Young families have been moving to the suburbs for as long as there have been young families and suburbs. That many of the young families moving to New York suburbs should be Brooklynites, and that many of them should fancy themselves "creative types" and that they, like their parents and grandparents before them, should believe themselves capable of bringing their superior sensibilities to the land of compromises and comfort should come as no surprise. See: Revolutionary Road.

And yet, the New York Times has seen fit to print yet another style section feature on the suburban exodus of Brooklynites called, what else, "Creating Hipsturbia." After all, "Williamsburg on the Hudson" ran way back in August 2011.

What seems to be entirely lost on these suburban pioneers (and The Times) is that despite their tattoos and their gluten-free baked goods and their farm-to-table restaurants, they are following in the exact same footsteps as their forebearers. The creative types who have long condescended to settle in the small towns of the Hudson River Valley have always carried their tastes with them, along with the notion that they may be in the suburbs, but they are not of the suburbs.

This is the tragedy of the suburbs: they are populated, on the whole, by people who hate to think of themselves of suburban, who cannot stomach the idea that they have abandoned the promises of the city for the comforts of the hinterland. The kinds of people who like to think they are above those comforts—the cars, the lawns, the bigger, cheaper houses—even as they partake of them. Frank and April Wheeler, for all their pretensions and talk of Paris, are not the exceptions, they are the archetypes.

The Times is so busy looking at the surface of things that they fail to see the substance. The style signifiers sprinkled so conspicuously throughout the article—the Fernet Branca cocktails with clever names, the haute donuts covered in maple bacon, the artist who wears his hair in a top bun and "bears tattoos with his sons' names, Denim and Bowie, on his forearms"—are meaningless. The Brooklyn "brand"—so easily recognizable that we all understand what "six-person-minimum whole-pig dinners" and bars "festooned with Edison bulbs" connote—is an aesthetic and lifestyle sensibility that has already proven itself infinitely adaptable to any number of geographic settings.

Indeed, the Brooklyn aesthetic is so ubiquitous and slavishly adhered to that it displays all the suburban hallmarks that we love to deride. The conformity, the dull sameness, the utter lack of imagination. In his excellent 2005 essay I hate Brooklyn Jonathan Van Meter quotes one of his friends on Williamsburg: "It’s not that I don’t like the culturati hipsters, but the last time I was in an environment where people only wanted to be with people exactly like themselves was in a fucking mall in Minnesota, which is why I left there twenty years ago."

As Inga Saffron writes in The New Republic, the real problem with gentrification is that it drives out economic, racial and generational diversity, leaving a bland monoculture in its wake. Brooklyn is filled with hundreds of independent businesses so identical to one another that they may as well be chains. Farm-to-table restaurants and are the new Applebees and felted wool antlers are the new Thomas Kinkades.

More to the point, these "hipster" newcomers want the same things that everyone moving to the suburbs has ever wanted: more space for less money, better schools, a slower pace of life. They have young children, they have not become the artists or dancers or musicians they had hoped to become, they have reached the age when they no longer believe that they will, and they do not find the sacrifices demanded by city life worthwhile anymore.

That these young families are being pushed from the city by affluence, rather than poverty, is something worth exploring. The growing impossibility of maintaining anything resembling a middle-class existence in an increasingly upper-class city is a real and pressing problem. But the fresh-faced suburbanites interviewed for the article tell an age-old tale.

Williamsburg roof parties thumping at 3 a.m. were not compatible with raising two young children. The gifted and talented program at the local public school was not up to snuff. Williamsburg no longer seemed central to the life they were living or wanted to lead. They were looking for a more peaceful environment, the country life not far from the city. The suburbs afforded more space to pursue the hobbies so central to the Brooklyn D.I.Y movement.

Brooklyn, with its brownstones and backyards and leafy streets, has long been a proto-suburb for Manhattanites. That those who embraced the lower-density and less frenetic streets of Brooklyn should be drawn to suburban life is not surprising.

"To abandon the idea of Brooklyn is to admit that a certain idea of Brooklyn has died, or that they are no longer part of it," the article claims. On the contrary, rather than stifling one's ability to lead a "Brooklyn life," the suburbs are an ideal place for a culture that glorifies domesticity and revels in homemaking, in baking and butchering and knitting and soapmaking and quilting and letterpressing. The Brooklyn ideal is not the urban careerist, but the rural crafter. The most hardcore Brooklynites are the ones who never really wanted to be in the city in the first place.

As one formerly-urban soap maker who now enjoys "pajama jams" in her basement music studio tells The Times: "We keep to ourselves a lot more, keep to our hobbies a lot more, which for creative types is great."

Honestly, what better way to enhance the insular qualities so particular to the Brooklyn brand, to nurture the inward-looking, self-reflective culture, than to shut out all the noise and messiness of urban life?

