We don't have to coerce everyone into living in five-over-ones or something. We just need to make it legal to build a greater variety of stuff, and invest in public transit. A _lot_ of people would _like_ to live in something like a streetcar suburb, there just isn't any supply of that, because we radically subsidized auto infrastructure while banning the building types for denser suburbs, in order to "protect" the suburbs from "undesirable elements".
How times change—this definitely wasn’t the Fremont I grew up in over 25 years ago. I lived on the wrong side of the city, where all of my parents Asian friends lived near Mission San Jose High School… and we were on the other side.
I grew up with a lot of diversity though. Neighbors with kids I played with were black, Hispanic, and working class white, which these days would probably get pilloried as a sitcom trying too hard. That all disappeared entirely when we moved to Pleasanton, where they had to break out Jewish as a separate category in school to promote its diversity (if I recall, it was 20% Jewish, 3% other, and white for the rest).
I definitely remember more, uh, roughhousing with knives in Fremont than other folks who I later went to school or college with were used to. We also definitely had police coming in for DARE (legacy of the 90s) and telling us gangs were bad. There were a lot more empty lots, areas, and urban warehouses then that are now all of these huge apartment complexes you talk about or mini shopping/grocery centers.
I have friends there now who say it’s basically the bedroom community for biotech workers.
In any case, I’m not quite sure what to think of the evolution of the Bay Area over time. It wasn’t such a monoculture before. It was expensive but not so much so that a relatively poor immigrant family could live somewhere, even if not in the school district desired… I guess I actually do remember crime was worse in the 90s so there was that much.
Funny because Mission San Jose High area seems like a very fancy, rich area to me nowadays. I had no idea it used to be like that. Thanks for the insight into Old Fremont!
I wouldnt say Fremont is at all a mono-culture. Walking around Lake Elizabeth on a weekend you can hear dozens of different languages all being spoken, its actually a lot more diverse than where I grew up in the Bay Area's urban core. Admittedly the diversity is mostly among Asian groups but "Asian" is just an arbitrary category. I could hear Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Farsi, Arabic, Malay etc.
Fremont does feel increasingly mono-economical in that these residents are all from the same industries now and the old industrial workers are ageing out or moving out.
I realize I was unclear (wrote this really late at night in a ramble)—Mission San Jose was the “good side of the tracks” and was always a richer neighborhood where the wealthier Asian immigrants moved in because of the schools.
I lived on the other side… not even sure what you would call it, but closer to American High, some of the farms, and industrial tracts.
Yeah, I do agree on the cultural point. It’s more the industries.
This applies to a lot of the Bay Area. East Palo Alto and East San Jose used to be just like this too. I have fond memories of knives, drugs, and gangs. Now they’re usually where the more middle class folks end up. I have mixed feelings about it all but it’s all a lot safer.
Sounds like you would've been in the same neighborhood as where one of my good friends in college (at Johns Hopkins) came from. My roommate freshman year was a Chinese guy from SoCal, and then sophomore year we lived with two of his friends who were co-founders of the campus Hong Kong Students Association, one of whom had grown up in Fremont. (Not that I would claim to be _deeply_ informed on the issues there, but I definitely got at least an overview, and remain appalled by what's happened since the handover... We really should extend some kind of preferential immigration status to HKers. Just invite all of Hong Kong to emigrate to the US and re-vitalize a few midwest cities.)
The other part of Fremont I find fascinating is Little Kabul -- as I understand it, there's a greater concentration of folks from Afghanistan there than anywhere else outside Afghanistan.
This is such a great piece. It DOES suck having to drive everywhere - but it is nice that suburbs are made for kids and make neighborhoods quieter and less busy. Also by appealing to families they are diverse, and by being cheaper for restaurants they end up having great food
It’s unclear to me why Fremont doesn’t actually separate their bike lanes, having spent some time there. There’s so much potential for car-free or car-lite living in the area especially with ebikes. The weather is great and the city really isn’t that large.
But I’m not that surprised. In its General Plan, Fremont specifically calls out that cars will remain a big part of the transportation equation. Their Bike Master Plan identified a 5 year roadmap to improve the bike network but seems to have stopped updating their progress on the website around 2021 (Year 3). In my time there (admittedly in 2018), very few areas had bike parking. It’s really such a waste as a small pittance on upgraded bike infrastructure could really up the standard of living in the city, decrease car centricity, and give the kids there a sense of independence from their parents but the city seems least bothered. Maybe one day.
It just doesnt seem to cross their mind, I guess. A lot of their big boulevards don't have on street parking, anyways. When a city/Caltrans project to re-design Mission Blvd was being held here, my girlfriend recommended a cross-town bikelane and everyone just drew blanks, like "HUH"?
