I'MMA LET YOU FINISH
Hah
And Fuck Bush
Live in a small rural town with about 10 grand for population. Mountains are literally in my backyard. No city or suburb for me, thanks.
Damn you spinoza. I read the post. Did you?
What? Suggest that Merkins should THINK about using their cars less? What's wrong with you? /major snark
I have to ride through suburbs to get to the country for bike rides. I am always shocked and creeped out by how quiet and "dead" they seem. Even on weekends. Why pay all that money for all that space and not use it? Where are the people?
that's what I'm always thinking on those rides.
I stumbled on a downtown in Northern Virginia a couple of weeks ago. I was venturing from DC to visit the only local outlet of a catalog retailer. I parked in a large parking lot around the perimeter of a cluster of buildings and walked into this freestanding approximation of a retail street scene. People were drinking coffee at outdoor cafes, window shopping, reading on benches. I was struck by the fact that everyone there had to *drive* to get there and that the whole thing was very "Truman Show"-esque. It seemed a little surreal -- but it shows how little I know about the world as I never realized such things exist.
I wonder if spending time in Europe, or other "older" places makes one see things differently. I've ended up spending a number of years in Europe, Zurich and Barcelona, and can't help but think that it changes the way you see things.
I live in San Francisco, have raised my kids in SF, Barcelona and Sonoma. The kids love city life and wouldn't have it any other way.
Yeah. It's expensive.
people can drive as much as they want. I'm just puzzled why people want to continue to create places where every driving age member of a household "needs" a car...
Damn you spinoza. I read the post. Did you?
mer-
What is this "post" you speak of? You are aware of course that this whole eschatonian enterprise is being maintained by Duncan Black, who has been diagnosed with multiple personality AND obsessive-compulsive disorders? None of these people really exist. Even the ferret is a product of his imagination.
Must soil all the sheets. Dirty, dirty. Poo poo.
Pet Peave/Peeve #331
Folks who will linger in the parking aisles, motors idling, for whole minutes, to snag a parking place close to the door of a bigbox inside which, after they've parked, they'll log countless hundreds of steps, just to get from the dogfood to the produce...fuckwitzzzzzzzzz!
I agree, it's crazy to drive everywhere. Somewhere along the line, people got the idea that their homes were supposed to be isolated from commercial/retail traffic, the farther away the better. *shrug*
BTW, I also highly recommend Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck.
Urban & suburban have always confused me. When I lived in CA I would tell people I lived in LA, but I never did. I lived in Beverly Hills, Inglewood, Hawthorne, Torrance and Venice Beach. Now I live in an even more dysfunctionally identified place called "the Quad Cities". I live in Moline IL. The Quad Cities were originally Rock Island, Moline & East Moline IL and Davenport IA. Then Bettendorf became a "bedroom community" to Davenport and to confuse issues further is included in the Quad Cities by some by eliminating East Moline. They did and do use the term "Quint Cities" from time to time but it hasn't really caught on. But the real question is is Moline an urban city or is it a suburb to one of the others?? Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Somewhere along the line, people got the idea that their homes were supposed to be isolated from commercial/retail traffic, the farther away the better.
While I agree that too many cars are a problem, I part company with the group on this one. Get me as far away from the city as I can get. I live right on the edge of the Wilmington, De metro area and can access it when needed, but I love the peace and quiet I have here in semi-rural MD.
Keeps me sane.
And coming at the topic from a bit of a different angle, Mike Davis's "City of Quartz."
Personally, I live in a "suburban-type single homes with yards" neighborhood, but my back property line is the city limit line... a block away are row houses and "city" streets. I love it! I can walk to a supermarket, two small neighborhood grocery stores, my mechanic, my barber, the largest hospital in the area is two blocks away, etc., etc., etc. Everything I need is within a mile or two, and that's ignoring all the big-box merchants. Hell, I personally know most of the people in a two-block radius and more because we actually see each other quite a bit walking to and fro...
Suburban living makes little sense from where I stand... I like it right here.
I'm a suburbanite and I'm more than ready to get the hell out. I'm lucky that I live literally two traffic lights from work, so I can walk or ride my shiny new bike (go, Red Lightning, go!).
But the burbs are not the friendliest place if you don't drive a car, and in Chicagoland they're spreading farther out every week. Soon it will be one strip mall between Chicago and Rockford.
I wonder if spending time in Europe, or other "older" places makes one see things differently
I think so. I did when I was in Ireland. I think here in US we have seen land use so differently because there IS so much land in the US. We're wasteful. I sure didn't see that on the Emerald Isle.
Of course the irony is so many of the people who dwell in these federally subsidized Edens are the very people who decry welfare mothers etc.
I agree, it's crazy to drive everywhere. Somewhere along the line, people got the idea that their homes were supposed to be isolated from commercial/retail traffic, the farther away the better. *shrug*
Actually what they want is for all services to be just far enough away from their houses that they don't know they are there until they want them. However, all services must be at this exact distance and no further away. All things that are considered unpleasant must be located somewhere where they would never go and in fact should be somewhere so far away they don't have to even know they exist.
For example all forms of electrical power generation are unacceptable except for the source at the other end of the wires to their individual house. That source is OK, they just don't want to know what it is.
Of course the irony is so many of the people who dwell in these federally subsidized Edens are the very people who decry welfare mothers etc.
Welfare for the 'burbs = Good.
Welfare for the city = Bad.
More Bush Junta bullshit hard at work.
Wasn't there some VA winger congressman who recently objected to a plan to put a light rail stop w/shopping and housing clustered around it (thus eliminating the need for some driving) in his district because that type of set-up would "create Democrats?"
Montclair, NJ is a really booming 'burb here in the northeast. People who live there are absolutely nuts about the place. One reason is that they can have cars, but they can also walk to the train and to some everyday shopping (you know, they don't have to drive to pick up a quart of milk on the way home from work).
Some suburbs around Minneapolis are currently implementing the "small town" concept Atrios mentioned. Instead of sprawl and big-box retail we've been seeing concentrated townhome/retail areas of activity. Once you get to the area (can be as small as 2-3 blocks or a bigger area), the space is designed to promote foot traffic.
The StarTribune just yesterday published a story regarding how poorly-designed one of our biggest, most affluent suburbs (Eden Prairie) is and that it is a failure for residents and businesses because it has become a maze of twisty passages, all different.
I live in California, where the suburbs are nearly a religion. None of my suburban friends can understand that I prefer living in Oakland, where I can walk nearly everywhere I need to go, to the 'burbs.
And the freeway is 2 minutes away when I want to go visit.
Atlanta has basically achieved a perpetual Rush Hour, and it's all due to the incestuous relationship among the developers and politicians that has allowed absolutely uncontrolled growth around the city. Not a one of those tassel-loafer leeches (developers and pols) had the courage to try to get a handle on the suburban cancer until it was finally too late.
I'm moving to a new job at a small university, and it looks like I may be able to get a place to live within walking distance of not only work, but also the town square, which is still a functional commercial area as well as a burgeoning entertainment district. My fingers are crossed so hard they hurt.
people can drive as much as they want. I'm just puzzled why people want to continue to create places where every driving age member of a household "needs" a car...
Atrios |
That's the real thresehold from my perspective - needing a car to go anywhere!
I moved farther away from the city where my job's located. I have a 50 minute automobile commute on mostly congested interstate. But I live the small town life. I literally live at the corner of Main and Elm (no joke) in a town about 6 city blocks long and 6 wide. I can walk a few blocks to small shops, neighborhood bar and diners. My service station is 3 blocks I can leave the car for repairs and walk home. A bus stops in front of my house and can take me to the city/subway to work when I need an alternative.
One less obvious advantage of the low population density is I always run into someone I know going anywhere. This after living there only 2 years. If I go to the supermarket (have to drive to strip mall out of town) there's always someone I know.
My sister however with a husband and teenage son bought a brand new tract mansion 5 miles from me. They can go nowhere...absolutely nowhere without driving. Most of the houses have 3 garages. That would drive me nuts.
So 90% of what I need I get in my town the rest I drive to including work. I have viable alternatives to my car and that was important to me.
I love living in a place where I do not need to use my car more than a few times a week but I really do not like living in Philly. It is the crush of people and the lack of open space than anything. Living in Ann Arbor (about 6 years post undergrad) was so ideal for me b/c I had my downtown that I didn't have to drive to get to but I wasn't surrounded by concrete and people. I get really bugged out here in the summer, I miss the trees.
The StarTribune just yesterday published a story regarding how poorly-designed
one of our biggest, most affluent suburbs (Eden Prairie) is and that it is a failure
for residents and businesses because it has become a maze of twisty passages,
all different.
puppethead | Email | Homepage | 06.04.05 - 1:33 pm | #
The home of MST3K?
Say it ain't so!
Doc, didn't I hear that there's a new hallabaloo over new highway construction down there, as well?
I am so ready to move to the mountains....
I've had the 3 basic living experiences - raised on a farm (perectly fine - but my God there is nothing romatic about all that work).
Had to do the suburb thing for a while, loneliest time of my life. If you weren't a soccer mom no one would talk to you.
Now I wouldn't swap my city life for anything - but then I confess to the luxury of no kids to push through a horrific school system , a work from home job and having bought into the whole thing early enough to have a great courtyard/green space compound to retreat to.
Thanks for the post - I'll read the book
NOthing to do with urban/suburban sociology, but I like this part of a piece by Tim Rutten in today's LA Times.
the utter-absence-of-irony award has to go to former Nixon chief counsel turned evangelical preacher, Charles Colson, who gravely noted that Felt "had the trust of America's leaders and to think that he betrayed that trust is hard to fathom."
Before he found God, and a lucrative second career, behind bars, Colson was the guy who memorably announced that he "would run over my own grandmother" to ensure Nixon's re-election. This week, William Neikirk and Mike Dorning of the Chicago Tribune had the nifty idea of going back through the infamous White House tapes to listen for mentions of Felt. One of the things they turned up was a conversation in which Colson urged Felt to order FBI agents interrogating the man who had attempted to assassinate Gov. George Wallace to pursue the idea that the shooting was somehow linked to Sen. Edward Kennedy.
"Be sure you push that, Mark," Colson demanded, "just to be certain that they ask those kind of questions, you know, to get that kind of information."
There's nothing "hard to fathom" about Colson — not then, not now.
What always kills me is how the developers claim that they never earned a penny because of government.
None of those jerks could have made a single dime without the massive public investment in roads since the 1950's to cite only one example.
Meanwhile, towns are scrambling around here to fund new infrastructure, any new road that gets built immediately is surrounded by the bulldozers, and the state DOT is placing a new traffic light every half-mile to accomodate traffic from new subdivisions.
I have a liquor store less than a block from my house.
I'm good.
Wasn't there some VA winger congressman who recently objected to a plan to put a light rail stop w/shopping and housing clustered around it (thus eliminating the need for some driving) in his district because that type of set-up would "create Democrats?"
Yeah, but the "Democrats" he seemed more worried about kinda appeared to be the sort of people who weren't "colored" right, if ya know what I mean. 'Cause we all know good "Rethugs" don't gotta walk to get anywhere--they got Fuck-You-mobiles for everyone in the family. Including the Snowflakes on the way!
Well, well, well, isn't this interesting:
John R. Bolton flew to Europe in 2002 to confront the head of a global arms-control agency and demand he resign, then orchestrated the firing of the unwilling diplomat in a move a U.N. tribunal has since judged unlawful, according to officials involved.
A former Bolton deputy says the U.S. undersecretary of state felt Jose Bustani "had to go," particularly because the Brazilian was trying to send chemical weapons inspectors to Baghdad. That might have helped defuse the crisis over alleged Iraqi weapons and undermined a U.S. rationale for war.
Kinda fits nicely in with the Downing Street Memo-Gate while also showing what a brut Bolton is, doesn't it?
Sorry "brute"
Fair warning. Kunstler is a bit of a loon. I like his ideas and I agree that suburbia is the path to america's decline. But the guy is always looking for the apocalyptic event. First it was Y2K, when he claimed with certainty it would be the "bitch slap upside the head of america". Now he's riding the Peak Oil crisis. He was also a big supporter of the war in Iraq. I started reading his recent book "The Long Emergency", but he's definitely a bag of mixed nuts.
There was a good piece in the NYTimes this week about 'relos': people who move from subdivision to subdivision with work, getting their 4,500 sq.ft. McMansions and zero community.
Still inching along, Ms. Link passes strip malls. She goes by the gym, chiropractors, nail shops, colonnaded stucco banks, hair salons, 16-pump gas stations, self-storage lots, Waffle Houses, a tanning place and a salon that tattoos on lipstick and eyeliner so they will not fade in the pool...
With the spread of global industry's new satellite office parks, the relos churn through towns like Alpharetta; Naperville, Ill., west of Chicago; Plano, Tex., outside Dallas; Leawood, Kan., near Kansas City; Sammamish, Wash., outside Seattle; and Cary, N.C., which is outside Raleigh and, its resident nomads maintain, stands for Containment Area for Relocated Yankees.
Worth reading. Straight outta Kunstler's thesis.
After a life in suburbia, I'm a total convert to city living. Use my car only when I want to, everything I need is within walking distance, and my commute to work is a matter of a few minutes' stroll. You do need to find some way to get a little green (meaning trees and such, not cash, although both are nice) in your life, though.
Ba'al: did you know that my parents were your high priest and priestess?
I would love to live in a city designed like Paris. A car is a giant albatross there, best rented when one wants to leave the city, if then.
But I live in Houston. Cough. Wheeze. And though I live in the absolute center of the city (which is nice relative to many other places), it is pretty much impossible to walk anywhere.
I only ask those who live in the suburbs to realize the enormous price we all pay for their dream homes. When factoring in subsidies for gas and oil, highway and parking facility construction etc, it comes to over $5,000 per car per year. And that doesn't even include our military costs in securing the oil at its source nor the health care costs caused by the pollution of millions of cars taking to the roads each day.
Still another hidden cost is the pollution caused by the manufacturing of cars. Not only the actual factory but the movement of materials from all over the country to the assembly plants. By the time a car hits the end of the assembly line, its construction has caused pollution equal to two-thirds the pollution the car will cause in its life on the road.
Lol Same here, CS. 7-11 next door (the owner loves me) with a built in liquor store. Pizza place, video place, hair place and a great Italian resaurant across the street. Local-style market down the street and a mall (if needed). And forest preserves around the corner, with trails and a dog park.
It's like living in a small town on a busy road. But I'm still planning to leave it behind ASAP.
Yes, the MST3K Eden Prairie. Twenty years ago Eden Prairie was mostly dirt roads and woodlands. Now it's one of the poster children for poorly-designed exurbia.
pseudonymus in nc--I read that piece, it was fascinating. So sad--all that money, all those wasted resources, and it was crystal clear that woman was not happy. I don't think she even understands what it means to be happy.
and, of course, they all voted Republican.
Jezebel,
Did you know that you are a saint in the world of Ba'al worship, and the last part of your name refers to that?
I have had many opportunities on these pages to cite you as an ideal of honorable behavior, true to family, beliefs, and fun to hang out with. Not like some people I could mention.
Yep, the Old Testament has done us both a grave injustice.
Sean --
Get thee to Fairmount Park. It'll cure what ails you.
John R. Bolton flew to Europe in 2002 to confront the head of a global arms-control agency and demand he resign, then orchestrated the firing of the unwilling diplomat in a move a U.N. tribunal has since judged unlawful, according to officials involved.
