner-esque Urban hellscape but one in which high-quality manufacture practices, technology, and eco-conscious zoning create a beautiful, people-oriented utopia.
A typical new development in West Hollywood, CA which features tree-lined paths, traffic-calming measures, high-quality infrastructure, and proximity to shops, cafes, and other amenities.
One of the best examples of ideal development happening in America at the moment is in West Hollywood, CA. This city was originally started as an enclave to protect the LGBTQI+ community from police and government harassment, and as a result became one of the most sought after locations in Los Angeles and has, unfortunately, priced regular residents out of the neighborhood but only because this kind of urban design is limited to places like this when it could be everywhere in big and small cities alike. Walkable neighborhoods with beautiful, tree-lined lanes next to shops and amenities, they are fantastic places to live. But because this kind of development is actually restricted in most of the USA, it also causes displacement of low-income households, and there are large swathes of places like Los Angeles where residents have no access to quality transportation which in turn creates enormous economic strife and isolation, breeding stress, crime, and severe mental and metabolic disease because of a lack of resources and access to economic opportunity, good food, and healthy environments.
Many of my siblings and their families live in suburban developments, and like all residents of those places live basically trapped in an expensive, shittily-designed box separated from places of human activity which would otherwise bring a sense of community, spending all their time indoors or chauffeuring children with no time for their own wellbeing and care. One of the best activities I could do in Salt Lake City or Los Angeles was go walk to a great coffee shop and sit with a great cup of coffee in the sunshine with a friend, occasionally run into other friends, or make new ones or chat with a stranger or just people watch. Coffee shops and cafes could exist in suburban areas but they are literally outlawed unless you happen to live near an old establishment grandfathered into the area. In suburban environments most people’s lives are spent driving to everything they do, and because driving is actually inconvenient—having to load everyone and everything you need into the car each time you make a trip out of the house—trips are usually ONLY for things that are necessary like grocery shopping or taking the kids to school, sports, piano practice, or church. People even DRIVE to places like the San Antonio River Walk or vacation to places like Paris, France to recreate when we could actually live in places just like that if we only changed our zoning and policy regulations which prevent it. Most often, living in sparsely populated suburban areas it is even uncomfortable to go on walks, because of the speed of local traffic and exposure of pedestrians on overly wide, unprotected streets, so many people in these neighborhoods don’t even do that and it is not uncommon in suburban neighborhoods to see hardly any people, anywhere. I don’t think my family ever once went on a walk when I was growing up, because suburban neighborhoods are not often actually a place you can safely walk with six kids without the worry of one running into the road, and with so much of your other time taken up by driving to and from every obligation.
Suburbanism doesn’t need to go away, we just need to be able to have better infrastructure over all that isn’t only limited to either single-home suburbs or towering urban centers. Living in Los Angeles still more often required transport by car, and I always wondered why, as I lived there for fifteen years in a region of 12 million people I had such a hard time finding friends and potential romantic partners, and realized later it was precisely because of the car-centric infrastructure and limited options for housing that our lives as Americans are so ironically sterile and unfulfilling, because the suburban system of sprawl and driving entirely separates us from other human beings, for good or for bad (mostly bad), and the only human interaction we tend to have is with our immediate family or at institutions like church, school, and work. A human is designed biologically and psychologically to exist within a tribe of people, a place and community where we cooperate and compete with likeminded individuals, but because this no longer happens organically as it did before the popularization of the automobile it is replicated artificially by the institutions in which most of us engage, and thereby makes many of our relationships shallow and unfulfilling. There are a lot of other complicating factors, such as remaining trauma from decades of war and threat of war as I discuss in my book, The Perfect Child, but a lot of the discontent and dissatisfaction we experience as adults in the 21st Century are a direct consequence of these restrictive political and government policies and substandard infrastructure.
Don’t get me wrong, I love cars. Cars are really neat and convenient, and nobody who advocates for better infrastructure wants cars to go away. We need better community design standards which facilitate human life better that restrictive zoning and housing regulations imposed on us by the boomer generation and their parents if we ever want to emerge from our emotional and metabolic trauma. The human animal was never meant to live always indoors, separated from each other, and there is no better way to trigger mental and metabolic disease than a deficiency of sunlight, nature, and human interaction. It is antithesis to everything we are, and we can change this by demanding changes to zoning and infrastructure policies and priorities from our government leaders. Support and vote for politicians (or run for office yourself) who will change zoning regulations to allow for all types of residential development, and require parks and public spaces, and beautifying policies and standards that install landscaping and trees and buffers into urban and suburban areas supported by smart, well-designed, and inclusive public transportation. We don’t need to put up with the crap imposed on us by past generations. Let’s change it.
Many of the policies which created this mess were actually racist in intent, to exclude minorities from ownership which has now come back to help cause the current housing crisis, and much of the current climate of political conflict is just a smoke screen of political theater meant to distract us from real problems and their otherwise simple solutions like Guaranteed Universal Income or better Minimum Wage and income policy.