COLONIE —If you had told the 15-year-old version of me that he would grow up to live in a suburb, he'd have been bitterly disappointed, if not appalled.
My teenage self viewed our suburb, outside of Boston, as a place to escape. To my young eyes, it was conformity and dullness. The city was where it was at, and I was sure I'd grow up to live in a dense, vibrant neighborhood like Boston's Back Bay or the Richmond District of San Francisco, where we'd lived when I was younger.
Even now, there's a part of me that longs to return to a city neighborhood like Troy's Washington Park, my first home in the Capital Region. Another part of me dreams of rural Washington County, with acres for horses and goats and night skies dark enough to see the stars.
Our corner of Colonie splits the difference, I suppose, which might be how so many families end up choosing suburbia. It can feel like the best of both worlds, or at least a reasonable compromise.
We have room enough for a garden and a rambunctious dog, there's a patch of woods behind the house, and yet our older neighborhood is fairly walkable and downtown Albany is 10 minutes away. My snobby 15-year-old self would never believe it, but life in this unglamorous corner of the world is pretty good.
And it's all going to come crashing down if Joe Biden is elected. So says Donald Trump.
As the president tweeted last week: “Joe Biden and the Radical Left want to Abolish Police, Abolish ICE, Abolish Bail, Abolish Suburbs, Abolish the 2nd Amendment — and Abolish the American Way of Life. No one will be SAFE in Joe Biden’s America!”
Let me suggest that there might just be a touch of hyperbole in that, a quality that's hardly unusual in Trump tweets. But the "War on Suburbia!" theme isn't confined to Trump's Twitter feed. He's selling the same fear in campaign ads and saying similar things to reporters.
“Suburbia will be no longer as we know it," Trump said recently in the Rose Garden. "They're gonna watch it go to hell."
Terrifying! Here I was thinking "Sleepy Joe" was just a boring former vice president, only to learn that he's a secret radical who wants to outlaw lawns, squirrels and white picket fences. He must be defeated!
This focus on the suburbs is strange, given the rising number of problems faced by American cities. And given that Biden himself lives in a low-density section of Wilmington, Del., it's tough to believe he's really has antipathy for suburbia.
To the extent Trump's claims are based in some sort of fact, they're about a 2015 Obama-administration rule that required municipalities to develop plans to deal with housing discrimination or risk losing federal grants. While the Trump administration moved this week to fully scrap the rule, Biden wants to enhance it.
Here's how former New York lieutenant governor of New York Betsy McCaughey framed the issue in a New York Post opinion piece: "Biden’s plan is to force suburban towns with single-family homes and minimum lot sizes to build high-density affordable housing smack in the middle of their leafy neighborhoods — local preferences and local control be damned."
That's also more than a bit hyperbolic, but it struck a chord with Trump. "The Suburban Housewives of America must read this article," he wrote on Twitter. "Biden will destroy your American Dream. I will preserve it, and make it even better!"
The phrase "Suburban Housewives of America" might be a hint that the president, until recently a skyscraper-dwelling Manhattanite, has a dated view of the bridge-and-tunnel crowd. It harkens to the day when suburbia was as boring as a pair of khakis and as bland as saltless tortilla chips.
But modern-day suburbs are not the Levittowns of old. They are surprisingly diverse places.
More than 12 percent of Colonie residents, for example, are immigrants, a percentage that's roughly equal to Albany's and higher than in Troy. According to the Pew Research Center, about a third of suburbanites nationally are people of color.
Left unsaid in Trump's recent tweets, or McCaughey's op-ed, is that the Trump administration has also viewed restrictive zoning rules as a problem. Last year, Trump created the White House Council on Eliminating Barriers to Affordable Housing Development, which aimed to erase local regulatory barriers that stymie developers and prevent the building of homes and apartments.
In other words, the Trump administration hoped to force municipalities with single-family homes and minimum lot sizes to build houses and high-density housing smack in the middle of their leafy neighborhoods — local preferences and local control be damned.
Sound familiar?
In truth, Biden and Trump are both onto something. Zoning regulations do prevent construction and drive up the price of housing, in cities and suburbs alike. Zoning rules do keep some neighborhoods exclusive. Especially in the most expensive parts of the country, local regulations do make it impossible for everyday families to buy homes they can afford.
But easing the rules to allow more housing and apartments where appropriate is not going to wreck leafy American neighborhoods. Nobody is coming for your single-family home, or mine. Life in this little corner of the world will continue to be better than the snobby 15-year-old version of me imagined.
I hear owls at night and I'm a few minutes from a Stewart's. How could I complain?
cchurchill@timesunion.com ■ 518-454-5442 ■ @chris_churchill
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