A former Bolton deputy says the U.S. undersecretary of state felt Jose Bustani "had to go," particularly because the Brazilian was trying to send chemical weapons inspectors to Baghdad. That might have helped defuse the crisis over alleged Iraqi weapons and undermined a U.S. rationale for war
When it comes to work, he's real hands-on.
Then again, so's masturbation.
Living in a semi rural area and being gay was no easy task initially.What I've discovered is that most people in these areas do not like (or don't know how to interact with )other people and keep to themselves. Have to drive to get to the store because there are only farms and ranches in the immediate area. Love it now though because people mind their own beeswax. Noticed also in my immediate area more Dems per capita than my friends in the burbs(almost exclusively Repubs). Seems the more suburban you get the more R the more rural the evenly divided the political landscape becomes. Of course some picky schmicky smuck on this site will tell me how that can't be. So go ahead.
Sugarland Texas. Hell on Earth. Home of Tom Delay, a place that makes Eden Praire seem like paradise in comparison.
One of the funny things about Sugarland are all the fake lakes and ponds they put in, which primarily serve as breeding grounds for mosquitos.
"these fake urban downtowns lack one thing. . ."
-atrios
actually they lack a lot of things. most notably basic democracy. they are not public spaces. they are private property the same way a mall is.
But I live in Houston. Cough. Wheeze. And though I live in the absolute center of the city (which is nice relative to many other places), it is pretty much impossible to walk anywhere.
Ba'al
New Orleans is similar--unless you live in the Quarter and work downtown, it is near impossible to be carless here. I live ten minutes by car from the CBD, but it would take me over an hour to get to work via streetcar and walking (which I do when it's not too hot or raining). We have some shops, restaurants and a beautiful park w/in walking distance, but no place to buy groceries nearby. But still, I'd rather live in the city than in the suburbs--I know people who drive an hour and half each way to get to work. It's insane.
pseudonymous, re: that article, Naperville actually has a very cute older section, as do a lot of the inner ring suburbs of Chicago. Atrios is right, some of this discussion does become polarized between two false ideals.
I quit driving on a daily basis two months ago, and I've lost weight, I'm feeling better, ride the bike everywhere, take the train to other parts of the city to see friends, walk places that are close, and am a lot less tense as a result. Some people love driving; I have a friend who finds it deeply relaxing. He lives in a small town and his idea of joy is taking a drive in the country.
I'll talk you blue in the face about the advantages of my way of life, but I'm a liberal, man, live wherever you want. What I always hate is the idea that because of these choices, I'm not a "real" American. For years my folks thought I lived in some kind of degenerate cesspool that "made" me a liberal and cost too much money. I hear that all the time from people still and that's when I jump on the "fuck suburbia" bandwagon. I love my 'hood and am very protective. And defensive. A lot.
A.
Yep, the Old Testament has done us both a grave injustice.
Ba'al | Email | Homepage | 06.04.05 - 1:45 pm | #
Amen. It is a testament (if you'll pardon the pun) to the dangers of politically motivated, revisionist history.
The horrors currently being wrought in the name of the fundies' warlike, hate-filled "God" should be leading to a resurgence in Ba'al worshippers. I am, as always, at your service, oh Ba'al.
Pseudo - That story in the NYT about the Links was creepy. Especially the part about them "shopping for churches". Of course they're Bush supporters.
When it comes to work, he's real hands-on.
If he was your guy do you think that there is any order he would refuse? That is until he decided to take you out and move up.
You should read Christoper Alexander's 'A Pattern Language', which, interestingly enough, launched a huge movement in the software engineering community, even though its about civil engineering. It's a study of well, patterns, observed in successfully designed communites. The patterns tend to transcend cultural and demographic matters, and Alexander provides a language for designers to use when speaking about the construction of such things... Definitely worth a read..
I saw a study somewhere (sorry, can't find the reference offhand) that found that, for every new tax dollar generated by residential development, it cost $1.17 (on average) in new expenditures for infrastructure, schools, etc.
I've been an advocate for impact fees because, down here, the current residents are subsidizing the new ones at a crushing rate. The other side has latched onto an argument that the added couple thousand will make banks unwilling to lend money to homebuyers.
Funny, when land prices up here jumped by like 1000% over the past couple of decades, that didn't seem to discourage the banks at all. I'm no financial expert, but it seems unlikely to me that lenders will voluntarily go out of bsiness in a fit of pique over impact fees.
This same concern - the death of town centers, the loss of the "architecture of social engagement" - were captured in the NY Times magazine article about the rise of mega-churches. It goes right to the health of our democracy.
http://imtalkinghere.typepad.com.../2005/03/
x.html
This is one of the many huge American maladies we still are not confronting. Kunstler's book was written in 1994, and the beat goes on.
City of Los Angeles. Voted sharply against Valley secession. I like that my street is quiet, but the overall feel is urban, and everything is within easy access, including mountains and the ocean as well as museums, restaurants and interesting neighborhoods.
Your exactly right, small changes in land use policy would reduce automobile dependence. It is called mixed use development and Arlington County Virginia has been pushing it for years.
If you go to Arlington County on 6 PM on a week day you will notice something, rush hour is almost gone. Drive a few miles west to Fairfax County, and it is grid lock all the way to 7:30. The difference is that Arlington has a Subway, grid street pattern, and mixed use development. Fairfax has only a few subway stations, almost no mixed use development, and cul-de-sac street plan. The result is hideous congestion.
On the positive side Fairfax has huge recreation centers with olympic size indoor pools and DC has a baseball stadium.
Wasn't there some VA winger congressman who recently objected to a plan to put a light rail stop w/shopping and housing clustered around it (thus eliminating the need for some driving) in his district because that type of set-up would "create Democrats?"
Well, the locals in white suburban metro-Atlanta have long objected to having the MARTA line extended their way because it'd make it easy for the black folks to come up and rob their houses / rape their womenfolk etc. I shit ye not.
Naperville is one of the fastest-growing money burbs around. People are tearing down older ranches and putting up McMansions that barely fit on the lots and look decidedly out of place in those neighborhoods. It's become quite the tony place to live in the last few years.
You do need to find some way to get a little green (meaning trees and such, not cash, although both are nice) in your life, though.
Park and lake across the street.
Sitting here listening to the sound of the nailgun next door (sallyh - did you lend it out?) I'm reminded of one downside to living in an older urban neighborhood - the near constant renovation of older buildings disturbing the peace of a beautiful spring morning.
Hi, I love your blog and read it everyday! I wonder if you would consider to post something on your website in support of new Brazilian fashion designers?
If you need more info:
www.geocities.com/designers_exchange
Thank you!
jezebel
I just got done reading "The Five Gospels" a monumental work by a group of scholars including John Dominic Crossan, in which they attempt to identify which parts of the four canonical gospels plus the Gospel of Thomas may have actually been uttered by the historical Jesus, and which ones for tacked on later to support some theology/ideology, usually completely at odds with the ideas of Jesus.
I wish every wingnut fund-o would read it, even if the goo from their heads exploding all over the place would be messy.
I'm glad to live in one of the few "in-between" cities -- Ann Arbor, Michigan. Not as crowded as the real urban areas or as inconvenient as the rural expanses -- but not as boring as suburbia either. We have a fun, pedestrian friendly downtown area, tons of parks, support for bike traffic, entertainment, culture, and convenience. You can live without a car here, but it's not bad to have one either. Of course, the twin forces of downtown densification and Wal-Martization and sprawl at the edges continually erode my mid-size-city paradise. Any lessons from other towns for preserving the balance?
pseudonymous--that NYT article was so utterly depressing. Worst part? The links are diehard Bushites.
"What always kills me is how the developers claim that they never earned a penny because of government."
--Doc
What kills me is that every person on the City Planning Commission in my city is either a developer or a real estate agent. Talk about stacking the deck in favor of suburbia.
The other side has latched onto an argument that the added couple thousand will make banks unwilling to lend money to homebuyers.
The only effect of the impact fees might be a slight reduction in the size/quality of house so the total cost would stay the same. Of course if one jurisdiction imposed impact fees and another about the same distance from the major work centers did not, developers would tend to build in the jurisdiction with no impact fees but again the effect would probably be small.
That story in the NYT about the Links was creepy. Especially the part about them "shopping for churches".
Heh. The one instance in which Catholicism is LESS work than anything else. A parish is geographic. You go where you live.
Or you're supposed to, anyway. I lived in an exurb for a while back when I was still a way way serious Catholic and the parish priest in this huge office park-type community thing was liberal as hell. I adored him. He lasted about a year.
A.
TJ,
My brother lives in New Orleans, and hasn't owned a car since he left law school. He lives on the edge of the Irish Channel and works in the CBD. Sometimes he walks to work (admittedly a bit of a hike) but he usually rides the bus or the streetcar.
His girlfriend, a Metairie native, drives, and about a year ago she took her first ride ever on the St Charles streetcar with us. I was kind of amazed.
Flory--we only lend out the Ramset of Virtue to NTodd and Eli. And only in the most extreme of circumstances.
I've lived in Suburbia all my life, and don't think I could get used to the city, but at the same time, I don't like driving in my car everywhere, and only until last year, even had a car.
I live in one of those planned communities that's designed to look like a small town, with the nice mix of retail/residential. I know it's fake, but it works for me. It's a three block walk to the grocery store, two blocks to various restaurants, the movie theater, etc. Five blocks to Office depot and PetCo.
I actually know some of my neighbors, though all the real estate speculators who keep buying up our small, relatively cheap (for Montgomery County, MD) two-bedroom residences are kinda mucking that up.
Out here in the Portland, OR area - land use planning central - there has been a lot of the type of development in the suburbs that Atrios mentions. Mixed use retail, residential and office space around pedestrian friendly streets. Traffic circles are making a big comeback (I miss them from my DC days).
I'd still rather live in the city but it is a start. When I visit my family back in the Maryland suburbs I am struck by the rigid resistance to mixed use development of any kind. Houses here, shopping there, jobs way over there and never the three should meet - of course traffic is a nightmare.
Still I don't like the preaching to suburbanites. Many working class Portlanders that I know are feeling the pull to the suburbs because property taxes and housing prices are lower. They love their city, but they just can't afford to live there anymore. Partly due to us groovy democrats moving in and driving their housing prices up. We shouldn't look down our noses at people forced to move due to economic necessity.
Having an isolated neighborhood of single family houses isn't even about distance from the commercial areas. What about those gated communities no one can enter unless they live there or are buzzed thru by someone who does? Those places aren't an integral part of a town by design.
I used to live in Austin, TX. What made me craziest was the subdivisions springing up like mushrooms, but even if not gated, they didn't connect to each other. There was no way to visit a friend one subdivision over without going out to the main highway (183 for anyone who's been there) which was unbelieveably congested all the time.
It was as if thru traffic was a great evil to be avoided, even if it made everyone's life a whole lot more difficult.
Why pay all that money for all that space and not use it? Where are the people?
This is precisely the *point*. The quiet and lack of people is what is SO attractive. This is what makes the world go 'round.
Well, the locals in white suburban metro-Atlanta have long objected to having the MARTA line extended their way because it'd make it easy for the black folks to come up and rob their houses / rape their womenfolk etc. I shit ye not.
pseudonymous in nc
Following in the proud footsteps of the residents of Georgetown, in DC, and Marin County. Both of which have lived to regret their refusal of a subway station in their neighborhood.
This is why New Urbanism has arisen in America. (www.newurbanism.org)
BUT... New Urbanist touters are more often preaching their messages to suburbs rather than as part of central-city redevelopment.
That said, I have no problem with suburbs, per se, as long as they would get away from the big lot/big box McMansions and incorporate New Urbanisim principles. But, New Urbanist designers need to be selling themselves to central cities, too.
You ain't reglar folk's and none of you has a damn job! Get a damn haircut and take a bath, find a job and eat more fiber. It'll make you regular.
God Bless George Bush!
True public transportation story: My small-town native mother came to visit me in Chicago soon after I moved here and we went downtown on the L to go shopping.
Taken the L trains a million times, never had any trouble, nobody too crazy, nothing. She was a little nervous, but I convinced her it would be great, just like in "ER."
Of course the minute we hit the subway stop there's a huge scary looking guy singing to himself at the top of his lungs and peeing off the platform.
I just had to laugh. She looked at me like, "What kind of hell on earth do you inhabit?"
A.
pseudonymous in nc,
I always laughed at the image of some inner-city burglar boarding the MARTA bus, fumbling for change as he tried to balance a huge stolen stereo in his other hand.
The anti-public transportation arguments are ALWAYS criminally stupid, and your attribution of racism to the suburbanites is, I believe, right on the money.
The difference is that Arlington has a Subway, grid street pattern, and mixed use development.
My old neighborhood. Walk 10 minutes to the subway to get to work. Nearly everything else within walking distance - and a mall a 5 minute drive away....
I wish every wingnut fund-o would read it, even if the goo from their heads exploding all over the place would be messy.
Ba'al | Email | Homepage | 06.04.05 - 1:55 pm | #
Excellent -- I'll look for the book. The fundie reverence for the literal words set forth in their King James edition is tragic. The Bible is a fascinating read for lots of reasons, but not least among them is the history behind it. Patriarchy, the suppression of goddess-worship, the debate over whether Jesus was human or divine, what teachings to attribute to him, which writing should be treated as gospel and which as apocrypha (and why)...trying to read the Bible literally, and in complete ignorance of all those things, is a recipe for disaster. Or fundiehood.
I'm just puzzled why people want to continue to create places where every driving age member of a household "needs" a car...
Atrios - Largely because most urban developers and city planners are putzes and most urban government is clueless. Because LA has been the approved 'model' for decades, because post-war California has been the approved suburban heaven.
Now that I've reached driving age of course, I get the convertible and leave GWPDA the Jeep. Who got the better deal in Phoenix? But I didn't -have- to have a car - I could always take the bus to the mall and the park. Pretty soon, we'll have light rail thru the center of town too. Just don't suggest that transporation in the Southwest include 'walking' as a mode of action - heat stroke's expensive too.
Just don't suggest that transporation in the Southwest include 'walking' as a mode of action - heat stroke's expensive too.
Hee.
A.
"other options for existence have been reduced"
Atrios has hit the nail on the head.
I would love Manhattan. But there is really only one in the whole damned country.
In Europe there is London, Paris, Rome, Madrid, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and many other places where you can live more or less the same way. Even Lyons and Marseille, Geneva and Berlin.
I envy them.
In the southwest also planners have failed to allow for the development of decent burgers. Or so I've heard tell. Perhaps this is apocryphal.
But the guy is always looking for the apocalyptic event. First it was Y2K, when he claimed with certainty it would be the "bitch slap upside the head of america". Now he's riding the Peak Oil crisis.
Aside from Kunstler's being wrong about other things, is there good reason to think that dire consequences won't result from the decline of oil production? I haven't read The Long Emergency, but what I've read about it seems reasonable. And he's not the only one speaking up about it.
I really don't know, but so far I haven't heard any counter-arguments other than ad hominem attacks or simple dismissal without elaboration.
Come on people, get a grip, do any of you have kids? I can't imagine trying to raise and protect my kids in a big city. Here in the suburbs they have a big backyard to play in, friends in almost every house on this block, and a decent school system. One day when they are grown I'd love to live in the mountains somewhere, or maybe even a city, but this is the best life I can give them right now. And just because you live in the suburbs it doesn't mean you are an anti-environmental, bigoted, red stater. There are plenty of us liberals out here campaigning door to door, raising money for charity, and recycling everything we can. The elitism I'm sensing here is obnoxious.
