Outside Atlanta, a Utopia Rises
Another New York Times article on Serenbe, a development to the southwest of Atlanta:
In just a few years, this idyllic community — which aspires to be something of a Sonoma for the New South (though without the wine) — has become a destination for Atlantans in search of a day trip with the kids or a getaway without them.
I’m not buying the utopian rhetoric of Serenbe’s founders nor any news article echoing it. Serenbe is simply not a sustainable model.
It’s still a greenfield development despite the plan to preserve 80 percent of the 40,000 as green space. It’s still a contributor to automobile traffic on I-85 despite accommodating bicycles in ways that other Atlanta-area communities do not. It still adds new homes to an urban area Forbes.com recently called the “third emptiest city,” based on rental unit and home vacancies.
Serenbe is still sprawl; it’s just a softer way to sprawl.
Three Octobers ago, The New York Times ran a piece on Serenbe’s founder, Steve Nygren. They quote an Urban Land Institute Fellow claiming that Serenbe is “based on the idea that the small towns of the South are not just a charming anachronism.” The article is right to praise the promising techniques Serenbe has used to beat its path from the city. Lost in this discussion of sustainable novelty, however, is that the reasons for beating this path are the same as they’ve been for just about every other postwar suburb. Especially in the Atlanta area.
I can’t help but see the “back to nature” aspect behind Serenbe’s establishment as merely the other side to the “away from the city” coin that has had such currency among middle- to upper-income, typically white Atlantans since the 1950s. Princeton historian Kevin Kruse’s book, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (2005), has this to say about suburbanization in Atlanta during (and in reaction to) the Civil Rights Movement:
Ultimately, the mass migration of whites from cities to the suburbs proved to be the most successful segregationist response to the moral demands of the civil rights movement and the legal authority of the courts. Although the suburbs were just as segregated as the city—and, truthfully, often more so—white residents succeeded in convincing the courts, the nation, and even themselves that this phenomenon represented de facto segregation, something that stemmed not from the race-conscious actions of residents buy instead from less offensive issues like class stratification and postwar sprawl. To be sure, on the surface, the world of white suburbia looked little like the world of white supremacy. But these worlds did have much in common—from the remarkably similar levels of racial, social, and political homogeneity to their shared ideologies that stressed individual rights over communal responsibilities, privatization over public welfare, and “free enterprise” above everything else. By withdrawing to the suburbs and recreating its world there, the politics of massive resistance continued to thrive for decades after its supposed death. (8)
I’m not suggesting that Serenbe is some sort of segregationist development. It’s certainly not. In fact, I have every reason to believe that Nygren and his community exemplify a new wave of progressive activity in the Atlanta area (Nygren himself has been a generous donor to Democratic politicians, both at the local and national levels). What I am suggesting instead is that Serenbe represents a new and subtle twist on the Atlanta model of suburbanization. Unlike many of the Civil Rights-era suburban residents, Serenbe’s really do care about communal responsibility and the public welfare. They’ll just do it from way over here, thank you very much.
My concerns are reinforced by the vocabulary used to sell Serenbe to potential residents. From the development’s home page:
Let’s say you could create the perfect place to live. Blank slate. Anything you want.
This embrace of blank slate-ness—especially in an area as historically unblank as Atlanta—is irresponsible.
