Shut down the ’burbs by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR Oh, suburban living. The blanket blandness of shopping malls off of highways with big-ass parking lots and dull afternoons in the backyard. Just thinking about it gets me worked up in an agoraphobic sweat. But the suburban wasteland has surrounded us cityfolk with seas of humanity, poking Montrealers in our collective cyclopean eye and undermining our high-held notions of Europeanness. Oh, and that’s just the abstract stuff-these suburban parasites also drain the city’s potential tax base and jam our streets with cars. But there must be something to living in the sticks. Suburbanites must like their urban sprawl-towns-otherwise, why would they endure the daily and costly ritual of staring at a motionless bumper and waiting for it to advance a few feet? Every day to and from work. Stop. Go. Brake. Rinse. Repeat. Don’t ask me how or why they endure this hell. I can barely make it through a red light without gnawing my knuckles to the bone waiting for the agony to end. City planners have figured that we can stem the tide of city-dwellers to the ’burbs by making off-islanders spend a good chunk of their lifespan sitting motionless in their car. Traffic on our island’s 137 kilometres of highway has doubled since 1970; we’ve only added 14 kilometres of new highways since. So far it hasn’t worked: The City of Montreal’s population has decreased by a half-million since 1967. The traffic-jam-as-Chinese-Water-Torture has proven an ineffective strategy to deter the march to the ’burbs. Like lemmings to the sea, these suburbanites hum along to their Sarah McLachlan and Garou tapes as they patiently roll by the reassuring uniformity of the Wal-Mart and the highway signs. If this seems like a chauvinistic putdown of the bridge-and-tunnel crowd, you know they’re up to far worse. From their evil and clean patio sets, they’ve knitted a fictional vision of the city as a haven for criminals and child snatchers. In return, I submit that suburbanites are: 1) Misanthropes desperate to maximize their distance from their neighbours; 2) Racists, as the subtle subtext of the promise of a white area is often between the lines of a suburban real estate dealer. And the sprawl happened so suddenly. My dad, a dabbler in land, used to tell me how he stared out at Brossard in the late ’50s, pondering whether to buy up some farmland on the south shore. “Nah,” he concluded. “Nobody will ever live down there, it’s like New York State.” He was wrong. The Champlain Bridge now hosts 49-million annual crossings, making it the busiest bridge in Canada, with the Jacques-Cartier coming in just behind. The solution? Tolls would be nice. Improve the island’s roads while making off-islanders cough up for their every precious visit to our city. If that doesn’t work, encircle the suburbs with heavily armed tanks and frogmarch these people back into the city where they’re supposed to be living in the first place. >>> Scams to watch out for: 1) Tenant puts an ad to rent out his apartment, giving the impression that he’s the landlord. He then signs leases with everybody who shows interest in the place, from whom he accepts a cheque for the first month’s rent. He then quickly motors to splitsville. 2) A sells a house to B for a healthy profit. Person A buys it back for a higher price. They keep doing it until the building doubles or triples in value. The last person simply defaults on the bank payments. The bank repossesses it, but not before the partner in crime has walked away with a big chunk of the bank’s mortgage money. : Comments? kgravy@openface.ca