Doc,
I'm constantly astounded when I meet New Orleans natives who have rarely if ever ridden the streetcar. And NONE of them ride the bus. You wouldn't believe the looks I got from people at work when I mentioned that my 14-year old rides the public bus home from school. (There's a private school bus you can pay $600 a year for, or they can use the free public bus passes they are all entitled to--no surprise which one we chose.) If the public bus system worked a little better, he'd ride it in the morning too, but as it stands now, he would have to be out the door at like 5 am to get there on time. Thus the carpooling in the morning. And we live at the very end of the street car line on Carrollton, hence the hour long trip for me into the CBD--I hit every stop. Otherwise I'd definitely ride it more often. We're looking for a house right now, and that's one of the factors we're looking at--of course, the closer you are to downtown, the more expensive it is (which is why I definitely agree with Tom about not preaching too hard at the suburbanites when homes are so much cheaper there).
Well, the locals in white suburban metro-Atlanta have long objected to having the MARTA line extended their way because it'd make it easy for the black folks to come up and rob their houses / rape their womenfolk etc. I shit ye not.
Read "The Power Broker" sometime if you want to learn how to keep black people out of desireable areas.
Fucking Robert Moses.
I moved from LA two years ago. Around the time we were leaving my wife and I took part in a fight to let light rail come through our neighborhood. You've never seen such anger. They had to even shutdown the nerdy neighborhood internet chatboard because things were getting so ugly.
It was sad. A below gradee path already existed for the train (it had been an active train line years before) but the anti-train folks, many of whom lived with the 10 Interstate Freeway in their backyards, complained that the light rail would be too noisy.
Of course, what they really feared was "outsiders" taking the train into their neighborhood.
LA does many nice things about it - most of it accessible by car only. A light rail line from downtown to Santa Monica would take hundreds of thousands of car trips off the freeways each week. But people just refuse to give up a goddamn thing for the benefit of the many. Very American.
Until people in LA stop fighting things like this, it will continue to be what it is: A big dirty suburb with good sushi.
Arthur J. GWPDA,
would you like to go dancing some time? we have some fabulous night spots here in NYC.
Kyork,
how'd you end up in Moline! My grandparents lived there when I was little (still think I've got oodles of cousins in the former Quad City area).
Cities are great, if they're alive. Dayton's downtown has been dying for a long time. It's got it small pockets, but every year it seems to die a little more. People are starting to move back into the city center, but there aren't any stores for them, so they have to drive to go shopping, especially for food. 'Planners' keep overlooking that minor detail.
If I could afford it I would move back to Chicago-in the city proper, not even one of the older 'burbs that has an acutal identifiable downtown. My sister lives in one of the suburbs without a downtown. It's a nice place, but all the burbs run into each other.
Of course, I also want the log cabin in Wisconsin when I get sick of the city life.
Athenae, I forgot you're a windy city sibling. What part of town are you in? I'm the far NW burbs...
Just a tip:
Urban planners are going to be a very hot commodity in the near future.
In the southwest also planners have failed to allow for the development of decent burgers. Or so I've heard tell. Perhaps this is apocryphal.
Thersites - What the hell have you heard about our Burghers?
jezebel
another nice feature of the The Five Gospels is that they provide a new translation of the original Greek texts, and provide a commentary on where the actual text fragments have been found, their age, etc. That in itself would make fund-os implode. The translations are nice because they give you a sense of the stylistic differences between the different gospels that other translations gloss over.
For example, Mark was written in a breathless sort of street-Greek, whereas Luke is in an elegant scholarly prose. And John is written in mystic wack-o.
One great comment they make... "If the Gospels were really the unerrant word of God, you might think that with all of His powers He might have seen fit to ensure that an accurate and complete text would have survived, but that has not happened." (The irony is that everywhere else in the text they use genderless personal pronouns to refer to God, so the dig was extra).
John R. Bolton flew to Europe in 2002 to confront the head of a global arms-control agency and demand he resign, then orchestrated the firing of the unwilling diplomat in a move a U.N. tribunal has since judged unlawful, according to officials involved.
A former Bolton deputy says the U.S. undersecretary of state felt Jose Bustani "had to go," particularly because the Brazilian was trying to send chemical weapons inspectors to Baghdad. That might have helped defuse the crisis over alleged Iraqi weapons and undermined a U.S. rationale for war.
If this nomination isn't dead now, it is time for us to get seriously pissed off. How much shit like this are we going to take?
Urban planners are going to be a very hot commodity in the near future.
so are bankruptcy attorneys.
yeah, light rail/subway all the way to the beach in santa monica would transform LA in such an inredibly positive way. Shame the locals don't get it..
I totally agree with your take--I was so tired of driving everywhere to find a little civilization and social activity that I moved abroad and didn't buy a car for 8 years. Now it's parked in a garage slot most of the time while I walk to work and everywhere else. The city is bustling at all hours with pedestrians. Now, this is a city with roots back 5000 years, so it's hard to size it up against Newville, USA. Once in a while I miss the smell of fresh-cut grass and the silence of having no neighbors right next to you, but it is more sociable and ecological.
Well as we weigh choices of how to live this is an interesting quiz that IMO think should be pertinent to such a discussion.
What is your ecological footprint quiz @
http://tinyurl.com/4uq4s
Arthur J. GWPDA,
would you like to go dancing some time? we have some fabulous night spots here in NYC.
watertiger
You're grounded, remember?
The nice thing about cities is that you can go out and drink liberally and take the bus home.
The elitism I'm sensing here is obnoxious.
Jeff D
*sigh* MasterX is six, and MissyX is two, but keep generalizing obnoxiously.
-
yeah, light rail/subway all the way to the beach in santa monica would transform LA in such an inredibly positive way
What? And have Jose, Marisol, and their children enjoy the exclusive beaches, instead of laboring in the Santa Monica residents' gardens?
You're so silly.
You're grounded, remember?
"Forever" is a relative term.
TJ
Ah, an uptown person. Almost everyone I know down here in Marginy/Bywater is carless. Robert's on one corner, Cuban store on the other - walk to Frenchmen for the night life, plenty of restaurants.
I put 3K/year on the car, max.
The elitism I'm sensing here is obnoxious.
Jeff D | Email | Homepage | 06.04.05 - 2:07 pm | #
I'm fairly amazed that it is characterized as elitism to decry the ultramaterialist life and highly expensive existence of the suburbs.
I don't want to start an argument, but the real issue here is that any choice other than suburbia has been rendered difficult if not impossible to live with. The reasons you cite for not living in the city (and there's a hint of elitism in your reasoning as well, frankly) have all been created by the subsidies and cronyism of local governments and developers, to the point that many people obviously cannot imagine another choice.
You don't need me to tell you there is nothing inherently bad about chosing to live in the suburbs. However, there are serious, harmful consequences of the current residential development practices in the US affect everyone, and demand some serious solutions.
Arthur J. GWPDA,
would you like to go dancing some time? we have some fabulous night spots here in NYC.
watertiger - Swell! I'll put the top down and we can go for a drive first!
"i always laughed at the image of some inner city burglar boarding a marta bus, fumbling for change as ha tried to balance a huge stolen stereo in his other hand."
-doc
i think the general theory is that they will take the train to the suburbs and steal a car while they are there to carry the loot off in.
If this nomination isn't dead now, it is time for us to get seriously pissed off. How much shit like this are we going to take?
I want him at the UN so this stuff will keep coming out. Eventually there may be some realization that what Bolton is says something about the chimp who chose him.
"Come on people, get a grip, do any of you have kids? I can't imagine trying to raise and protect my kids in a big city?"
Jeff, lots of people do it, big cites are are filled with kids too. It is also true that kids can get in heaps of trouble in the burbs also. I'm not trying to be contentious, just pointing out that people can not only imagine it, they do it.
Well said Doc
Swell! I'll put the top down and we can go for a drive first!
you don't mind if i still stick my head out the window to get the breeze in my face?
I'm not dismissing Kunstler's premise about Peak Oil. I just think that he would be a much more effective writer if he cut out the hysteria. He doesn't help himself out calling his website "ClusterFuck Nation". Sure it will appeal to the kids. But its not likely to get into the mainstream media with that name. He was also spectacularly myopic on Iraq.
Decline of American culture is likely to happen. But Rome didn't fall in a day.
D.C. is a big city and all of our fine elected politicians send their kids to the local public schools there.
you don't mind if i still stick my head out the window to get the breeze in my face?
watertiger - Sure! You can play with the radio too...
crime and schools are issues in big cities but yes many people do raise kids in cities. Here in philly Rittenhouse Square is stroller central these days.
but, as I tried to make clear I'm not talking about wanting everyone to live in "big cities." just talking about minor land use changes in the burbs..
Scout Prime:
I don't think that quiz is terribly balanced. I excluded the airtravel I've been doing recently and my footprint dropped 10 points.
And the car questions aren't very well designed for someone who works from home.
Joe Scarborough says that Rome wasn't burnt in a day. Didn't Nero prove him wrong?
My take on this is that after WWII, the suburbs became linked with the idea of social advancement and upward mobility (think Levittown). The suburb now defines the middle class for most Americans, but they started as a way to imitate on a smaller, more affordable scale the older suburbs of the prewar merchant, industrialist, and professional class -- which, ironically, are most often now considered urban neighborhoods because cities have expanded and swallowed them and their former owners have moved out. For example: When I was in college and grad school, I lived in one of these older merchant and professional class neighborhoods (Fort Sanders at the edge of the Univ of Tenn campus in Knoxville). There were lots of huge old mansions with big yards and smaller, though still substantial, Victorian gingerbread houses, all of which had been carved up into student ghetto apartments. The money and the suburbs had, for the most part in Knoxville, moved west past Fort Sanders -- first into the suburb of Sequoya Hills and then farther west until it had spread out at least twenty miles. I guess the point I'm making is that for most Americans a house with a yard defines being in the middle class -- even if the yard has gotten progressively smaller as land prices rise. Only the poor or crazy liberal artistic/anarchist class traitors, by this way of thinking, would live in an urban setting with little or no yard. "Truly making it" in America is defined by how much yard you have. As they say in Gone with the Wind (a movie I really don't like): "Land is the only thing that matters."
I grew up in a very pleasant,
Leave it to Beaver-ish suburb
located ten to fifteen minutes
from Manhattan. Enjoyed it
immensely, but couldn't wait to
move to the city. Which I did
at the earliest opportunity.
I still have friends in the
hometown who think I'm insane
for having left.
As for kids, they're getting themselves killed by the carload up in the North Metro Atlanta suburbs this summer as schools let out. It's just as easy for them to get themselves into trouble in suburbia as it is in the city.
In Europe there is London, Paris, Rome, Madrid, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and many other places where you can live more or less the same way. Even Lyons and Marseille, Geneva and Berlin.
I envy them.
Ba'al
Poland, what about Poland? You forget Poland.
flory
Yeah I made a change and mine dropped quite a bit too.
But I think it makes you stop and think. I wonder how it differs based on the country you live in?
(wtfwjd? -- Bolton's role in the ousting of Bustemi in 2002 was big news outside the US, and it's one reason why I hated that fucker a good few years ago: he didn't want independent chem-weapons inspections in Baghdad... or inside the US.)
Hey George W, want some wood?
Anyone have a link for the Bolton article? Or did I skim over it?
Who's bashing suburbanites? I'm one because that's where I can afford to live. It'd be nice if the place were better designed, that's all.
It's an older suburb so there are a few businesses and stores within walking distance, but not many.
Hey George W, want some wood?
Doc |
If you help me clear some brush!
Gentrification... the ugly side of urban life. Bayview/Hunters Point in S.F. Not sure where they are going to move all the poor black folks, but the rich (white) folks are going to get quite a bargain.
"if the gospels were really the inerrant word of god, you might think that with all of his powers he might have seen fit to ensure that an accurate and complete text would have survived. . ."
-from ba'al
good point. of course i've always wondered about a god who would reveal himself in the form of a book during an age of almost universal illiteracy. just seems kind of inefficient.
One great comment they make... "If the Gospels were really the unerrant word of God, you might think that with all of His powers He might have seen fit to ensure that an accurate and complete text would have survived, but that has not happened." (The irony is that everywhere else in the text they use genderless personal pronouns to refer to God, so the dig was extra).
Ba'al | Email | Homepage | 06.04.05 - 2:12 pm | #
The fundie God overlooked some pretty key details. Ba'al is a far more competent and benevolent deity.
May the aroma of burnt goo from exploded fundie heads be pleasing to Ba'al.
Sorry, GW, I ain't getting anywhere near Laura.
Come on people, get a grip, do any of you have kids? I can't imagine trying to raise and protect my kids in a big city.
Well, perhaps you ought to imagine it. The 'protect' thing is an especially dubious premise: I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers showed that, for the small number of child abductions, most of them take place in the 'burbs.
"just talking about minor land use changes in the burbs.."
But of course this is exactly what forward looking urban planners and government are doing and have been doing for some time - only to be foxed by 'developers' working at the other extreme. Thus at one side of the equation in Phoenix, you have the City funding, encouraging and insisting on in-fill development, multi-purpose and joint use throughout the city but especially in the downtown, midtown and uptown areas, using every tool they have to foster a sane urban/suburban/exurban relationship. Simultaneously, the regional economy is built almost entirely on raw land development and new construction, mostly single family housing, which is not within city limits (any city) and is now proposed to extend out to Florence - sixty miles south - which houses will provide the only available 'affordable housing' in the midst of the real estate bubble. Life becomes interesting. In an area like the Phoenix metroplex there has to be inter-governmental co-operation strong enough to counteract the raw business interests of development - and that is not anything easy.
Say, Donald Trump wants to build a 40 story apartment tower just east of Camelback and 24th Street - apparently because we are insufficiently fashionable without it. He's going to really pout too when he can't get the permit....
"Forever" is a relative term.
watertiger
It is, however, longer than one day. There will be no nightclubbing this weekend.
And what do you know of this Arthur person, anyway?
A silver lining to this sad tale...
http://americablog.blogspot.com/...ed-
unarmed.html
jawbone
Google "Bolton flew to Europe in 2002 to confront" and you will get 63 responses. It is an AP story.
BTW If no one has said this further up thread. Fuck me!
Ventura's greatest legacy was getting the first LRT line running in Minnesota. The light rail line originates in downtown Minneapolis, goes to the airport and terminates at the Mall of America in Bloomington, which is a suburb on Minneapolis' south side.
The funny part of this story is originally the MoA owners didn't want LRT anywhere near them, so they managed to get the terminating stop to be about 5 blocks away. Apparently they figured the ethnic mix coming from the urban core would bring trouble. They had already worked to limit bus routes for the same (perceived) problem.
Well lo and behold, when the first leg of LRT opened (didn't include airport or MoA stops), ridership was insanely high, like 70% above projections. And surprise! Not just poor ne'er-do-wells but middle-class people love riding the train.
The MoA begged and begged and ended up paying for having the final stop moved to one block from the shopping Mecca. Stupid short-sighted bastards. They should have figured out that people from all over the world fly to Minneapolis just for Mall of America shopping junkets, and now they can take the train directly from the airport to the Mall.
I'm currently living in downtown Portland OR, a hundred feet from the Willamette River. Portland (and nearby counties) has done many things right in making the place very liveable.
A world-class public transit system (multi-county light rail and buses, plus city streetcars) is completely free in the downtown area. Old buildings have been preserved and keep on getting restored, but they are mixed with newer higher-rise mixed-use condos and apartments. I can walk from one end of the downtown to the other in minutes. A major university is within blocks. And we have lots and lots of trees, and parks.
