SP #3: Walkable Cities vs. The Cursed Rural Americans
A tale of urbanite, asshole, sophisticates
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Sunday Post on Trauma Response (and no, I haven’t come up with a more inventive title than “Sunday Post,” I don’t know what you want me to do about it). Hopefully, you have all read my Friday post which explains my absence last week, but don’t worry, I’m back and better than ever. For this week’s Sunday newsletter we will be diving into familiar-ish territory as we discuss a post I saw on Twitter about a completely benign Halloween tradition that was issue-ified for no good reason. So join me, as I discuss walkable cities, urbanites, and the benevolent practice of “trunk-or-treat.”
Trunk-or-treating, for those unfamiliar, is basically just trick-or-treating in a parking lot out of the trunk of people’s cars. If you’re not familiar with trunk-or-treating, I would guess that you’re probably from a city, or even just a non-rural, middle-class suburban town. I grew up in Michigan, and while I never participated in a trunk-or-treat myself, I’m well aware of the practice as they happened in several of the more rural towns surrounding my own. Trunk-or-treats are usually organized by churches or community leaders and are completely normal and benevolent.
With that being said, it was much to my chagrin when I came across a tweet on Halloween day, from an account called Queen Anne Greenways, that read: “I just learned America has a thing called Trunk or Treat where people dress up, drive to a parking lot, and pretend it's ok we don't have walkable communities anymore.” As it turns out, the Queen Anne Greenways Twitter account is run by a representative of the Queen Anne Greenways neighborhood in Seattle, Washington. Per their bio, the account itself is dedicated to “Safe, sustainable, equitable, healthy cities.” Nevertheless, I found their tweet off-putting, I found it snide, and I felt that they were turning up their noses at the people who partake in trunk-or-treating in order to illustrate their “walkable city” agenda.
Similar to the group I talked about in my cyclist article, Queen Anne Greenways shares the same core values of being sustainable and anti-car. A popular buzzword with groups like Chicago Bike Grid Now and Queen Anne Greenways is “walkable city,” cities that are, well, walkable like Chicago, New York, or, wouldn’t you have it, Seattle. At its core, I find nothing wrong with this campaign, this country as a whole would benefit if there was stronger infrastructure in place, if more places were equipt with affordable mass public transit systems, and didn’t have to rely on cars. Walkable cities, as groups like Queen Anne Greenways love to point out, work all the time in European towns, but the US is nothing like Europe in terms of scope. The US is simply too big and too spread out, and too suburban and rural for people to be walking everywhere, that’s the tragic reality, I suppose, of why so many people use cars. And here is where my problem with this movement stems: for all their talk about wanting better infrastructure and better cities for all, groups like Queen Anne Greenways seem to hold a special disdain for people who don’t already live in walkable cities.
Rural areas make up 97% of land in the US, and 40% of land in the US is used as farmland. By definition, rural land, including the people who live on it, is just more spread out than urban land. In Chicago, I live above, below, and across the hall from my neighbors, in Rural America you can drive for miles from your house before you get to the next house over. It is quite literally impossible for most Rural Americans to walk everywhere. The solution? According to the Walkable City Lobby, these people should just move.
In a tweet from August 22, 2022, leftist cultural critic Adam Kostko wrote, “In discussions of reducing car dependency, one often hears, ‘What about people in remote rural areas?’ And my gut instinct is -- people shouldn't be living there in the first place. The solution is to give them generous grants to relocate among other humans.” That, in itself, made my eyes roll, but he continued, “‘But what if they like living in remote rural areas?’ Sorry, you can't always get what you want. A lot of people would like to live in dense, transit-rich settings but can't -- either because they can't afford it or it simply doesn't exist where they are.” He goes on to say that none of this will ever happen and that governmental institutions are biased toward rural areas because, well, just trust him. But that anti-rural ethos is common in the walkable city movement.
To me, the anti-rural sentiment and disdain for Rural Americans on the part of the walkable cityfolk are emblematic of their own internal feelings of failure. I have a hard time believing that the supporters of the walkable city movement don’t see the cracks in the foundation (America is bigger than Europe, this country is too spread out, etc.), but they can’t blame themselves (I mean, it isn’t even really their fault that the US is the way it is), so they use Rural Americans as a scapegoat. For as long as Rural Americans want to stay Rural Americans, the dreams of walkable cities for all are hindered, it’s the rural people who drive all the cars, and it’s the rural people and their small dreams that halt progress.
As someone who came from a fairly rural area, of course, I take issue with this thinking. In the same way, I was mad at Chicago Bike Grid Now for being mad at “people with cars” and not “the city government,” I feel an even deeper sense of irritation at the urbanites of the walkable city movements directing ire towards Rural Americans. If dreams of walkable cities are to be made a reality you can’t start from the endpoint, “we all live in walkable cities” will never happen, sorry, it just won’t. Progress is made slowly, and the only way real progress will be made is if the walkable city movement concedes to the fact that some people just don’t fucking like to live in cities, and that the US is filled with those types of people. I would never want to live in the country, I tried it for 18 years and I just didn’t wear it well (I’m gay), but I would also never presume to tell anyone where they should live or where they should want to live.
At the end of all this, so it was in the beginning, is trunk-or-treat. Just like I said on Twitter, some communities are rural and spread out, some communities are on hills or mountains or un-walkable terrain, some children can’t walk all around the neighborhood, some people don’t live in adequate housing that they want people trick-or-treating to, the list can go on. Trunk-or-treating has never been about “Rah rah, look at my car,” nor has it ever even been about not wanting to go normal trick-or-treating. As I said before, trunk-or-treats are usually organized by churches or community groups, and, contrary to what Queen Anne Greenways would have you believe, I think they’re a really positive, albeit small, form of local community action. I don’t think trunk-or-treats are some sort of grandiose political statement, but it warms my heart to know that even if one kid doesn’t have a good home, or doesn’t have any neighbors to go door-to-door to, that kid can still have a good Halloween.