My dad slid the VHS tape into the player with a giddy anticipation that should have been my first warning. There was something in his expression, curiosity mixed with mischief, that suggested he knew exactly how fucked up this was going to be. I was maybe ten years old and he was about to show me the cult classic, Kids.
If you aren’t familiar, the film follows an HIV-positive teenager in mid-90s New York City who makes it his mission to sleep with as many girls as possible, specifically virgins. Around him, his friends spiral through drug and alcohol abuse and violence. It’s a grainy, unflinching, and deeply uncomfortable view of a particular type of adolescent life in the big city. The movie has been called everything from exploitative to essential. It has been bashed and praised with equal fervor. That’s part of what gives it cult status; it’s not just a film, it’s a provocation. It’s exactly the kind of movie parents shield their children from. Not my dad. He popped it in and let it roll.
I became infatuated. Not because the film was well made, but because it was raw in a way my life in suburban Florida was not. My world was master-planned communities carved out of drained swamps and highway adjacent strip malls, where everything was polished, uniform, and brand new. Golf courses replaced wetlands. Cul-de-sacs wound through developments with names like “The Sanctuary” and “Eagle’s Landing.” My neighbors were predominantly white, middle to upper-middle class families who had moved there for safety and sameness. Homeowners associations enforced that sameness down to the shade of paint on your mailbox and the length of your grass. My parents, like so many others, had chosen this place to raise my brother and I because it was exactly what it promised to be: predictable, comfortable, and insulated.
Kids was the opposite of that world. It was ugly, candid, and without guardrails; teenagers getting high in Washington Square Park instead of being in school like consequences didn’t matter. For me, missing a homework assignment felt like a catastrophe, the start of a slippery slope where my grades would slip, I’d miss out on a good college, and, by extension, my future. My world revolved around carefully trimmed lawns and perfect report cards. Not these kids. The kids on screen weren’t role models. They were untethered. They were reckless. But what haunted me was the contrast. Here were kids near my age living by a completely different set of rules. At times, living by no rules. It cracked the glass dome I’d been raised under and showed me that the life I was taught was simply not the only way. Was their way better? Absolutely not, but that’s beside the point. The exposure was simply enough.
And, that crack never quite closed. Most kids I knew stayed sealed inside it, even when they traveled. They’d go on family trips to New York City and never stray far from the Times Square Marriott, splitting dinners between the Olive Garden next door and the T.G.I. Friday’s across the street. I wasn’t much different. I went on many cruises with my family, eating at buffets and playing mini golf on the deck, floating between exotic lands, while inside an extension of the same bubble we’d left behind. More polish. More sterility. More sameness.
Some never left the bubble. They’d grow up to be adults who now warn about the dangers of the city without ever really having stepped inside one, let alone lived in one. Watching Kids meant I couldn’t unsee what was outside my bubble. I knew there were other lives, other rules, other risks. And I wanted to experience them all.
That awareness pulled me forward. I moved to the city as soon as I could. I don’t own a car, and I never want to have to rely on one for daily transport. I chose noise, crowded spaces, the potential for crime, graffiti, and the smell of hot garbage in the summer, because within that chaos and ugliness is an energy that can’t be manufactured. Culture doesn’t grow in a petri dish. It grows in friction, in density, in the collision of people with different backgrounds, ideas, and identities, who don’t have the space to avoid one another.
The evidence backs this up. Cities are engines of culture. Pack enough people close together, and innovation explodes into patents, films, books, and ideas that ripple out everywhere else. Creative work like media, design, and technology concentrates in cities not by accident but by necessity. The collisions of strangers, spontaneity, and risk are not inconveniences to manage away. Culture is life, and these frictions are its raw ingredients. Scrub the city clean and you don’t just get safety, you get sterility. The culture the suburbs consume—sports, music, fashion, movies—would dry up at the source.
I frequently see people wishing for cities scrubbed clean of all that: no homeless camps, no danger, no grime, a place where “it all kind of works out.” Sometimes I catch myself nodding along, thinking, yeah, maybe we should clean up the streets. That conviction is persuasive. But then I step outside [in the city] and see nothing but beauty. A city without friction isn’t alive. It’s a simulation. That fact of the matter is, any one of us in America is more likely to be killed by a car in the suburbs than robbed by a criminal in the city.
Of course, the suburbs offer a slice of the good life: quiet streets, big yards, and an easy sense of order. It’s the life my parents wanted for us, and in many ways it delivered. But, it can’t provide culture. It insulates against it. It withdraws from it. It borrows from it. I know, because that was us, that was me. We’d drive into the city for concerts, big games, parades, a night out, and then drive back. But a city isn’t sustained by visitors. It needs people in it, every day, working together, for it to be a city at all. Those outside its confines far too often look at the mess of the city and mistake it for failure instead of fuel.
People exploit that tension, selling safety while ignoring that everything vital—art, music, social justice, food, ideas—comes from density, from friction, from the same mess that convinced my family and my neighbors into building gates around our bubble instead of bridges. That choice wasn’t ours alone. Choices like this have shaped entire communities.