My car is a 1998, and I just passed 10,000 miles.
Here's some views of my city , which I've adopted after many years in San Francisco. I have most of the best of SF, and far less of the no-so-good of SF, at well less than half the cost of the city by the bay.
Pasadena is the site of the 13th Congress of New Urbanism to be held June 9-12.
If you have a half hour or so to burn, a rather nifty discussion of New Urbanism can be heard at KPCC.
The entry for Thursday, June 2 has the link to an audio file of that portion of the show. It's about 38 minutes long.
May the aroma of burnt goo from exploded fundie heads be pleasing to Ba'al.
The Supreme Consciousness may well be no more than burnt goo. He may be no more than the aroma of it.
Would getting into trouble in the suburbs include filling a cooler with beer after they turned the lights on the basketball courts out and driving our parents' cars around drinking because there was nothing left to fucking do in the souless town where I grew up?
Just wondering.
The elitism I'm sensing here is obnoxious.
Jeff D
Beware the pod people
One 4th of July during my brief stint in the suburb my obese neighbor (a canadian expat!) set up a chair out front and had his two kids setting off fireworks, all the time he was bellowing "america is the greatest country in the world".
All these idiots who don't want public transportation because it will bring the wrong kind of people to their suburbs do not seem to have noticed that the wrong kind of people also have cars and can certainly get there if they want even without public transportation.
Of course there is the other side of the "european experience". The average square footage of peoples home and apartments are much smaller and pricier than the average American suburban homes. Many of the foriegn students I have put up over the years tend to find the size and inexpensiveness of American suburban homes one of the biggest surprises over here.
Phoenix to study putting housing on light-rail path
Ginger D. Richardson
The Arizona Republic
Jun. 4, 2005 12:00 AM
PHOENIX - Officials are exploring any and all opportunities to build housing along the 20-mile METRO light-rail path.
At a City Council subcommittee meeting Wednesday, officials said they hope to focus on three types of housing in their transit development plan: living spaces for students, accessible housing and affordable housing.
"The biggest value of transit-oriented development is that it gives us an excuse to do what we should be doing anyway, creating great neighborhoods," said Marilee Utter, a consultant with Citiventure Associates LLC, which is working on the transit development plan at the council's request.
City officials have not yet identified specific sites for new housing but say the new transit line will provide myriad opportunities. They also acknowledge that the rising price of Valley land means they need to act quickly.
"The development community will want to put high-end, for-sale condos there (along the route)," Utter said.
The $1.3 billion starter line, which will connect Phoenix, Tempe and Mesa, is expected to be open by December 2008. Officials believe it will be particularly popular with ASU students attending the downtown Phoenix campus as well as those going to school in Tempe.
As a result, ASU is hoping to build student housing along the route. The goal is to have 250 student beds open and available by the time the downtown Phoenix campus holds its first classes next fall, more than 1,800 beds in place by the time Phase II opens in 2008 and more than 4,000 by the time build-out is complete in 2015.
Residents say they support a plan to build what will likely be high-density housing along the route but warned the city not to forget about the homeowners already in the area.
"We have a lot of historic neighborhoods abutting this line," said Paul Barnes, president of the Neighborhood Coalition of Greater Phoenix. "We don't want to have unintended consequences as we move forward.
"Because if this thing starts off wrong, you are going to have a lot of angst, a lot of bitterness."
Ah, but what about us people who require so little of convenience as to be able to live deep in the northern forest with nary a neighbor or even a car.
That always seems to be the problem: we divide into camps. In this case, urban versus suburban: but what about rural by choice. I love the deer in my backyard. I love the birds and squirrels and the definite lack of Republicans. We are still living in a small city for my kids. In another year I will be building as deep in the woods as is feasible. My only requirement is a driveway able to be plowed economically and a decent internet connection. But I think these are certainly possible.
flory,
tell that to the group i meeting for a bachelorette party tonight.
any friend of GWPDA's is a friend of mine.
i think american parents have a lot of irrational fear about their kids. a while back i heard a report on the cbc about a problem they were having somewhere in western canada. seems teenagers were racing each other in the streets. drag racing. they had some people from the town on. the kids and the parents. of course the kids were all for it. the parents reactions were more mixed. some were horrified by it, of course. others thought maybe they should build a racetrack. but there were a surprising number of parents who thought it was perfectly fine for the kids to drag race each other in the streets. you would never find an american parent coming out in favor of teenage drag racing.
any friend of GWPDA's is a friend of mine.
Ah, just cause he's got the convertible....
puppethead: I took the LRT from downtown Mpls to the airport a couple of months ago (after being stranded there by my connecting flight, but that's another story.)
It surprised me, because before 9/11 drove him batshitwingnutinsane, I read Lileks' complaints about downtown Mpls, and my experience was very different and much pleasanter than what I expected. (Then again, I've seen downtown Charlotte and Atlanta, which are truly depressing doughnut-cities.)
Has the LRT helped bring people into downtown, as well as ferrying them out to the MoA?
i think american parents have a lot of irrational fear about their kids
I think in general Americans think nothing bad is supposed to ever happen to them. We think everything in the environment can be controlled. So if something bad does happen you either fucked up or there needs to be a law against "that" bad thing so it never happens again.
Joe Scarborough says that Rome wasn't burnt in a day. Didn't Nero prove him wrong?
No, but then Nero had his horse in the senate. Bush has Dick Cheney and Tom DeLay.
Wouldn't live in suburbs or a city if you paid me, and I do need the dough: in debt and living on the ragged edge in a special place after giving up the East Coast (and total "security") for good.
Fortunately it's rugged and dirty enough out here to keep the equity-clogged hordes from successfully transplanting. People who move here to "retire" are idiots and usually crash and burn. I'm 59 but can never "retire." What the fuck is that, anyway? Like one of the early commenters above, I have 13,000 ft. mountains right outside my damn door.
Pedantic arguments over how to live are useless and hide the real issues. America's man-made landscape is on borrowed time, no matter how you shape it. Simplify, live now, get right with your own soul. Learn to be thrilled.
We never left the Garden, we just taught ourselves not to see it.
I'm always amazed at how quiet cities are relative to the concentration of people. I live in the suburbs, and have for most of my life. If you were to transplant and multiply a typical suburbanite into a large city, the crime rate would skyrocket due solely to the unbearable cacophany.
Suburbanites can be some noisy fuckers, with their gas-powered lawn implements at 6 AM and 9 PM, and their little cherubs whizzing down the sidewalk on scooters that sound like a 1,200 lb mosquito, and their teenagers cruisin' slowly down the street to their "flush Noriega out of his hole" bass pumps.
"It's a free country" is often "freely" interpreted to encourage being the biggest asshole on the block.
Why should I care about all of this?
Let it go to pot.
The sooner everything goes to hell in a handbasket the sooner jesus returns.
Besides, the problem is overpopulation.
And right now we are never going to be able to control it as long as white people think they need to keep making more and more babies to counter the uncontroled birthrates of non-white babies. It's all racism man!
MYOB'
.
People get into trouble everywhere. We have to drop this idea that a place is inherently good or bad. It's all about where you're comfortable.
I'm sure my loud-ass neighbors and their loud-ass parties would drive some people to execute others on the freeways. I love the reminder that there are other people about and would go nuts in rural parts. Be where you're happy. If you're miserable and twitchy all the time because you hate your home, I don't care how good the schools are, the kids aren't going to love it.
Ripley, west side.
A.
Rios Montt's daughter, Zury Rios Sosa, a Guatemalan senator, married Rep. Gerald C. Weller (R-Ill.), in November, and Rios Montt hosted the party at his expansive weekend home. John Hamilton, the U.S. ambassador, was among those in attendance.
--------------
Anyone hear what article Randi Rhodes was referring to yesterday on the dictator Rios Montt's daughter, mass graves, and the marriage to US Rep Gerald Weller? I need it.
Article on the brute, Bolton.
http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/
MG...GBZW113K9E.html
magnolia's propaganda ministry
There is this article at Rhodes website:
http://tinyurl.com/8wyno
I can't imagine trying to raise and protect my kids in a big city.
I grew up in a big city. And I turned out great!
There's a lot more to do in a city with kids. We're out just past a suburbia in the country now, and we have to drive to a playground. That's messed up.
"Burn down the Malls"
Mojo Nixon
Thanks scout prime- your handle suits you.
Burn down the malls
Burn down the malls
Burn down the shoppin' malls
I said Burn down the malls
said burn down the shoppin' malls
burna burna burna burna down shoppin' maaalls
Hey you ever get the feelin that America is turning into some kinda sit-com?
lowest common denominator
shopping mall marketing strategy from hell?
You ever get that feeling?
Well I got that feeling right now
and it's kinda getting under my skin
yeah
so get some gas-o-line
and
Burn down the malls SAY IT
Burn down the malls LOUDER
Burn down the malls
You know it just started out as a kind of corner store
Then it turned into a shopping center
Oh I remember the shoppin' center openings man
they used to have those big lights shinin' up
but now...
Now, where do the old folks go?
Where do the young kids go?
What's America, what's America turning into?
Mondo-condo-shopping-mall-hell
I say
Burn down the malls
Burn down the malls
Burn down the malls
Nero had the right idea-
fiddle while you burn...
Now another thing is kinda gettin' on my nerves...
another thing that's kinda gettin' on my nerves is this
national 21 drinking age
Huh? what do ya think about that?
A bunch of malarky
whatever malarky is man
it's a whole bunch of it..
you know if Reagan finally gets the war he's lookin for
you think he's gonna be draftin' 21 year olds?
No man they're gonna be draftin' 18 and 19 year olds
but ya cant buy beer
you can get married and screw yourself up real good
but ya can't buy beer
ya can charge 8 million dollars on the mastercharge
but ya can't buy beer
you can vote for one fool or another
but ya can't buy beer
'cause this is America
America that's run by the lowest common denominator
the money
how many units did ya move Mojo?
how many things of apple juice did ya sell?
c'mon suckers- c'mon feel it
Burn down the malls
Burn down the malls
Burn down the malls
Alright all you weirdo's out there
all you moralistic twisted evil little icepickers
you say "we wanna censor rock and roll"
we wanna decide what you read
what you watch
what you listen to
ooo ooo ooo Mr. Falwell
oooh Miss Tipper Gore
wait till i got you on the floor
we gonna tie you up inside of a shopping mall
then we're gonna then we're gonna
we're gonna have a war on drugs
a war on drugs
we outta have a war on war you suckers
we outta have a war on this senseless condominium
new car helllll
Burn down the malls
Burn down the malls
Burn down the malls
I'm sure my loud-ass neighbors and their loud-ass parties would drive some people to execute others on the freeways. I love the reminder that there are other people about and would go nuts in rural parts. Be where you're happy. If you're miserable and twitchy all the time because you hate your home, I don't care how good the schools are, the kids aren't going to love it.
Ripley, west side.
Pretty much. I've lived in small town (East Texas, pop. 60,000 where I grew up, Deep East Texas, pop. 20,000, and half of that was the college), larger town (500,000), St. Louis County, rural Illinois (150 people and corn field out my back door), at the end of the runway of O'Hare Airport (Bensenville, IL), and now in the oozing suburbia that is Houston, Texas.
Happiness is not where you are, it's what you bring with you. Been happy everywhere; happier some places than others, but it's all up to you.
You ain't happy now, the place ain't gonna force you into happiness.
We're out just past a suburbia in the country now, and we have to drive to a playground. That's messed up.
Thersites
Thers,
If your blog photos are largely representative of your home environment, your children have hit the jackpot. They have nature's playground each time they exit the door.
I was raised like that in Virginia outside of DC in the 60's & 70's. It was heaven, though I didn't realize it.
That place is now Dante's third ring (the steel and concrete one, if you will recal).
HAL-O-FuckingScan sez this is a duplicate post, fucker...
Many of the foriegn students I have put up over the years tend to find the size and inexpensiveness of American suburban homes one of the biggest surprises over here.
Anatoli - 2:36 pm
isn't it the point that the prices are not inexpensive, merely that the costs are deferred and distributed in other arenas--socialized, if you will? and they are not obvious, either. the costs of individual (vs mass) transit are some the most deeply concealed (although the cloak of invisibility may be slipping a bit, these days); the environmental costs are never expressed in any financial analysis, either...other social costs accrue, too, and are elided by the relative cheapness of a square meter of private space...
the first exMrsWGG was a German gal, who saw New Mexico for the first time when she arrived there as MrsWGG, and there was no turning back. She HATED it...it was too far from anywhere to everywhere, it was huge, tghere weren't any people, and the builldings all blended into the earth...that was one of the (several/many) reasons why the marriage ended sooner rather than later...she went back to germany and was much happier...
mir, war's egal...
You ain't happy now, the place ain't gonna force you into happiness.
Rmj, Wandering Aengus - No - but it well may force you into cutting your throat. Eh, Thersites?
Give me my urban condo with a grocery store, coffee shop, a high-end fashion mall, restaurants within walking distance, and a wonderful view of Camelback Mtn, Squaw Pk (or Piestwa Pk) anyday. I despise the suburbs. I read earlier on that someone commented on the deadness. I agree.
I happen to think that while many surbanites enjoy the lack of character and staleness of suburbs, many are just hoodwinked into thinking this is what they want. Sold on something that does not exist.
I work in a "surburban office park" about 5 miles from where I live. I hear people everyday complain about the commute, complain about the traffic, about the pollution, the cost of gas, whatever. Meanwhile, they just bought a house 45 miles away and own an Expedition. Do they not see the correlation? They are the problem.
I am a geographer. I study this kind of thing and it amazes me when I hear this stuff. Anyway, if you want some more academic reading about this subject I would highly suggest picking up a book called "The City Reader" 3rd ed. by Richard LeGates and Frederic Stout. It has some great articles about the rise of surburbia and it effects on society.
It's arguments like these that make "main stream American" (whoever that is) view Liberal's as eliteist! Esp when it's really the only choice. Besides, the argument that Suburb's are fake doesn't hold any water when one states the concrete jungles are real.
Nothing is real.
What you're describing is happening all over Southern California. But it takes a long time to transform a region. And longer to change someone's prejudices.
Near almost every college and every older downtown someone is building a walking/drinking/retail area. Near me is Birch St. in Brea, Uptown Whittier and the redeveloped Whitwood Center, and Commonwealth Ave. in Fullerton in addition to the completely manufactured Downtown Disney.
Most of these (will) have ground-floor retail and apt. living/condos above. And most of the condos and apts are/will be expensive. And the shop downstairs is likely to sell lattes, not cat food, so you still will have to go somewhere else for groceries. It looks like they target empty-nesters as buyers. I hope it works. To a certain extent it's already working.
But who wants to fight thru sidewalks of sullen teens every night? And if you're going to open a store, what can you sell at a profit that won't be undersold by Borders/Bed Bath and Beyond/Home Depot? So you gotta sell drinks and expensive high-ticket items, but do you really want to live above a bar with live music? Where's the balance point between convenient shopping and annoying crowds?
Also nearby is another example; a medium-sized mall with condos and densely built single-family homes next door. It is a very structured community with built-in architectural diversity and a limited color palate. Everybody can easily walk to the mall but they all have 2 car garages. This particular development is being spurred by a prestigious local public high school and a waiting list of Asian Americans. Maybe this is a compromise that we might both like, but now we're talking association fees on top of $750,000 mortgages...
