For the bulk of my life, the physical world around me didn’t change at all.
It just took over the country.
Suburbs already dominated the American imagination when I was born. I was raised in a suburb, Massapequa, on Long Island. My father had his TV repair shop there. New York was a collection of spires in the far distance. The place became a punch line in the 2001 movie Kate & Leopold, because no one in the 1870s knew where Massapequa was, let alone would say they were raised there to be among the Gilded Age elite.
Intown Atlanta, where I’ve lived since 1983, retains its suburban character. (Shown is this urban character in 1988.) Everyone has a driveway or parks in the street. Wooden poles carry the phone, cable, and electricity services that mark the 20th century. There was little difference between how my neighborhood looked in 1983 and how it looked in 2019. The differences lay beyond our sight. Cars and freeways carried the suburban ideal to the Georgia mountains, and 50 miles in every direction.
The E-Transport Revolution changed all this, in just 6 years.
Night and Day
I was a weirdo when I was younger, because I rode a bicycle. Thanks to e-bikes, I’m not a weirdo.
I went out over this last weekend and found dozens of other “bikers” within a half mile of the house, hundreds more along the way to the west side of town. I also passed people on e-trikes, and dozens on fat tire “Class 3” machines, which are little different from motorcycles, just quieter, their pedals like a vestigial tail.
The new rule is that “If you want development build a bike path, and if you want density build a park.” Bike paths are the freeways of the 21st century.
The west side of Atlanta is now gentrifying, but not like the east side where I live, where the middle class arrived 40 years ago. Instead of having young people buy up the homes of the poor, tearing down only those that are worn out, rich men are buying houses in wholesale lots, tearing them all down, then building gated communities.
These apartments and townhomes are like castles on a medieval plain. There is a physical class separation on the west side that doesn’t exist on the east side, high fences replacing the moats. You can either afford to be inside the wall, or you can’t. If you can you’re probably white while if you can’t you’re probably black. The proud black hard-working men and women who raised me are gone. The west side’s kids will never meet them.
The Point
The E-Transport Revolution has created this new housing demand. People will now pay top dollar to live in the center of town, if the amenities they need are an e-bike ride away. The centers of Atlanta and Decatur are barely 30 minutes apart via e-bike, or on a standing scooter if you prefer. The Beltline is thus in every intown neighborhood, and all the newcomers want a safe path to it.
Gentrification means nearly all the amenities I need are now less than 5 miles away. The suburbs haven’t disappeared, but they’re no longer the only game in town, as they were a decade ago. The “hole in the doughnut,” as Atlanta was once called, is closing, the poor are moving outside I-285, and suburbs are starting to acquire rich, gooey, bikeable centers.
It’s the biggest change in urban design in our lifetimes.