It's all come full circle, a development augured when Martha Stewart, the homemaking doyenne of the 'burbs, became the patron saint of the Brooklyn craft crowd. The return to the suburbs—where many of the Brooklyn hipsters came from in the first place—is not a really a reverse migration. It's a homecoming.

kvelsey@observer.com

Janney, Platt, Laurie and Shawkat in The Oranges.

Leaden and cliché-riddled, The Oranges is, for starters, not about the four neighboring townships in New Jersey. There are no emerald green lawns in New Jersey in December (and it was filmed in New Rochelle). No, it’s about two neighboring dysfunctional families—instead of just one—who live across the street from each other. David and Paige Walling (Hugh Laurie and Catherine Keener) have been best friends with Terry and Carol Ostroff (Oliver Platt and Allison Janney) for years. They exercise, barbecue, raise their kids and celebrate Christmas together, and frankly it’s as boring to them as it is to the viewer. Paige is obsessed with Christmas and spends too much time shopping for ornaments and organizing her choir of carol-singing flakes to pay much attention to David, who holes up every night in front of his TV set in his off-limits “man cave.” (Shades of Tommy Lee Jones in the brighter, far superior Hope Springs.) Their marriage has hit a speed bump, and one of the many things wrong with this movie is that nobody ever bothers to explain why.

But things are about to change in the teeth-clenching dramedy of a TV sitcom, when the Ostroffs’ daughter Nina (Leighton Meester) returns home after five years away at college (Huh? No summer vacations or Thanksgiving reunions in five years?) and a hippie romance that has just hit the rocks, and starts sleeping with Mr. Walling, who is more than twice her age. All hell breaks loose, making for easy laughs and weak double entendres, and all of the other members of the two families are forced to rethink their own lives, while the story plods along in voiceover narration by the Wallings’ dumpy, pot-smoking daughter Vanessa (Alia Shawkat).

Only a British director making his first film (Julian Farino) could pile on so many clichés tackling a subject as foreign as warped American domesticity and eccentric suburbanites trying to cope with the Christmas holidays. Instead of discussing the sexual revolution in their own bedrooms in a rational manner, the men rant, the wives suffer breakdowns, Allison Janney delivers a demented lecture on what happens when penises age and poor Catherine Keener, in a thankless role as the sour-faced Walling matriarch, leaves her two children home with their hormonally charged father while she maxes out his Visa renting an entire bed and breakfast to sulk in, and drives over the family Christmas decorations with her automobile. What does David see in his best friends’ vapid daughter in the first place? Why does Nina fall in love with a family friend her father’s age? Can’t anyone just talk to each other? Finally you come to the conclusion that you just couldn’t care less.

The cast practically throws their hips out of place running a marathon to build characters where none are provided by script writers Ian Helfer and Jay Reiss, who go for quirky sentimentality where sanity should be. The lackluster direction is pretty much what you might expect from a man who has helmed episodes of Sex and the City and The Office. The film is worth seeing for the excellent ensemble work by a cast that, although diligent and appealing, remain somewhat less than thrilling. They do their best to plumb the depths of domestic dysfunction, but in the end, The Oranges does not quite deliver the goods.

rreed@observer.com

THE ORANGES

Running Time 91 minutes

Written by Ian Helfer and Jay Reiss

Directed by Julian Farino

Starring Leighton Meester, Hugh Laurie and Catherine Keener

2/4

Now, however, that pattern may be subject to change. According to the latest census data, more people moved to the city than moved out last year. Some 252,000 people moved to the city last year, while about 220,000 left for parts unknown. Generally, those numbers are the reverse.

The new figures illustrate a few points, all of them good. Clearly, despite the discontent voiced by Occupy Wall Street, the city remains a magnet for ambitious people from all over the globe. The city’s economy may be less than robust, but that hasn’t dimmed the city’s allure.

But new arrivals come by the hundreds of thousands every year. What makes these figures significant are the relatively low numbers of out-migrants. And that too can be easily explained: people in search of safe streets and good schools no longer have to pick up and move to Westchester, Nassau or New Jersey. Yes, picket fences are a bit hard to come by on the Upper East Side or in Williamsburg, but if your heart is set on them, well, there’s always Staten Island.

Quality of life—or at least the perception of quality of life—surely has been a major factor in chasing young families out of the five boroughs. But after historic decreases in crime and renewed efforts to improve public schools, the city has been able to counter the appeal of suburban life and its supposed quality-of-life advantages.

Home ownership, of course, isn’t what it used to be, and that certainly has helped stanch the flow of city residents to the suburbs. But, in the end, it is the city’s improved quality of life that keeps—and will continue to keep—young families from leaving.

It’s hardly a given that New York will remain the nation’s safest big city, or that schools will continue to innovate and improve. That’s why both must remain top priorities for this administration, and the next.