I too could go on a long time. But I still like the suburbs because I grew up here, and I hate that they are so easily dismissed. Why is it that I'm supposed to respect everyone else's background, be they farmer or small-town Opie or big-city sophisticate, but they are allowed to turn up their nose at mine? A little respect from both sides could help us find a common ground.
http://breadowntown.com/bdt-index.htm
http://www.fullerton.org/mod.php...1102&
page_id=16
http://www.amerigeheights.org/To...Main%
20Page.htm
Happiness is not where you are, it's what you bring with you.
Hippy.
They have nature's playground each time they exit the door.
True enough. There are no other kids for about a mile around, though, is the drawback. Just cows. And they're not much fun to play with...
and a wonderful view of Camelback Mtn, Squaw Pk (or Piestewa Peak)
Hi, Eric! {{{waves}}} Which side of Piestewa are you on?
We should dwell in the salty sea.
Magic dolphins we all should be.
It's much nicer than land.
You don't hafta pound sand
To find ladies that live so carefree.
There are no other kids for about a mile around, though...
Hold onto that property as if your luxurious retirement depended on it.
No - but it well may force you into cutting your throat. Eh, Thersites?
Good grief! Even Miami didn't quite make me go that far. Miami is the worst planned city ever, because there are no laws of any description in Florida whatsoever. They aren't allowed.
Hi, Eric! {{{waves}}} Which side of Piestewa are you on?
Is that the one named after the female soldier killed in Iraq or am I way off?
Kunstler is over the top in his predictions of an oil catastrophe, but it would be a mistake to dismiss him because he was wrong about Y2K. The Clinton administration took Y2K very seriously indeed and spent a huge amoung of time and money making sure that nothing untoward happened. In the case of the coming oil dearth, the situation is drastically different, not only because the problem can't be solved all at once relatively simple precautions but because the people in power aren't addressing the issue at all.
Jim, my political opinions are dismissed because I'm one of the "elites" in the cities, not a "real" American. You're not the only one who gets that shit.
It's just horseshit designed to get us fighting with each other. And too many people confuse an endorsement of one way of life with an attack on every other.
A.
The trouble with Haloscan on a popular blog like this is that you go away for an hour and suddenly the linear comments section is two hundred messages long. I prefer the threaded fora. Oh well.
What I was going to say is I'm one of those who think this is something that will sort itself out automatically when the price of gasoline, and personal transportation in general, gets to be a big deal.
People won't cram back into the existing cities, but will coalesce around existing and new public transportation nexuses (nexi?), beading up like water on a surface gone suddenly teflon.
Just cows. And they're not much fun to play with... Well, there are some games to play with cows....
As for throat-cutting, I give you one word. Willseyville.
< / a > close link.
Has the LRT helped bring people into downtown, as well as ferrying them out to the MoA?
Yes, actually. The Hiawatha LRT has good ridership in both directions. The parking lots at Mall of America and Fort Snelling (just north of the airport) are usually full with people who park there and ride the train into Minneapolis. And when there's a Twins game in town you can't get a spot on the train, which has a stop right at the Metrodome downtown. Good thing they run every seven minutes.
I can't imagine how Lileks could hate Minneapolis, especially before his 9/11-induced futureshock. He claims to hate it yet here he is. He even came back here after a few years in DC. Why doesn't he go back to his beloved North Dakota if urban life is so wretched?
True enough. There are no other kids for about a mile around, though, is the drawback. Just cows. And they're not much fun to play with...
but if you were a republican and the cows were mules
http://www.newshounds.us/2005/
05...e_rightwing.php
Is that the one named after the female soldier killed in Iraq or am I way off?
Re-named from 'Squaw Peak' for PFC Lori Piestewa, 4/2003. Smack in the middle of North Central Phoenix.
"We have a lot of historic neighborhoods abutting this line," said Paul Barnes, president of the Neighborhood Coalition of Greater Phoenix. "We don't want to have unintended consequences as we move forward.
"Because if this thing starts off wrong, you are going to have a lot of angst, a lot of bitterness."
GWPDA, Irate Scholar
GWPDA, There's going to be angst when the light rail is built, because it is on the street and not underground or up above traffic, it's going to be a slow boat to china. That's what Skippy gets for his money, having not spent enough to have en effective system.
Hold onto that property as if your luxurious retirement depended on it.
Well, we only have about an acre, but there's still a hayfield behind us and a farm across the road. The farmer keeps making noises about selling out though, and will if he can get enough for the land. We're already getting somewhat more developed than we should be, though, a story told in our well water...
Skippy GOT.
My ideal would be a city house with a small garden, because I love gardens. I don't care much for yards.
I would consider living in one of those old suburbs if I could ever afford it, e.g., Wellesley, MA or Newton.
I honestly don't know how anyone in the suburbs ever has a drink. the 'designated driver' model works fairly well for 20somethings piling 6 people into a minivan, but for, say, married couples going to a dinner party it doesn't work so well.
____league
AC: "You had sex with animals?"
NH: "Absolutely. I was a fool. When you grow up on a farm in Georgia, your first girlfriend is a mule."
Jesus H Christ on a hay bale. Ah what else can you say
Well, we only have about an acre, but there's still a hayfield behind us and a farm across the road. The farmer keeps making noises about selling out though, and will if he can get enough for the land. We're already getting somewhat more developed than we should be, though, a story told in our well water..
If you don't own it, expect it to get built on..
Sorry Pitchforks, I don't anticipate any significant angst - we ran light rail/trolleys up that entire route until the war - and every stretch of the line in Phoenix is running on streets that were originally designed to carry high density traffic. Remember, we didn't have freeways in Phoenix until the 80s and our major roads were engineered accordingly. That's why Central is variously 6 and seven lanes wide, Camelback is 8....
I can't imagine trying to raise and protect my kids in a big city.
depends on from what you are defending them, i guess...
i know it was a long time ago, and all, but as a 13 yr old i played almost daily hookie from 9th grade and used my urban transit pass (purchased for attending a distant school downtown from home on the Westside--cleveland, when it still WAS a 'big city') to go out to Severance Hall and the Museums on the East Side and University Heights, where i'd attach myself to any big group of kids coming in on 'field trips'...i was alone and unsupervised most of the time, and i ended up a middle-aged, retired professor, landlord, and dope-smokin hippie...hoooo gnu?
I live in NYC (the west village). And yes my apartment is small (around 250 sq. feet) and relatively expensive, but I walk to work and just about everywhere else I need to go (occassionally using the subway or a cab). I'd love to at least double my living space, but not at the expense of moving to the suburbs. I like not having a car. And there are lots of families with kids living in the village. Not all of them are fabuously wealthy either (but that wouldn't hurt).
I'm sure my loud-ass neighbors and their loud-ass parties would drive some people to execute others on the freeways. I love the reminder that there are other people about and would go nuts in rural parts.
Heh, just called the cops last night at 2:15 a.m. because of an over-the-top party downstairs. Seems I wasn't the only one, either. As soon as I reported my address, the desk sergeant said, "I know, I know. They should be there by now."
scout prime
Somebody the posted the link to that here a few days ago and when Thersites made the cow comment I could not resist.
Thanks, Quentin. How to win friends and influence nations at the UN.
I honestly don't know how anyone in the suburbs ever has a drink.
Ah, that's easy. You become best friends with your neighbors so that they or you (depending on where you start) can stagger across the street safely.
Rmj, when did you live in Bensenville? I grew up in Wood Dale, back in the Nixon/Ford years.
I honestly don't know how anyone in the suburbs ever has a drink.
I know about 15 years ago it was estimated a person drove drunk 500 times prior to getting their DUI. I'm sure that number has come down Alot but I bet alot still just drive drunk.
Gotta go get into the Jeep and run to Home Depot for some nice mulch and bark. I'd be happy to take the bus but I'm not sure how to move 4-5 bagged cubic yards of mulch on the #12. It takes a lot of hauling to run an urban garden.
Kevin Drum makes this point a lot: the political divide in America correlates more closely to the urban/suburban difference than any other category. It is in the interest of Republicans to build freeays, turn farmland into housing pods, defund rail service, etc. Why? Because suburbanites have little connection to the civic fabric which binds city-dwellers. Once you privatize civic functions, the ties have been severed. Government is not only superfluous, it's utterly irrelevant.
Happiness is not where you are, it's what you bring with you.
Ain't that the truth.
Working in the oil bidness, I lived in Gabon, Scotland, and the UAE. Felt like I lived in Mexico and India due to the amount of trips made there. Of course the cities were all on the coast (except Mexico), which makes almost any city livable if you are less than a mile from the ocean.
The point, I found I could be happy almost anywhere as long as you find a place that suits your needs. Plus, people are just people no matter where you go, good and bad everywhere.
I know about 15 years ago it was estimated a person drove drunk 500 times prior to getting their DUI. I'm sure that number has come down Alot but I bet alot still just drive drunk.
scout prime -3:30 pm
well, i have been known to drive after imbibing; indeed, in my less vulnerable days, i was known to have drive drunk once in a while. i got popped once, in Flagstaff, in about 1982 or 83.
i generally don't drink enough anymore to get drunk...
anybody else remember how ravingly, drunkenly, flailingly, staggeringly fucked up you hadda be to get a ticket for it back in the era when DeeDubya and BigDick were accruing their convictions?
scary shit...
the first convicted felons ever 'elected' to the oval office
.
Atrios is right about the difficulty of going out for a drink. The neighborhood cocktail lounge here is a dying institution because of the logistics involved in going out for a beer.
Derek has a good point about mass transit being the driving force for development density.
And I think everyone's opinion needs to be taken seriously. That's why I read 200 posting cooments.
One of the current barriers to the accessibility of "new urban" communities is that they're often hideously expensive. My last city of residence had a couple such new developments; but they were the most expensive apartments/houses in the city. Like renovated downtown lofts, you have to make six figures to even consider such a lifestyle. In the meantime, the affordable suburbs work just fine for me.
Scout Prime: I was in Sarasota, Florida recently (wedding) and went out drinking with a group of folks. I had one drink and kept to tonic water after that because I was driving. I was the only one. Everyone else at the bars were drinking a lot. Now everyone had to have driven to the bars and drive home from them because the bars were located off of highways (no residential areas near them). That disturbed me. Especially since they didn't have a beer or two. They were pounding back mixed drinks like you could not believe.
anybody else remember how ravingly, drunkenly, flailingly, staggeringly fucked up you hadda be to get a ticket f
Yep...you could get away with an awful lot back then.....W must have been so shit faced.
Sorry Pitchforks, I don't anticipate any significant angst - we ran light rail/trolleys up that entire route until the war - and every stretch of the line in Phoenix is running on streets that were originally designed to carry high density traffic.
Nobody anticipates anything like that in Phoenix, it's run by Bushites who... tend NOT to think about how anything turns out, as long as their friends profit from it. We're sunk. This country is not prepared for anything. It's not just Phoenix, it's the entire country and nearly everything we do the wrong way. People just eat the pablum, and when it turns out badly, have tempertantrums and blame someone else.
GWPDA, I hope you're right, but having lived 21 years in Phoenix and a year in Montreal where they do things effectively most of the time, it seems that the light rail system is going to be lame. It's just not going to be effective enough, It'll be stuck in traffic along with the SUV's.
pissed in NYC
It does make you wonder heh?
It is going to get worse. The reason we have suburbs is population growth in combination with cheap gasoline. I think gas would have to get much more expensive before new suburban construction ceases. And the idea that suburbs are going to turn into ghost towns is absurd because the population is increasing every day.
Overpopulation fucks mightily with the quality of life. It is oil which is the foundation of the agricultural green revolution and oil which fosters the ability for scientific achievement in medicine. These things have allowed population to skyrocket.
At no time has humanity ever figured out a way to voluntarily limit population. For most of history population was limited by starvation and disease.
Most of the people on this planet today are spending their time getting enough food to take them through the day. Our oil-based industrial society is just a blip on the radar. Enjoy it while you can. You are the lucky ones.
Pitchforks and Torches
Tar and Feathers, too, by gowd...
I don't think i've mentioned how much i like your nym...
in the proper HOAP-spirit, too...
cheers, cher
.
I just finished Kunstler's The Long Emergency, and highly recommend it. While it is a bit over the top concerning the coming oil crisis, it has certainly changed the way I look at my consumption and car habits in a way none of the other sustainable lifestyle tomes have managed to do. The fact is that the suburbs (and big cities) are in for a radical lifestyle change when oil becomes more expensive.
and BigDick were accruing their convictions?
WGG
Did Cheney get a DUI??
anybody else remember how ravingly, drunkenly, flailingly, staggeringly fucked up you hadda be to get a ticket for it back in the era when DeeDubya and BigDick were accruing their convictions?
If you could find the car, you were OK to drive.
If you could find the car, you were OK to drive.
____league.
Hi, folks, back after a short but nice bike ride out in the sticks.
Speaking of Dubya's DUI(s) did anyone notice how they were written off as "youthful mistakes" despite the fact that he was, what, around 30 at the time?
Whereas Clinton's dope smoking in his very early twenties were a sign of a permanently flawed character?
Enjoy it while you can. You are the lucky ones.
Uncle Albert -3:44 pm
that is sooooo 'word' brother...
i remind myself daily that i live 'better' (more comfortably, less anxiously about daily necessities, more luxuriously, more lavishly, more sybaritically, if you will) than 99.99999 people who have ever lived...
sheer luck
.
Rmj, when did you live in Bensenville? I grew up in Wood Dale, back in the Nixon/Ford years.
Buckeye, Dealer of Rare Coins
Wait a minute, how long have I been in Houston? Daughter's in 8th grade in the fall, started first grade when we moved here, so....
7 years ago? Lived there for about a year, pastoring a church. One winter in that church was cold enough....
Did Cheney get a DUI??
IIRC, 3 or 4 of them.
i remind myself daily that i live 'better' (more comfortably, less anxiously about daily necessities, more luxuriously, more lavishly, more sybaritically, if you will) than 99.99999 people who have ever lived...
sheer luck
.
WoodyGuthriesGuitar (aka...) 06.04.05 - 3:48 pm | #
Yeah, but I can never get over the feeling that somehow, somewhere, some Roman Emperor had it better than I do.
Did Cheney get a DUI??
scout prime - 3:45 pm
two, minimum...
I honestly don't know how anyone in the suburbs ever has a drink.
It's spelt 'DUI', Atrios.
2 DUI's and possibly 3 or 4....that's Rehab material!
Yeah, but I can never get over the feeling that somehow, somewhere, some Roman Emperor had it better than I do.
Doc -- 3:51 pm
yeah, sometimes that bugs me too, gotta tell ya...i mean, they weren't Murkins, were they?
one word answer: No way jose...
We have a Potemkin Village mall in Columbus. I took my daughter there, at her bidding, awhile after it opened. After we'd parked in a perifery garage attached to the set, walked through a more-or-less familiar enclosed mall complex and reached the outdoor square surrounded by movie-type storefront, she turned to me -- age 16 -- and said, "Oh, my god. The end is nye."
Trumanesque is exactly the correct way to describe it, though I can't remember if the movie was by then. And yet, the very fact that there were shops that opened onto streets, and lots of folks walking about, reminded me of what "downtown" was like when I was a kid, before freeways & bypasses and all that those bring.
So I admitted to my daughter that even though faked, the scene conjured a sense of nostalgia in me. And she said, "Yeah, but back then did everyone dress alike like this?", which I hadn't quite noticed. So then I did and said, "Well, it was the 50s, so yeah, pretty much." Immediately I realized I was feeling nostalgia for something I'd seen through and rejected long, long ago, but since forgot. Old eyes really need young eyes sometimes to remind them to see.