Cobb County, Georgia, offers a real-world counterpoint to the argument of building bridges, not gates. The county’s refusal to join MARTA initially was rooted in racial fears, not economic concerns, as Atlanta Magazine points out. White flight had taken shape, the magazine describing as “an astonishing exodus of white people fleeing the city as the Black population swelled during the civil rights era.” Between 1960 and 1980, half of the white population in Atlanta migrated to the suburbs. Cobb County nearly tripled in population during that period, while the City of Atlanta actually lost more residents than it gained. The city was hollowing out as the suburbs swelled, and that trend has continued to this day. Since 1960, Cobb County has grown nearly sevenfold and the Atlanta metro fivefold, while the city of Atlanta itself has barely budged. Half a century of growth went everywhere but the core. Historian Kevin Kruse argues that the city’s slogan, “The City Too Busy to Hate,” might have been more honestly rendered as “The City Too Busy Moving to Hate.”
Kruse refers to this phenomenon as “suburban secession” because it involved more than just physical movement. Suburbanites withdrew from shared public life, abandoning schools, parks, and transit in favor of private alternatives. As the magazine notes, the 1965 and 1971 MARTA referendums weren’t really about transportation at all. They were referendums on race. Cobb County politician Emmett Burton crystallized the mood when he infamously promised to “stock the Chattahoochee with piranha” if that’s what it took to keep MARTA out of his county. At the time, Cobb County was 96 percent white, while neighboring Fulton County, home to the City of Atlanta, was about 45 percent Black. The river that divided them became a literal and symbolic moat.
These decisions walled the county off for decades. But now the sprawl has caught up with them. Traffic chokes the highways, growth has outpaced infrastructure, and the absence of viable transit has become impossible to ignore. What was painted as protection has turned into limitation, proof that gates can lock you in as much as they keep others out. The added irony is that Cobb County, not too long ago 96 percent white, is now less than 50 percent white. The gates built to separate it no longer represent the community they were intended for.
The pattern isn’t just in history. It’s alive and well. In 2017 the Atlanta Braves left Turner Field in Summerhill, a historic, predominantly Black neighborhood blocks from downtown Atlanta, for Cobb County, a stone’s throw from the Chattahoochee. Turner Field had been built for the 1996 Olympics and co-designed with the Braves’ future in mind. The Olympic cauldron still stands in its parking lot as proof. The move to Cobb was pitched as an economic necessity. The team claimed Turner Field needed $150 million in infrastructure upgrades plus more money to improve fan experience, while pointing to limited parking and lack of direct transit access.
Cobb County officials put up $300 million in taxpayer money to help build Truist Park and its surrounding infrastructure. The stadium sits at the junction of I-75 and I-285, beside an eight-lane highway, across from a regional mall, and entangled in a web of parking decks and commercial office buildings. The property was designed with cars in mind as much as it was for people. And it has far less transit access than that of the team’s previous home.
Meanwhile, Summerhill and the Turner Field area didn’t decay. It’s been quite the opposite, in fact. Georgia State University bought Turner Field, converted it to a football stadium, and added residential developments, retail, restaurants, and public improvements to the immediate area. It demonstrates what can happen when people embrace density rather than retreat.
Because retreat carries real cost.
Since 1950, developed land in America has expanded by more than triple while population has less than doubled. We’re spreading out faster than we’re growing, and in the process we’re consuming natural habitats, stretching infrastructure to its breaking points, and making ourselves sicker in the process. Research shows that as sprawl increases, so do rates of hypertension, diabetes, and mental health issues. One study estimated that if metro areas had maintained higher density instead of sprawling outward over the past thirty years, obesity rates would be 13% lower. And it isn’t just health. Suburban sprawl costs the U.S. economy about $1 trillion every year in extra infrastructure, longer commutes, and car dependence.
We’re paying for our isolation with our bodies, our time, and our wallets, all to avoid the friction that makes everything worthwhile. Community, culture, and spontaneity get paved over in the name of peace and quiet. That doesn’t make sense…
Are we really just scared of Kids?
Because that was what the film represented: the city as a cesspool. Drinking, drugs, sex, and violence are all things parents in the suburbs use as justification for gates and distance. But that too has a cost.
In a way, I wanted to emulate those kids. Not their actions or reckless behavior, but their rawness. It felt real in a way my manicured life was not. That mess was what I wanted more of.
I want to see cracks, not facades. I want to feel the friction of lives colliding in close quarters. Because that friction sparks art, ideas, arguments, music, love… life.
I want to be someone who doesn’t just talk about truth, but someone who encounters it daily. My attraction to Kids wasn’t chaos as entertainment. It was to reality, as raw and unfiltered as it gets. And maybe that’s what the suburbs fear most. Because the farther we sprawl, the more we wall ourselves off, the less we seem to know what we’re running from. And in the end, that retreat doesn’t protect anyone. It just leaves us all with less life. Because culture is life.
SUGGESTED READING:
If this essay spoke to you, here are two more I think you’ll like:
Everything Is Content. Nothing Is Sacred. — on how life itself gets packaged, posted, and consumed.
Breadsticks and Country Clubs: Serving Power, Chasing Money — what I learned about work, power, and honesty in the spaces where breadsticks and privilege get served