"homeless people are disproportionately the victims of crime, not the perpetrators"
Seems like Safeway folks statement was a reminder of the former, not the latter. If anything it suggests they are both disproportionately victims and perpetrators. I'd have a hard time believing they are disproportionately less likely to be perpetrators given the demographics alone (on average more male, more mental health and substance abuse issues). It's also a good reminder that every homeless community is different, just like every housed community is.
Anyways - my takeaway was that there's a lot that urbanites and suburbanites can learn from each other, culturally. Feels like suburban people are far too closed minded and paranoid (but some of that, maybe most of that, comes with being a parent). And they don't factor in the costs of built-isolation and car dependence. And urban people could learn to be more respectful of their own neighbors in terms of littering, noise and driving.
Also - it seems like you're using "white" strictly as an ethnicity and not a description of skin color, in which case it should be capitalized for consistency, unless you have a good reason not to.
Some interesting observations, thank you. If we remove affordability and poverty out of consideration (in theory they’re orthogonal to density and urban design) I am not sure what urban areas can learn from suburban ones. One trades off interesting interactions for peaceful privacy when leaving a denser area. With interactions comes noise and other sensory overhead, with privacy comes boredom and isolation. If you’re saying we don’t have enough places in between – areas that are dense enough to be interesting and yet not so dense that they’re exhausting – I agree wholeheartedly. Many metropolitan areas outside US are better at that.
I grew up in Union City, which is (was?) sort of like a slightly poorer version of Fremont. I'd recommend checking it out. The area near the BART station and high school is still pretty suburban, but I remember it as being a touch more walkable than Fremont. There are some medium density apartments next to a park and a couple strip malls with a Safeway, an Asian grocery store, and a lot of good restaurants. A 15-minute bus ride (buses run every 20 minutes) will take you from there past a whole bunch of typical suburban single family homes, of varying age and price points with nearby to Union Landing, which is where the movie theater and TGI Friday-esque restaurants are and where you'll see a lot of teenagers hanging out.
Excellent essay, thank you. I don't know Fremont but grew up in a Virginia suburb of DC, and at least some of this is similar. Also, it feels like you are updating Ebenezer Howard for the 2020s - around 1900, he compared the benefits and challenges of rural vs urban life, and came up with Garden Cities (the famous 3 magnets). Which in a twisted way became the iconic US suburb without the social vision. Thank you again for a very thoughtful essay.
People really need to understand that suburbs don't have to suck.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0
https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/streetcar-suburbs-2/
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/7/3/making-normal-neighborhoods-legal-again
We don't have to coerce everyone into living in five-over-ones or something. We just need to make it legal to build a greater variety of stuff, and invest in public transit. A _lot_ of people would _like_ to live in something like a streetcar suburb, there just isn't any supply of that, because we radically subsidized auto infrastructure while banning the building types for denser suburbs, in order to "protect" the suburbs from "undesirable elements".
How times change—this definitely wasn’t the Fremont I grew up in over 25 years ago. I lived on the wrong side of the city, where all of my parents Asian friends lived near Mission San Jose High School… and we were on the other side.
I grew up with a lot of diversity though. Neighbors with kids I played with were black, Hispanic, and working class white, which these days would probably get pilloried as a sitcom trying too hard. That all disappeared entirely when we moved to Pleasanton, where they had to break out Jewish as a separate category in school to promote its diversity (if I recall, it was 20% Jewish, 3% other, and white for the rest).
I definitely remember more, uh, roughhousing with knives in Fremont than other folks who I later went to school or college with were used to. We also definitely had police coming in for DARE (legacy of the 90s) and telling us gangs were bad. There were a lot more empty lots, areas, and urban warehouses then that are now all of these huge apartment complexes you talk about or mini shopping/grocery centers.
I have friends there now who say it’s basically the bedroom community for biotech workers.
In any case, I’m not quite sure what to think of the evolution of the Bay Area over time. It wasn’t such a monoculture before. It was expensive but not so much so that a relatively poor immigrant family could live somewhere, even if not in the school district desired… I guess I actually do remember crime was worse in the 90s so there was that much.
Funny because Mission San Jose High area seems like a very fancy, rich area to me nowadays. I had no idea it used to be like that. Thanks for the insight into Old Fremont!
I wouldnt say Fremont is at all a mono-culture. Walking around Lake Elizabeth on a weekend you can hear dozens of different languages all being spoken, its actually a lot more diverse than where I grew up in the Bay Area's urban core. Admittedly the diversity is mostly among Asian groups but "Asian" is just an arbitrary category. I could hear Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Farsi, Arabic, Malay etc.
Fremont does feel increasingly mono-economical in that these residents are all from the same industries now and the old industrial workers are ageing out or moving out.
I realize I was unclear (wrote this really late at night in a ramble)—Mission San Jose was the “good side of the tracks” and was always a richer neighborhood where the wealthier Asian immigrants moved in because of the schools.