WASHINGTON - Republicans in Congress and their corporate allies see some daylight for pro-business legislation in the weeks ahead, now that judicial nominations and House Republican leader Tom DeLay's travails have slipped into a legislative twilight, at least for the moment.
Fascism is hard work, after all....
The neighborhood cocktail lounge here is a dying institution because of the logistics involved in going out for a beer.
Yeah, I hate that. Means less live music and fewer chances for me to plunk my magic twanger in public...
This month's Harper's article about the evangelical suburbia developing in Colorado Springs was eye-opening. The church leaders are trying to create a fake-50's paradise. The residents don't ever go into town for fear that demons will jump on them. Yes, that's right. Demons will jump on them. Ernest Angley, where are you?
GWPDA, I hope you're right, but having lived 21 years in Phoenix and a year in Montreal where they do things effectively most of the time,
Pitchforks - I've been here, on and off, since 1959. Most of the damage was done with Margaret Hance and her ilk. Always keep in mind that Phoenix is Phoenix and not Mesa, Tempe, Peoria, Glendale, Apache Junction, Scottsdale, Surprise! or Sun City.... The model that's being used for light rail here is very close to that used in Calgary - with the exception being it will travel on the surface rather than overhead - but then, there's not a lot of permafrost in Phoenix. I wouldn't worry greatly about it in any case.
The church leaders are trying to create a fake-50's paradise.
Pleasantville here we come....
Rmj, now I'm trying to remember which churches are in Bensenville, which one were you pastoring at? My in-laws still live in B'ville, you can stand in their backyard and see all the planes waiting for landing at O'Hare. I'm surprised they haven't lost their hearing yet.
Old eyes really need young eyes sometimes to remind them to see.
cs -3:55 pm
it was for that reason that i cherished my 'international' grad students...they saw with fresh eyes...
it was also instructive to observe how (and how long it took before) the corrosive influences of Murkin 'culture' wore away at their critical capacities...
.
.
Happiness is not where you are, it's what you bring with you.
Hippy.
Well, yeah, but I've been working out....
Oh, you meant "Hippie"! Like I said, happiness is what you bring with you.
And what will we do when we can no longer afford plastic bags?
Or plastic housings for our computers?
In Europe when you moved into a village you were expected to become part of the village community, very close-knit and so on. It would take you a generation to achieve but that was the goal. I don't know if it's still the same, but when some people move in who just want to live there like in a motel the pattern breaks and soon there is no real community left.
This is what I have observed in some of the suburbs here, they are just places to park stuff and children and stay-at-home spouses. Not good for mental health. Maybe that is why the megachurch thing has developed as an alternative.
But I'm not sure if urban areas offer any more community or if people even want it. And there is definitely money, fear of crime and racism involved in all this, as well as the car thing.
I live in the middle of an area where nobody speaks to me because I'm a pagan goddess who is not old money or the right religion. It feels very comfortable. We are all different.
Speaking of Dubya's DUI(s) did anyone notice how they were written off as "youthful mistakes" despite the fact that he was, what, around 30 at the time?
Here's a thought. Think of a time in the future when George W Bush expires. If you couldn't stand the Ronald Reagan BS after he croaked, what will you do when Chimpy gets the same treatment.
Just a depressing thought.
.
A bunch of Austrian performance artists (I know, I know) are doing a tour of the US that's devoted to parodying the 'Experience' concept/conceit, whereby everything has to be packaged and demarcated as 'an Experience' in order to be experienced.
Experience The Experience Of Being Buried Alive
The people present will have an opportunity to be buried alive in a coffin for fifteen minutes. As a framework program there will be lectures about the history of the science of determining death and the medical cultural history of "buried alive". People buried alive not only populate the horror stories of past centuries, but also countless reports in specialized medical literature. The theme of unintentional resurrection by grave robbers also runs through forensic protocols. Even in the 19th century it was said that every tenth person was buried alive. No wonder that the fear of this fate was immense and led - especially in the German-speaking region - to all kinds of precautions to avoid it. Various death test methods were developed, for instance. "Security coffins" with bell pulls and air hoses were patented; mortuaries were built, in which corpses were left for days to natural decay.
Those 'downtown experiences' -- Potemkin downtowns -- are at the heart of the idea that you partition off bits of urban life.
Rmj, now I'm trying to remember which churches are in Bensenville, which one were you pastoring at? My in-laws still live in B'ville, you can stand in their backyard and see all the planes waiting for landing at O'Hare. I'm surprised they haven't lost their hearing yet.
Immanuel UCC.
It was an inglorious reign.
Think of a time in the future when George W Bush expires. If you couldn't stand the Ronald Reagan BS after he croaked, what will you do when Chimpy gets the same treatment.
Well my hope is that sometime in the next 3 years he will commit a "middle-age discretion" of some sort that will sink him.
But Plan B is to outlive him and have a whale of a party when he goes...but I wouldn't drive.
A bunch of Austrian performance artists (I know, I know) are doing a tour of the US that's devoted to parodying the 'Experience' concept/conceit, whereby everything has to be packaged and demarcated as 'an Experience' in order to be experienced.
So, is this a real experience? Or an experience of an experience? Or a virtual experience of a virtual experience?
And if we don't label it as an experience, how do I know how to experience it?
I don't know if it's still the same, but when some people move in who just want to live there like in a motel the pattern breaks and soon there is no real community left.
In England, it's getting really bad. People sell their one-bedroomed London apartments and can afford to buy big farmhouses or cottages -- there are even TV shows devoted to the process.
It prices the locals right out of the market. So the kids brought up in the village end up having to move to the nearest town (or to suburban estates built on former farmland) in order to get on the bottom rung of the ladder.
The London property market is responsible for all manner of ills in the UK. Not to mention turning bits of France and Spain into modern-day British colonial outposts.
I'm sure they'll also find ways to trash Clinton in every obit they do for him. May it be far in the future . . .
What gets to me isn't suburbia or non-suburbia, it's how everything is becoming so homogenized.
The Niketowns, WalGreens, McDonalds, Target, Quiznos,the same McMansion housing developments popping up alongside freeways in the 'burbs and the crackerbox condos in cities etc. etc.
With the exception of the weather and the occasional glimpse of natural scenary, it's getting harder and harder to distinguish where you are.
With the exception of the weather and the occasional glimpse of natural scenary, it's getting harder and harder to distinguish where you are.
Stinky | Email | Homepage | 06.04.05 - 4:06 pm | #
I grieve for that as well.
The Problem isn't the city or the suburbs, it's all the fucking strip malls. Hell half of them are already empty and they are still building more. It must be one hell of a tax write off.
My problem is, I like the city (Chicago) for the concerts. It's great getting to see bands from all over the world there. However, I don't want to live in the city, partly due to health reasons (Public Transportation won;t work for me) and I also love opening the window and just hearing the sound of trees rustling in the breeze.
I should also note, I work out of my house most of the week, so I don't have to commute. I know alot of employers don't like that, but wait until gas prices start shooting way the hell up. I think when that happens, there will be more and more "tele-commuters" than real commuters.
Also, I like the idea of "good" urban design, such as Seaside Florida,
http://www.idyll-by-the-sea.com/...om/
seaside.html
I think it's an idea that would make
alot of sense, especiialy as more and more people end up working over the internet.
Cities are just too noisy and too crowded for me to want to live there. If they didn;t have all of those people, they would probably be alright 
This is what I have observed in some of the suburbs here, they are just places to park stuff and children and stay-at-home spouses. Not good for mental health. Maybe that is why the megachurch thing has developed as an alternative.
Wow, interesting observation.
I'm afraid I'm going for three consecutives posts here, but...
In Europe when you moved into a village you were expected to become part of the village community, very close-knit and so on. It would take you a generation to achieve but that was the goal. I don't know if it's still the same, but when some people move in who just want to live there like in a motel the pattern breaks and soon there is no real community left.
True for the smallest towns I've lived in, too. You don't get "in" for a generation or so, maybe longer. Can be rather alienating, if that gets under your skin. Still, the alternative is Plano, Texas.
This is what I have observed in some of the suburbs here, they are just places to park stuff and children and stay-at-home spouses. Not good for mental health. Maybe that is why the megachurch thing has developed as an alternative.
Yup. And why Plano had such a high teenage suicide rate a few years ago. "Everybody knows this is nowhere." That's Plano, and many a Texas suburb devoted entirely to the $$$ and the corporate bottom line.
Kuntsler's a zealot but I like reading him and I think he's right on a lot. The impending end of cheap motoring is going to kick our asses like nothing in centuries. In the past couple years I went from almost-urban to boonies. Love the boonies and stars in the sky but hate hate HATE cars, how much time I spend in mine to commute to Capitol Hill. Jesus Christ what wasteful isolationist bullshit, what a fucking way to live, I say to myself every day in my goddamn car with all those other fucking cars. Car commercials on TV should show the car sitting in gridlock. Lying bastards, car going freely on open road.
I just came in, has anybody brought up Jane Jacobs and her Death and Life of Great American Cities? Best book ever on simple life patterns of people and how bad they've been fucked by our notions of "improvement" based on cheap oil, corporate hegemony, and social fears.
Seaside Florida
Seaside looks like a town made of cake...
I saw a news story on one of those megachurches, and they had everything from a full gym to a food court. I imagine it was even hermetically sealed so the members didn't have to breathe the air exhaled by non-believers.
I thought to myself, "Now, if they have a store where you can exchange foreign currency for US, it would be perfect."
robert sez: So, is this a real experience? Or an experience of an experience? Or a virtual experience of a virtual experience?
why am i reminded of the goon show?
a genuine, naugahyde imitation faux vinyl polyester copy of a fake reproduction 1950s Pontiac driver's seat...or something...
BTW: regarding the expansion of the term and the traditional ambit of 'geography,' i recalled Foucault had speculated upon it. Here's a site with a brief bib on the subject, fwiw...Alan Hudson's one of several reliable Foucault translators, iirc...
.
Not good for mental health.
There is a line of thought that much of mental ill health is the result of how people have lost the connections to the institutions that supported them in the past when they faced difficult times...family, neighborhood, church, government etc.
I think this is true. It's why I think counseling often fails. Perhaps it is why Xian wingnuts are so fixated on their Churchs.
I'm wracking my brain trying to remember the late-70's early-80's movie, with a youthful Matt Dillon, where all these kids basically went batshit because their suburb was so soulless and boring, and locked their parents in the school auditorium. It seemed far out then, but fairly appropriate now.
pseudonymous in nc -- Yr post reminds me of "My Dinner With Andre". I got so mad I actually yelled back at Andre on the screen in that film.
I'm a car-free urbanite currently housesitting in the endless Atlanta sprawl.
Tip for 'burbites: if you install a satellite dish in winter, picture wh=hich nearby trees will have leaves in a few months.
Where I'm at, they knew what interference was and they knew trees leaved in spring, but didn't put two and two together. So I'm watcching a lot of their DVDs.
Over the Edge?
Think of a time in the future when George W Bush expires.
Let it be in a Fallujah refugee camp. Somebody has spirited both him and Cheney there. Also Rummy and Condi. All surrounded by people whose homes and livelihoods and loved ones have been destroyed for their vanity and delusion.
Sean,
That's it!
Doc
It's Over the Edge
There is a line of thought that much of mental ill health is the result of how people have lost the connections to the institutions that supported them in the past when they faced difficult times...family, neighborhood, church, government etc.
i suppose, scout, that you could say the people have lost those things, but i think that an inappropriate metaphor.
it's like, i never lost a job in my life: I know exactly where every last one of the fuckers was the day i left it. It wasn't like they moved while i was home, and it wasn't where i'd left it the night before. gnowadduhmean?
rather, i think it is one of the supposed 'unintended consequences' of the culture (which makes a virtue of dividing and conquering its enemies)...unintended, my ass? unintended, mebbe til Myrdal, or Veblen, or Mill noticed and reported it.
anything BUT unintended afterwards...
Another tip for 'burbites: squirrel-proof bird-feeders aren't raccoon-proof. The raccoons have suprior instincts/abilities for chewing through ropes and tipping stuff over.
I like the close-in old streetcar suburbs of Chicago -- Oak Park, Evanston, etc., except Evanston is getting too built up and was getting way too expensive fifteen years ago. But anyway I like them. I like city life, too.
We have a 1916 house in a second-ring streetcar suburb, with a garage on the alley; the neighbors along the alley all know each other (across the street, not so much). The only thing missing in this burb is corner taverns. That's the best thing about city life, corner taverns.
Sharkbabe -- I'm in the boonies, too, though in Ohio, which is creepy in so many ways. But whenever my kids come home and walk out the door at night for the first time, they gasp at the stars and say, "Oh, my. I forgot!"
Oh, can I mention how happy I am that "All the President's Men" is #30 on Amazon's list? I can? Thanks! I'm very happy that "All the President's Men is #30 on Amazon's list.
Over the Edge is a good for for suburban disgruntlement run wild, but the real cinema poet of suburban ennui is Hal Hartley; most everyone minds their manners (a very limited repertoire) no matter how bizarre the situations become. They just seem unable to break out of their American Dreams, despite overwhelming evidence they're in uncharted territory.
I always picture Hartley telling his actors "Blanker, blanker."
WGG
Yeah lost perhaps wasn't the best choice of word but could be "cut" or "severed" or "purposely obliterated"....but that they are gone for many people. They don't live by their family, they don't know their neighbors, they haven't been to church since they were kids, they haven't trusted gov't since Watergate....so where do they turn when shit happens.
Well some of us are ahead of the curve. We could see it cycle back our way and stayed put ready to take advantage of opportunity.
It will be a while, still, but technology does expedite matters.
This is what is right about Kansas. Small towns can be better for a business, they help develop loyal cores for an effecient worker base.
Not to say companies are not going to the outsource model.
They've got no choice. K Street says hire repubs for your company or get no funds/subsidies. Then you hire repiglicans, theyt move it anyways, gut the pension and sell it for near penny stock value.
Long as there's still golf links near the local child labor factory, Tom DeLay's way will rule. He'd use Terry Schiavo's head as a driver tee if he had the chance.
Back to topic: small towns are good, but Borg Warner still moved away from here to the next opportunity. Extort the locals for good deal, move camp the next week. Shifting goalposts until one arrives overseas.
I live in the suburbs. Please kill me.
I am always struck by the fact that our society is so wasteful and destructive. We destroyed our cities by neglect and intention. Europe saved their beautiful old cities, rail lines, streetcars, etc. Murikans just neglect or destroy just to make more and more money for the real estate folks or the "corpses".
Let's all live in tight, high little boxes which will be moved out of because we've made some more money and then slum lords move in and charge poor, illiterate blacks, immigrants and the government lots of money so that the slum lords have the conception that they are on a higher income status level, but are really being screwed by the tenants because they don't pay the rent. Nothing like high rise, low rent, subsidized housing that makes for happy hallways.
I'm looking out on my backyard, and I see trees, turkeys, foxes, birds and all those other lower life forms that seem to avoid the big cities (except Pale Male). And I'm looking from here in lower Fairfield County, CT (an affordable suburb).
Yep, Suburbia. Love it, leave it or bulldoze it.
I'm late to the conversation, but have to say I'm pretty much with Atrios on this. Suburban existence tends to appall me. Further, I don't like city driving, and become easily frustrated with traffic jams during rush hour.
So, my happiest times have been living in New Orleans, and walking everywhere, and in Hyde Park in Austin, which means little driving...
My one quibble is the passage, "I'm also not one who thinks that suburban primacy and automobile supremacy are ever going to go away (unless perhaps if Kunstler's more apocalyptic predictions come to pass). People like suburbs. They like cars."
