Suburban memories

The New York Times has an article about the Southern movement of the US auto industry. It’s a “tale of two cities” type of piece, a Northern industrial town declining, while a formerly small Southern town explodes into a Toyota factory town. The Northern town they focus on is Livonia, Michigan.

Livonia was where I had my second full time job, my first job in the Internet industry. It’s got lots of memories, but it’s not the sort of place one could get attached to. It was a six by six mile square on the western edge of Detroit – an old Northwest Ordinance township – of strip malls and subdivisions. It wasn’t walkable. Getting anywhere required driving. What made my office a convenient location was the freeway exit running almost to the front door. Headed out for lunch one day with a friend who had driven over from Ann Arbor, we tried to do what people from Ann Arbor did and walk to the restaurant a quarter mile away. After climbing over lots of walls between parking lots, we realized why that was a bad idea. When I quit my job there and started figuring out where to go next, I held up Livonia as the example of exactly what I didn’t want.

Still, at that stage in my life, there was something exciting about Livonia. It was bland suburbia, but I’d never known bland suburbia before. There was some excitement in the 14 lanes of traffic in front of the office. There was the awe of being able to drive miles past neighborhoods that looked pleasant enough, and having the scenery not change at all. Strip mall, subdivision, strip mall, subdivision, it all looked the same, but the scale was breathtaking.

And then there was the work. All those low slung boring looking office buildings had stuff going on inside. Electronics companies, pharmaceutical distributors, ad agencies, auto parts companies. Often, I didn’t know what exactly, but they all had people hard at work inside, and the ones I saw all wanted this new Internet thing. Stuff was going on in our own building too; we were building our little part of the new Internet thing. We didn’t really know what we were doing, but nobody else did either. There was lots of trial and error, but somehow it all worked most of the time.

The Times says, “The city has one of the Midwest’s largest industrial corridors, a six-mile strip of factories and warehouses along Interstate 96.” My office was in one of those warehouses, and most of them had full parking lots. Last I heard, our building was empty and for sale. The Times says Livonia’s vacancy rate has doubled since 1995, the year before I started working there.

Still, it seems odd to see Livonia’s boosters quoted talking about either Livonia’s past or its future as a vibrant community. Stuff was going on, sure, in cookie cutter neighborhoods and anonymous warehouses, but it was a suburban wasteland. Nobody went out unless surrounded by a couple tons of steel. It seemed in many ways a disposable town, with many more completely indistinguishable from it where it came from. An inner-ring suburb built to replace the City, being replaced by outer ring exurbs. A town of Michigan auto-workers wanting high UAW wages, being replaced by Kentuckians who are happy to work for less, while when I was there we were a band of Michigan tech workers happy to work for less than our counterparts in California, probably having since been supplanted by SBC employees in Texas.

Livonia seemed designed to left behind. Heading East took me into Detroit, with its hulking empty buildings and its grand and ornate but desolate 1930s skyscrapers. Heading West, past Interstate 275 and over the big hill on M-14, led into the new exurbs, tight-packed blue or brown McMansions that had been farmland when I first got to know the neighborhood a few years before, hiding behind dirt mounds in a feeble attempt to block the freeway noise. Just beyond there, past Godforsaken Road and into Washtenaw County, was actual farmland, and then Ann Arbor, and the real walkable neighborhoods that I couldn’t bring myself to abandon. From my apartment on the Northwest side of Ann Arbor to my office in Livonia was 25 miles, but driving it took only 22 minutes and involved two stop signs and two traffic lights

Livonia’s fate seems sad, but it somehow feels inevitable.