I lived on the other side… not even sure what you would call it, but closer to American High, some of the farms, and industrial tracts.
Yeah, I do agree on the cultural point. It’s more the industries.
This applies to a lot of the Bay Area. East Palo Alto and East San Jose used to be just like this too. I have fond memories of knives, drugs, and gangs. Now they’re usually where the more middle class folks end up. I have mixed feelings about it all but it’s all a lot safer.
Sounds like you would've been in the same neighborhood as where one of my good friends in college (at Johns Hopkins) came from. My roommate freshman year was a Chinese guy from SoCal, and then sophomore year we lived with two of his friends who were co-founders of the campus Hong Kong Students Association, one of whom had grown up in Fremont. (Not that I would claim to be _deeply_ informed on the issues there, but I definitely got at least an overview, and remain appalled by what's happened since the handover... We really should extend some kind of preferential immigration status to HKers. Just invite all of Hong Kong to emigrate to the US and re-vitalize a few midwest cities.)
The other part of Fremont I find fascinating is Little Kabul -- as I understand it, there's a greater concentration of folks from Afghanistan there than anywhere else outside Afghanistan.
This is such a great piece. It DOES suck having to drive everywhere - but it is nice that suburbs are made for kids and make neighborhoods quieter and less busy. Also by appealing to families they are diverse, and by being cheaper for restaurants they end up having great food
It’s unclear to me why Fremont doesn’t actually separate their bike lanes, having spent some time there. There’s so much potential for car-free or car-lite living in the area especially with ebikes. The weather is great and the city really isn’t that large.
But I’m not that surprised. In its General Plan, Fremont specifically calls out that cars will remain a big part of the transportation equation. Their Bike Master Plan identified a 5 year roadmap to improve the bike network but seems to have stopped updating their progress on the website around 2021 (Year 3). In my time there (admittedly in 2018), very few areas had bike parking. It’s really such a waste as a small pittance on upgraded bike infrastructure could really up the standard of living in the city, decrease car centricity, and give the kids there a sense of independence from their parents but the city seems least bothered. Maybe one day.
It just doesnt seem to cross their mind, I guess. A lot of their big boulevards don't have on street parking, anyways. When a city/Caltrans project to re-design Mission Blvd was being held here, my girlfriend recommended a cross-town bikelane and everyone just drew blanks, like "HUH"?
"homeless people are disproportionately the victims of crime, not the perpetrators"
Seems like Safeway folks statement was a reminder of the former, not the latter. If anything it suggests they are both disproportionately victims and perpetrators. I'd have a hard time believing they are disproportionately less likely to be perpetrators given the demographics alone (on average more male, more mental health and substance abuse issues). It's also a good reminder that every homeless community is different, just like every housed community is.
Anyways - my takeaway was that there's a lot that urbanites and suburbanites can learn from each other, culturally. Feels like suburban people are far too closed minded and paranoid (but some of that, maybe most of that, comes with being a parent). And they don't factor in the costs of built-isolation and car dependence. And urban people could learn to be more respectful of their own neighbors in terms of littering, noise and driving.
Also - it seems like you're using "white" strictly as an ethnicity and not a description of skin color, in which case it should be capitalized for consistency, unless you have a good reason not to.
Some interesting observations, thank you. If we remove affordability and poverty out of consideration (in theory they’re orthogonal to density and urban design) I am not sure what urban areas can learn from suburban ones. One trades off interesting interactions for peaceful privacy when leaving a denser area. With interactions comes noise and other sensory overhead, with privacy comes boredom and isolation. If you’re saying we don’t have enough places in between – areas that are dense enough to be interesting and yet not so dense that they’re exhausting – I agree wholeheartedly. Many metropolitan areas outside US are better at that.
I grew up in Union City, which is (was?) sort of like a slightly poorer version of Fremont. I'd recommend checking it out. The area near the BART station and high school is still pretty suburban, but I remember it as being a touch more walkable than Fremont. There are some medium density apartments next to a park and a couple strip malls with a Safeway, an Asian grocery store, and a lot of good restaurants. A 15-minute bus ride (buses run every 20 minutes) will take you from there past a whole bunch of typical suburban single family homes, of varying age and price points with nearby to Union Landing, which is where the movie theater and TGI Friday-esque restaurants are and where you'll see a lot of teenagers hanging out.
Excellent essay, thank you. I don't know Fremont but grew up in a Virginia suburb of DC, and at least some of this is similar. Also, it feels like you are updating Ebenezer Howard for the 2020s - around 1900, he compared the benefits and challenges of rural vs urban life, and came up with Garden Cities (the famous 3 magnets). Which in a twisted way became the iconic US suburb without the social vision. Thank you again for a very thoughtful essay.