Of course suburban primacy and automobile supremacy are going to go away, eventually. Suburban primacy in the US is just over 50 years old, not that long in the scheme of things. Same goes for the interstate system that fosters suburbia and the big boxes.
Something better will come along and people will give up cars and suburbia just as they gave up horses and farms.
The key is to make sure that "better" means better for people's quality of life, and not better for, say, corporate profits...
so where do they turn when shit happens.
scout prime --4:30 pm
who was it, the french sociologist, Durkheim?, wrote of 'anomie' as the/one consequence of the developing industrial order. Anomie would translate, possibly, as 'namelessness' in a generic sense, the absence of connectedness to a sustaining cultural identity. By making/regarding people as interchangeable parts of the (all-encompassing) machine, 'business/corporatism' dispropriates them of their connections, and then sells them back as commodities, in media which operate to create needs nad sustain the presence of absence...
gnowuddahmean?
.
gnowuddahmean?
surelydo
gnowuddahmean?
Existentialism. See Kierkegaard, Soren, critique of Hegel. See also Romanticism, reaction to Industrial Revolution. Various French, German, British, and American 19th century writiers.
surelydo
thotchamite...
News important to the quality of our lives doesn't get covered because
http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/.../
slaughter.html
OT
The guvmint says the now admittedly proven occurrences of Qur'an defilement were "isolated incidents".
This we should believe from the same people who just a few weeks ago said that nothing of the sort ever happened?
I think that "isolated" is the entire reason this shit goes down. Nobody at the time figures anybody will ever find out.
I grew up in the suburbs of St. Paul, and while I'm not a big fan of suburbs, I don't recall that we were all the dependent on cars. As kids, we biked or walked to a good many activities, and we took the bus all the time to St. Paul or Minneapolis. The problem I see with many new suburban developments are the lack of sidewalks. There is a whole different dynamic with sidewalks. If kids can't bike and walk in suburbs now, it shows you that they too have become as dangerous as the city.
By the way, I live in Portsmouth NH, a three hundred year old port city designed for walking. Shops, restaurants, parks are all close by. It's wonderful. When I want the country, I go to a farm in the New Hampshire countryside to visit my old horse. It truly is the best of both worlds.
WGG--Yep, Durkheim, though the "selling back as commodities" is more stressed by the Marxist writers, such as Althusser and such... Durkheim certainly saw it coming.
The existentialists also get the feeling of anomie, but tend to go awry when seeking the causes, in my opinion, looking more to the metaphysical than to the material...
Existentialism. See Kierkegaard, Soren, critique of Hegel. See also Romanticism, reaction to Industrial Revolution. Various French, German, British, and American 19th century writiers.
yeah, that's pretty much where it starts...i was kinda thinking of Heidegger's critique of technology, but hey, is all in the same thought line/tradition, one way or another...
.
Buy small, buy crummy but buy in the country. Protect every natural square you can, and plant on it.
I work at an organization which plants butterfly gardens in a crime ridden, garbage strewn city. And it's damn hard getting the natives involved - they just don't care anymore.
The payback is when I take their children to this tiny but natural lot and we dig for worms, look for bugs and plant seeds. A new generation is sprouting, in a very small way.
WoodyGuthriesGuitar (aka...) -- Yr anomie comment interests me. I moved to a rural, very-small-town nearby, area after living near Cleveland. I found myself missing the anonymity of a large city. Whenever I went back (not for a long time, now) I recognized a kind of stranger friendliness in casual encounters -- marketing, shopping, movie-going, eating out, etc., that isn't in the area where I live. Here "strangers" stand out and are viewed and interacted with suspiciously. And there is a particular prejudice against folks who speak differently.
As a professor of urban planning and design all I can say is that American suburbs financially cost communities more than the economic benefits always promised by the developers. Most are bland, lifeless, and environmentally wasteful. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein "there is no there there!"
People don't live in suburbs because of a desire for "automobile supremacy", an idea so comical only a liberal could even think of it, let alone believe it.
People live in suburbs because liberals have largely fucked up most cities, due to their high taxes, weak stances on crime, and kowtowing to the teacher's unions, which creates some of the worst schools in the United States. Not to mention the fact that most Americans want to raise families and live in houses, while liberals are increasingly living by themselves according to all recent studies, increasingly isolated and sexually frustrated, leading to the bitter frustration and hatred you see spewed here daily.
Groundworks Trust.
Get involved.
Sharkbabe -- I'm in the boonies, too, though in Ohio, which is creepy in so many ways. But whenever my kids come home and walk out the door at night for the first time, they gasp at the stars and say, "Oh, my. I forgot!"
cs |
Just watch out for the tornado (/gummo)
Buy small, buy crummy but buy in the country. Protect every natural square
Well in watching a bit of CNN's anniversary programming this week I learned that Ted Turner is the biggest individual landowner in America. He has promised not to develop any of it.
Another Victory for Eschaton,
The Houston Miracle.
'Nuff said.
though the "selling back as commodities" is more stressed by the Marxist writers, such as Althusser and such
yeah, that'd be me...a Marxist? strictu sensu, no; more like a 'Marxian' (as in "MARX, beyotches!")
cs--
Yes, a great many--though by no means all--of the critiques of the "anomie" and "alienation" of the big city, especially from the nineteenth century, tend to invoke the idyllic dream of the pastoral "organic" unity of the village or town.
Same with critiques of the suburb.
Rather than offering progressive solutions, many critics do lapse into reactionary dreams, imagining a Golden Age which never existed.
It's always a danger, when critiquing the status quo--ignoring the good in our present moment is always folly.
The problem I see with many new suburban developments are the lack of sidewalks.
It's a half-mile tramp through the mud to get to the bus stop, and I'm just a couple of miles out of town. The lack of pavements/sidewalks was one of the first things I noticed when I came over.
That, and having parking lots out-front, rather than separate garages, or parking round the back. I think Jane Jacobs and/or Christopher Alexander have talked about this, but there's such a big difference between a suburban landscape where the storefronts are close to the road, rather than set back 50yds by a parking lot.
Another Victory for Eschaton. n. nonsense
It was so nice there without any trolls ...like a quiet suburban neighborhood.
A problem I see in newer suburb developments is that the quality of new housing stock is not good. Ever look at the new stuff going up? Two by fours and vinyl siding. I'm wondering what the life expectancy is for the average new house constructed today. The older suburbs seem to have more substantial buildings, often built with stone and masonry and looking like they were meant to last. That said, when I look at the apartment buildings and towers "built" (that is, promoted) by Donald Trump and his ilk, I can't help but think that they were built to be taken down 50 years later. They do not have a sense of permanency about them.
yeah, that'd be me...a Marxist? strictu sensu, no; more like a 'Marxian' (as in "MARX, beyotches!")
Yeah, I tend to identify more as Marxist, but I know where you're coming from--my wife calls herself "Marxish."
Oh I should also mention that it's generally cheaper to live in the suburbs, at least in terms of the space received per square foot (in which case its no contest). While liberals are not completely at fault for this, they are (*surprise!*) still largely at fault, due to their obsession with zoning regulations, building codes, "smart growth" and other fun ways of making sure they have a nice view.
Until AVE troll substantiates these claims (ha!), it should be ignored.
the quality of new housing stock is not good. Ever look at the new stuff going up? Two by fours and vinyl siding. I'm wondering what the life expectancy is for the average new house constructed today.
it is sooooo much easier to sell the myth of capitalism's 'creative destruction' when everything around you is built to fail, or wear out, or self-destruct through planned obsolescence withing a generation...
houses are stick-framed by guys wielding industrial staple guns. toe-nails instead of nailing studs through the plates. a strong wind will disassemble these cheezy shit-heelplaces in no time...
but that's okay. don't get attached to anything, cuz it'll be stolen, razed and sold back to you in 5 weeks...
.
"Yeah, I tend to identify more as Marxist, but I know where you're coming from--my wife calls herself "Marxish.""
You mean the regulars here are openly Marxist?
NO WAY!
Marxism is sooooo 1917. Communism lost, get over it.
They do not have a sense of permanency about them.
Is there anything now in America that points to a real working concern for the future?
We don't care about deficits, we don't care about scientific development like we should, our education is being left behind, we don't care about the environment.....Is anyone really talking about making things better for the future?
Seems all here, all now
http://www.groundworkusa.net/
I've been digging, planting and teaching for years, and all I see are liberals and those who give and preserve life using their time and energy to slowly and with great effort bring back what capitalistic devastation, prejudice and greed has created. Still waiting for a republican to show up on a Saturday and do some weeding.
Get involved or stop living in your mother's basement, eating Twinkies and join the military, Another Victory. Get some fresh air.
Let me know how it goes.
anybody else remember how ravingly, drunkenly, flailingly, staggeringly fucked up you hadda be to get a ticket
And W fucking *somehow* managed to massage one out of a cop who *knew* the international power this family had shamelessly wielded for 50 years prior.
Shrub must have been dry humping the officer's K-9 partner or something.
Putting in my lifestyle 2 cents here.
I live at the beach on the top floor of a 2-story stucco house built in 1902. Very charming. My place is on a "walk street", which means there is just walking path, no road.
Walk everywhere, but I do have a garage space for my car in the back alleyway (which I drive about once a week, sometimes just to let it know I still care!)
For my nature hit (which is very important) I made the front sunroom, long and narrow and almost all windows, into the bedroom. I can open all the huge old windows day and night and feel the trees and the breeze and at night I can see the moon.
I must say, my bedroom blisses me out!
I love these discussions because I've never understood suburbia. I grew up a city kid, except for a 4-year stint living in the mountains. It was very remote and you'd have to walk a long way up a steep hill to get to the cabin. This was also fun, as it was an alternative lifestyle. Bathtub was outside and so was the bedroom! But a mile away was a coffee shop, a general store and a yoga studio. Perfect.
I think it would be wonderful if everyone could find a little spot for themselves that suited their nature to a tee. We'd all be a lot happier and have an easier time loving our fellow men & women.
ciao 4 now!
You know who really is hilariously
stupid....
steve
Who??
They do not have a sense of permanency about them.
Yep. And just to annoy the troll, let me quote Marx on capitalist "progress":
"All that is solid melts into air." (also, this phrase is the title of a great book on urban development by Marshall Berman. Very appropriate to this discussion.)
A problem I see in newer suburb developments is that the quality of new housing stock is not good. Ever look at the new stuff going up? Two by fours and vinyl siding. I'm wondering what the life expectancy is for the average new house constructed today.
I have a story about this. There was a little Victorian house near mine, an old one, with a very old lady living in it. When she moved to a nursing home and sold the house it was gone like in a day. Just a hole in the ground. Then the developer built a MacMansion on that little site. He tried to save the money so he imported Canadians to lay the foundation. Then Americans to do the carpentry. The foundation is in metric and the rest in inches. Which means that you can't drive a car into the garage because it doesn't fit. There are also odd corners inside corners if you know what I mean.
The rest of the house is built from HomeDepots special offers on vinyl and the cheapest windows I've ever seen. Then a vast marble porch was added. The price: one million smackers.
The neighbors tried to talk the buyers away from the deal but didn't succeed. Now they're embroiled in a court case.
The guvmint says the now admittedly proven occurrences of Qur'an defilement were "isolated incidents".
I also noticed (shamelessly blogwhoring) that the HRW report credited many incidents to Camp X-Ray and Camp Delta.
Which make the claim about "no credible evidence" at Gitmo technically correct. And it was mostly before January 2003, so again, a technicality is their excuse.
Marxism is sooooo 1917.
Another Victory for Eschaton
Pure, unbridled capitalism is soooo 1871.
Although your 7 year old child being chewed up in a textile factory power belt might not be such a loss to you.
scout prime:
our troll.
ciao 4 now!
Jenny from the ßlog • =5:07 pm
sounds utterly idyllic...
(tugs distractedly at beard, trying to figgerout how to wangle invite to beach and fresh air and and and...)
gotta go hook up some plumbing for a friend...prolly b-back in a coupla hours...
cheers, chers.
fuck the Busheviks & trools, and down with the Junta! ya, Basta!
Marxism is sooooo 1917. Communism lost, get over it.
Another Victory for Eschaton |
You spend too much time here you asshat. Bush sold your job off to CHina and left you here.
He should get cited for littering along with his theft.
Kunstler made a point that much of the money that used to go into important buildings in communities (cities and towns) is now spent on road/highway construction and maintenance. Think about how schools, libraries, post offices, fire stations and city halls used to be built. Money went into making them grander than their surroundings, imparting a sense of importance to these community buildings. Now, he points out, you can't tell the difference between a hospital, prison or school. The public school near me must have been built in the early 1900's. It has a stone base with masonry walls, about five stories tall. It is a solid and beautiful building. I went to an elementary school built in the mid-60's. It has only one story and looks like an overextended ranch house. I wish some visionary town/suburban planner would convince the powers that be to invest in good and sustainable architecture for schools and other public buildings. I think it would help in building a sense of community.
My house in Sacramento was once in what was considered a suburb - in 1915. It's amazing how small many of the houses are. It seems the older the house the more likely it is under 1,000 sq. ft. There was a trolley line which ended at my streetcorner, four stores, a hospital and a cemetery within walking distance and a lot of small churches and even a Mormon temple in my neighborhood. Oh and the state fair was only a block away. One by one everything left and we even got a big ugly freeway that cut through part of the neighborhood. Suburbanization's consequences nearly killed our community.
Only one store is left, but it's a going concern, and most things I need I can get to on a bicycle or scooter being only about a half-mile away from a Trader Joe's and 3 blocks from a light rail line going downtown. We have a good community center and a strong neighborhood now. Only problem is now we're getting the suburbanite type who wants to destroy the cute little houses and stick McMansions on lots which aren't meant for them. I don't like being so far from anything I need that I have to drive long distances to get it, so I guess I'll never live in suburbia. If there was anything I'd want back, it the stores I could walk to daily.
Since Another Vacuous Embolism has got us pegged as Marxists, let's chip in with a bit of poetry from a supporter of Mussolini, and see if we can provoke our troll into apoplexy:
With usura hath no man a house of good stone
each block cut smooth and well fitting
that design might cover their face,
with usura
hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall
harpes et luthes
or where virgin receiveth message
and halo projects from incision,
with usura
seeth no man Gonzaga his heirs and his concubines
no picture is made to endure nor to live with
but it is made to sell and sell quickly
I grew up in the suburbs; it was a great place to be a kid. But that was the 60s-70s and the suburbs themselves were different, very different scale, different facilities. A kid with a bike was functionally independent in a day-to-day sense (though to go to the one nearby mall was still a trip in the family car).
But I could not imagine living in the suburbs as an adult. Looking back, it was an isolated existence even then. That suits some people. I like the hustle-bustle and variety of city life. And at least in the older cities, every couple of blocks is its own small town, anyway. Hell, my apartment building is a small town: everyone knows each other, at least by sight, some by name, some by closer ties. Some of the residents here go back 40 years to when the building was built.
We walk, subway or bus everywhere. We're five minutes walk from a large and varied park.
There are kids everywhere, of all ages and economic status. They all look pretty healthy and happy to me.
I see the attractions of country life. I obviously love city life. But to me the suburbs have always combined the worst of both worlds.
I'm very surprised that anyone who reads Atrios (or IS Atrios) believes that "suburban primacy and automobile supremacy are [n]ever going to go away".
They are going to begin going away very, very soon.
Anyone who thinks peak oil is just another crisis de jour should read Out of Gas by one of the least loony people on earth, David Goodstein. It's short.
