I flew into San Diego some time ago, and from the air you could see it wasn't a good location for a big city. There area is very dry, so much of the water supply comes from the Colorado River. The river is hundreds of miles away, and drying up. The recent fires made it obvious that the problem is even worse. People have built homes spread across miles of desert and mountains, and that means long commutes, and the public expenses of providing electricity, water, schools, and fire and police protection across an expanding area.
It is not an ideal situation for families, and the issue of long commutes and families in the suburbs isn't limited to San Diego alone. In a cities the size of San Diego, commutes average 50 minutes per day [PDF]. Toss in rising costs for gasoline, and the environmental costs of additional greenhouse gases, and it indeed sounds like a bad place to live.
Sure, I understand that this is not all about folks building McHomes on 10 acres with a view. Many young couples, especially if they have or want children, locate in distant suburbs to find affordable housing in safe neighborhoods.
And this is where legal scholar Kate Silbaugh's research comes in. In a recent article, she argued that this system is rigged against women. Here's why. With a long commute for work, and shorter car commutes for anything from a school to a grocery store or doctor's office, single-family houses in increasingly distant suburbs only work for families without children or... those with a stay-at-home parent. This is especially true for middle-class families who are expected to make sure their children are involved in a slew of extracurricular sports, music, and academic activities. And guess who is likely to be caught staying at home?
In reality, mom is unlikely to be a full-time homemaker, even in the suburbs of today. She's likely to be employed, and that generates time pressures. The obvious problems are that distances for childcare, for jobs, for school, or even for grocery shopping eat up lots of time and money. What is less obvious, and a main point of Kate Silbaugh's research, is that these distances make flexibility a serious problem.
Suppose you're living in the suburbs, working downtown, and your child has a doctor's appointment in the middle of a weekday. You need to drive from work to a childcare center or school back out in the suburbs, transport the child to the doctor's office, take the child back to the school, then head back downtown. Even a 15-minute doctor's visit could easily eat up two hours of a workday. These flexibility problems are built into suburban life, and they afflict women far more often than men. And if you are a low-income worker living in the urban center, your commute and flexibility problem is just as serious: low-wage service jobs have followed the middle class out to the suburbs.
If you're smart, you might respond to these pressures by trip-chaining, combining a work commute with dropping off or picking up a child, and maybe tossing in a grocery run in the bargain. That helps somewhat, but if you happen to drive around the newest suburbs, you'll notice that you increasingly need to drive from one place to the next. It seems like every restaurant, bookstore, doctor's or law office, convenience or grocery store is putting up a stand-alone building with it's own parking lot. And trip-chaining does not solve the fundamental issue of flexibility: medical emergencies don't happen when you're already at a doctor's appointment. Life is full of surprises, and flexibility on the job is needed to respond to them.
Leave it to the rich to have a solution. While many of the wealthiest Americans live in McHomes on large plots of land, another group has figured out that mixed-use neighborhoods in our major cities are great places to live. If you have enough money to live in Manhattan or in the Back Bay of Boston, or other gentrified areas of large cities (Haight-Asbury is now one), you can often walk to the grocery store, childcare center, school, or doctor's office, and maybe grab a quick cab or subway to the office. And you can work the same hours while leaving home later in the morning and returning far earlier than your colleagues living in the suburbs. You are also much closer when family emergencies arise.
We need more mixed-use neighborhoods, and we need them to be affordable to put them in reach of the average American family. That will be good for the environment and good for working mothers.
In the meantime, when you make a location decision, don't forget the hidden costs of commuting. Think through the time and expense involved in getting to and from work, shopping, schools, and so forth, and don't forget to figure out who will respond to emergences, and what will be involved. A little planning could save you a lot of time, money, and hassle for years to come.
Robert Drago is a Professor of Labor Studies and Women's Studies at Penn State University, and the moderator of the workfam newsgroup. His latest book is Striking a Balance: Work, Family, Life.
A Peaceful Revolution is a weekly blog about work/life satisfaction done in collaboration with MomsRising.org. Read a blog by a leading thinker in the field every Tuesday.