Suburban Real Estate Mogul to Cincinnati: Y'all Are Crazy!

Today's Cincinnati Enquirer continues to follow up on Our Fair City's gradually declining population density with a story about burgeoning development at Butler County's Union Centre Boulevard. Our SWNIDish eye was drawn to the following quotation:

"Who is his right mind would live in Cincinnati?" says Charlie Chappell, one of the original landowners of the Union Centre Boulevard area and president of West Chester 75 Inc., a group of investors who put up land for the interchange.

"We have better schools," he said. "We are more civilized. We have less crime."

Being of legally sound mind and residing in Cincinnati, we feel compelled to respond to Mr. Chappell. While not denying the acuity of perception or objectivity of judgment displayed by a person with an obvious financial interest in the commercial and residential development of property outside the city, we respond to his triumvirate of suburban virtues:

• West Chester's best schools, thanks to their low concentration of poverty-stricken students, are better than Cincinnati's worst. But we note, as we have before, that Cincinnati's best are at least equal to the Twin Lakotas of West Chester. We will add that the SWNIDs are glad that their offspring faced no appreciable social pressure from peers to conform materialistically or behaviorally in their urban educational institutions. We hope for the same for our suburban friends.
• The higher civilization of Union Centre Boulevard is apparently on display through (a) its clever use of British spelling combined with a French term for the local appellation; (b) the cutting-edge Rave Cinemas, where high-minded teenagers hang out until the sophisticated hours of the early morning. Cincinnati by contrast offers two fine art museums, a major symphony orchestra, a delightful chamber orchestra, a ballet company, an opera company, jazz clubs, a Tony-winning regional theater, various other professional and community theaters, major and minor universities, architectural landmarks, outstanding municipal parks, and breathtaking hilltop vistas.* You are welcome to visit any time. Oh, and Cincinnati has a curfew for its teenagers, something we understand the high civilization of West Chester is also contemplating.
• Your lower crime rate is temporary. Bad guys have cars, know how to drive on the interstate, and aren't deterred by municipal boundaries. Enterprising drug lords will move their retail operations closer to their suburban customers sooner or later, if they haven't already.

And now to some points not raised by the astute Mr. Chappell:

• For those like the SWNIDs who live with the genteel privation typical of workers in the faith-based, not-for-profit sector of the economy, Cincinnati offers value. The purchase price of our four-bedroom, 2.5-bath two-story of 1960s vintage in the city would have barely got us into a two-bedroom landominium in the new developments of Butler County.
• And for that price, we got a neighborhood with abundant, mature trees. Suburbs of the West Chester ilk are built on what was heretofore farmland. West Chester trees are still scrawny and supported by tethers on stakes, except for the ones between subdivisions that survived the farmers' axes and plows.
• Our six-mile commute to work never forces us into heavy traffic. A generation ago our streets were built to a capacity that supports businesses and residences. The occasional traffic snarl simply redirects us to the multitude of alternate routes, something that would be impossible for the West Chester resident who complained in the print version of the article about impossible congestion on Friday afternoons.
• Now that gasoline has topped $3 per gallon, we have the option of commuting our six miles by automobile, motor scooter, bicycle, or public omnibus, even with our municipality's disappointing lack of support for alternative modes of transportation. In West Chester, it's drive or stay home, and six miles will barely get you to the next interchange.

So in the end, we stipulate the sanity of every suburban resident. All we ask for in return is similar respect for our crazy choices.

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*We'd provide hyperlinks, but who has the time?