Suburbia = cars + racism. It's that simple.
I would live closer to the "city" if I could afford to buy a house there. I can't afford half a million dollars right now...
I have a liquor store less than a block from my house.
I'm good.
Central Scrutinizer | Email | Homepage | 06.04.05 - 1:40 pm | #
Two liquor stores within a half mile (one a speciality store)....I guess I'm not as suburban as I thought...
Racism = urban dark skinned living vs. suburban overpriced white living. Cars, asshole, have nothing to do with it.
Where are all the failing schools? Not in Darien, CT. And not in the private, NY, Los Angeles schools.
Hmmmm. And Los Angeles has cars and buses. Hmmmm.
I would just like to praise my small city. We live in a city of 80,000, in an inner city environment of 3 family hmes and small apartment blocks. I would estimate that my neighborhood is 25% white, 25% african Amaerican, and 50% Hispanic. This was not the case when we moved in from the suburbs; it was more like 50% white, 50% "other". I love my neighborhood. We have our annoyances. We don't like loud hip-hop, We're bluegrass, country, and zydeco people. Sometimes we have to talk to our neighbors and ask them to turn it down. Some of our neighbors keep their garbage cans in the front yard--yech!
Last year we thought about selling, but we thought the better of it. We like it here, despite the little things that we complain about: and we love our neighbors--even if we don't like their music. Jesus was called up thru the national guard to serve in Iraq. The interracial couple on the other side of us is raising their even more interracial grandchildren. We have decidedthat this is where we must be--at least for now. I totaly admit that we are complete honkeys--on that level we don't fit it this neighbhorhood. But we are accdepted here. We are a pain in the ass to some, and yet we belong. I dont undertstand it--but i love it.
You know it's funny. All these white conservatives never cared about the higher taxes in the city until integration.
Then they fled the cities, crippling their goverments because of the decrease in revenue due to plummeting property values, and blame liberals for the poor quality of schools.
Fascinating.
When I was in Oregon I had the pleasure of buying a house in Orenco Station. Absolutely loved it, but hadn't really thought about why.
And then I picked up a copy of Alexander's "Pattern Language". I realized that Alexander was on to something... and that the patterns he lays out in the book directly correlated to the things I loved about Orenco. Both at the community level, as well as the interior design of the house.
In two years of living in Orenco Station I put 5,500 miles on my car, and most of those were driving 250-300 miles to Mt Hood for ski weekends. I could walk to work, the grocery store was on my walk home, and the light rail was 1/4 mile away for trips downtown and to the airport.
"I'm also not one who thinks that suburban primacy and automobile supremacy are ever going to go away"
Atrios is in for a surprise one of these decades...
"They are going to begin going away very, very soon." (burbs)
Oil production has peaked. The middle class is going to get it in the guts (it has already begun-the impoverishment of the US). There is going to be great anger when the people finally (the poor dumb asses) realize it. The public schools have already been dumbed down to nothing so the people don't understand anything that is happening. The fact that the preznit has given the right wing fundies a voice is not because he is one of them but because he is trying to create the chaos before the chaos from hell. The burbs will die a slow dangerous death. Living in small communities will be the only saving grace--places where we can grow our own food and learn to survive in communities. I have no idea what will happen to places like Philly and am afraid to even think about it. Maybe living by the Italian Market will save some lives. (grin)
Think about what is going to happen--no public school, no healthcare system except for the very rich being able to purchase it, every country in the world is more well educated than we are. There are more people in India who speak better English than we Americans have and do. Large masses of unemployment ahead. Most of the jobs are security forces and other types of cops hired by the wealthy to protect the wealthy. Half the people in the country heat their homes with natural gas and we practically have no more of the stuff.
There is trouble in River City and in all the rest of them. Be very afraid.
so he imported Canadians to lay the foundation.
Oh. Dear.
Urban.
Legend.
Mexicans, maybe. Columbians, possibly. Canadians? Out of work software engineers from Red Deer and Great Slave Lake?
Well, it's a nice story.
I like to think that the suburbs will vanish one day. I live in one and I don't like them. Bring back the trolleys, I say.
I live in an actually very small town (3000 inhabitants) which has been made into a tourist mecca - good post atrios!
And Sallyh, reading what you write about the City of Los Angeles, I want to hop on the next plane to LA. There are actually non-stop flights betweeen Melbourne, Australia and LA, California!
Hey Roastbeef, I just skimmed to the end of this thread to say that some people do have a clue with developments like Orenco Station.
Some cites like San Francisco do have public transport that goes way out into suburbia. Myself I live in the suburbs of Portland in Vancouver WA and I hate it. Where I live its impractical to take public transport. I bike to the strip mall to grocery shop but somehow its not the same as living downtown.
There is nothing more hypocritical to me than people who say they live in the country because they love nature. If you love nature quit fucking it up and get back to the city where people belong. Leave the countryside to the farmers and the trees. Don't cut down trees to clear a building site for god's sake like a "nature loving" coworker of mine did.
I LOVE living in NYC. If not here, I would live in Paris.
I love hiking in the middle of nowhere, or I like cities. Small towns make me crazy.
I have to visit one of those fake McMansion housing develpments in cincy at the holidays. I would die if I had to live there. Mother's little helper would be needed.
When homes lost porches and got private back-yard decks, that is when we lost community.
"And Sallyh, reading what you write about the City of Los Angeles, I want to hop on the next plane to LA."
Helga Fremlin
helga,
Don't buy your tickets yet. i lived in LA until 2003 and listen to what I say about it. It's a hellscape of millions of individual homes and zero natural resources to support it. Its public transportation is a joke even by America's pathetic standards and unlike New York, Chicago, San Francisco etc, there's a lack of decent looking public space that is mind-boggling. But everyone does have a nice backyard surrounded by an eight foot fence. As dystopias go, it's top notch. And as I said earlier, the sushi is good.
L.A. truly is a nightmare of inefficiency. But if you want a glimpse of hell, head down the 405 for about an hour, and take a peak at southern Orange County. This is what haunts my man Kunstler. As we say in Brazil, NINGUEM MERECE!!!
The most touching thing in that New York Times article on Alpharetta as Hell was Mrs. List's wistful pining for the lost paradise of Rochester, NY. Though technically in the outer circle of hell during the winter months, Rochester has its passionate defenders. There are suburbs and there are suburbs. In New England and upstate New York, they are called towns and have town centers.
A lot depends on the actual design of the suburb. Lenin supposedly offered the peasants free bread, and the peasants fed the bread to their pigs since it was cheaper than pig food. Free roads and cheap gasoline, at least if you aren't actually serving in Iraq, encourage development that uses lots of roads and lots of gasoline.
The typical developer doesn't want to build a road for anyone but his own customers, so everyone has to use the same public highway. The typical developer doesn't have to build the schools, hire the cops, buy land for parks, or any of the other things that people living in housing demand. It's a recipe for disaster, and a lot of people are living in it.
In Europe, the businessmen were the aristocrats, and when they weren't fighting wars they were building bridges, dredging harbors, establishing trade relations and building infrastructure from a business point of view. If you wanted to win a war, you had to capitalize the health of your fighting age men, and the women who would bear them.
A modern businessman can ignore these calculations, and somehow, governments are supposed to ignore them as well. Maybe if we brought capitalism back into government we'd be balancing our budget, revamping our health care, and forcing our developers to account for the cost of their construction.
Hey, Philly Boy ... mentions of Downtown Disney and Irvine Spectrum ... you talkin' ta me?
Most people would generally prefer predictable mediocrity to unpredictable "excellence." That's why they eat at McDonalds and they live in suburbs. Because there is no risk at what you'll run into.
I highly reccomend (most of) Kunstlers latest book, The Long Emergency
Peak Oil is here, and the emergency awaits us all
Wasn't there some VA winger congressman who recently objected to a plan to put a light rail stop w/shopping and housing clustered around it (thus eliminating the need for some driving) in his district because that type of set-up would "create Democrats?"
The story: A developer bought up a 53-acre, 40-home subdivision next to a Metro station and tore down the homes with the intent to build offices and 2,250 homes. Part of the project involves the developer buying 3 acres of land next to the station from Metro. The local congressman, Rep. Thomas M. Davis III, plans to introduce federal legislation to keep Metro from selling the land (which the feds can do since they fund a significant part of Metro). From the WaPo:
Some local elected Democrats say that in private conversations, Davis has made it clear that he has no interest in supporting high-density developments near Metro stations because he believes the residents they attract tend to vote for Democrats. As Exhibit A, they said, he has cited the Merrifield condos and townhouses around the Dunn Loring Metro station.
Last year, for the first time since his first run for Congress in 1994, Davis lost the Merrifield precinct to a Democratic challenger, polling 727 votes to Ken Longmyer's 807, while the precinct voted 2 to 1 for Democrat John F. Kerry over President Bush.
"In one of the first studies of social capital ...the Saguaro Seminar.... found that the extent of community social connectedness and trust were highly associated with the greater personal happiness reported by respondents. Being connected to others and to a broader community will (help to) make us happy."
Timothy Beatley, Native to Nowhere
"Meaningful and happy lives require connections with nature, and real places provide the contact with nature and our physical surroundings.... E.O. Wilson ... and others have argued that ddesire fro connectionos to nature are hardwiered, the result of centuries of evolution, really coevolution." ... We need contact with nature -- this is not an optional extra, it is essential to our well-being and to our emotional health, to a deeps sense of who we are."
"Nancy Wells... has found that greennes and nature enhance the cognitive functioning in children." A U of I prof has demonstrated that when an adolescent girl can see even a little bit of green vegetation from her window, her grades go UP.
Timothy Beatley, Native to Nowhere
"Reconnecting to place is about taking control of our lives. Much of our frustration today is a function of our feelings of having little or no control over the events and dynamics that shape and affect us.... . Commitments to place are about taking charge, about proactively participating in the creation of one's own life, while at the same time seeking to connect to others [& nature]."
"A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology concludes that the most important factors in determining personal satisfaction are a sense of autonomy, competence, relatedness...and self-esteem. Not making the listwere influence, luxury, or money ..."
Timothy Beatley, Native to Nowhere
who was it, the french sociologist, Durkheim?, wrote of 'anomie' as the/one consequence of the developing industrial order. Anomie would translate, possibly, as 'namelessness' in a generic sense, the absence of connectedness to a sustaining cultural identity. By making/regarding people as interchangeable parts of the (all-encompassing) machine, 'business/corporatism' dispropriates them of their connections, and then sells them back as commodities, in media which operate to create needs nad sustain the presence of absence...
gnowuddahmean?
WoodyGuthriesGuitar
Word!
And ...
America's answer to anomie? That's right -- suburbia.
Racism = urban dark skinned living vs. suburban overpriced white living. Cars, asshole, have nothing to do with it.
Where are all the failing schools? Not in Darien, CT. And not in the private, NY, Los Angeles schools.
Hmmmm. And Los Angeles has cars and buses. Hmmmm.
Sue
Cars have plenty to do with it.
Mobility, substituted for proximity, = dispersed suburban dev't patterns.
Credit and lending practices, and the fact that your suburban property taxes go to a different school district than your "inner-city" counterpart, determined the economic fate of central cities, as well as the failing school systems of central cities.
The presence of cars in L.A. have exactly zero to do with the success of private (or public) L.A. schools.
White suburban enclaves have continually and consistently refused to agree to mass transit connections with central cities. The racist presumption is that poor folks don't got cars, and will use the light rail to come on out to Wauwatosa, Lima, CT, and steal stuff from white folk. Which is, of course, bullshit.
The major welfare queens here are highway users. And of course, heavy auto/SUV dependence shifts larger costs onto the private realm, but hey, that's a personal choice, for which suburbanites must take responsibility. I mean, rather than rail about city rents, tower living, and subsidized housing. Because suburbanites would prefer taking responsibility to pointing fingers -- wouldnt' they?
?
Well. A lot of opinions, and I agree with those who are tolerant of people who make choices they might not make themselves.
Isn't that what this country should be about?
Anyway, during my graduate studies, I asked this question time and again: can we envision what America would look like if everybody who now lives in 'suburbia' had moved into the 'urbia' instead?
Imagine the population of every major metropolitan area compacted into half as much space (or worse) and fewer 'sprawl' cities. Some might call this paradise.
But imagine the cost of real estate, the quality of life, the crowding, the sheer waste of cheap land that could never be farmed without driving farm income to subsistence levels.
As bad as things are now, what would things be like otherwise? Don't imagine some urban eden and then find fault by comparison with the suburbia we now have. Be realistic and ask how urban life would be if all the cities we know held the population that moved into the suburbs instead.
Jon, that's just a straw man. The suburbs aren't going to pour back into the cities, they'll make little urbs in the middle of the existing suburbs.
In America, this will probably happen in an unplanned way, as people concentrate within walking distance of a shop and a bus stop, and shops and bus stops will be established within walking distance of concentrations of people.
But in England at the beginning of the 20th century, this was actually planned: read up on Ebenezer Howard and the Garden Cities movement.
One thing about suburbs modern people tend to forget, true history isn't really taught, is that they were originally developed by the streetcar companies starting in the 1890's. Of course, this was a different kind of suburb than the auto-centric ones we have today. The development by definition was "mixed use." Since people had to walk from the streetcar stop to their homes, all the shopping and commercial development was intermingled with the residences. It was an inherently more energy-efficient existence.
Communities in North America were already quite spread out before 1920, but they were pedestrian-oriented. Cities were a spider web of streetcar lines spreading out in all directions. A good illustrative example is this map of trolley lines in the Midwest of 1912:
http://www.pccmph.com/images/
int...terurbanmap.jpg
Atrios,
Are you kidding? I thought you were an economist. The reason we have suburbia the way we have it and it isn't going to change substantively anytime soon is because it is in the interest of developers to do what they do. Not in the long term interest of developers, but since when did the typical developer care about anything long term? That's all suburbia is about today as it was 100 years ago when it all began. You can read about it in "Streetcar Suburbs", fine book that can be found in any good library.
Housing bubble.
20% of our economy runs on the homebuilding industry.
So in a debt-economy, when the bubble bursts...
Kunstler's a crank
Hmmm, I can have 2 bedrooms in NYC for 1.5 million dollars.
Or I can have 4 bedrooms, a basement bar with room for my pool table, wine cellar, a home office, formal living and dining, decent kitchen, 1 acre, 4 miles from downtown Saratoga Springs, for $300K (well, I paid $145K for it in 2001).
Sure, I wish I could walk out of my house to a local store to get the paper and milk or whatever. Or have a restaurant/bar scene within stumbling distance. Unfortunately, I have to get in the car. But all those 3-10 mile round trips to go shopping, they won't cost me $1.5 million in gas over the life of my home.
I would have liked to buy closer to downtown, where I could walk to/from the bars/restaurants/cultural centers, and I looked hard for something. But again, 1/2 the house and 1/2 the land would have cost twice as much, and that was out of my range at the time.
Besides, I like grass, gardens, trees, decks, and quiet. I like my Weber grills. I like that my golf and tennis club is a mile down the road, and that it has a pool.
Suburbia is an excellent choice for some people. As much as my fianceé and I liked her brownstone in downtown Albany, within walking distance of so many good locations to eat, drink, etc., she was happier than a pig in shit when she moved in with me, and had garage space. No shoveling 2 feet of snow from around the car so you can get to work at 7:30AM. No Snow Emergencies, where one side of the street is shutdown for cleaning, so an already crowded city has HALF the parking for everyone. No carrying groceries for 3 blocks because of the lack of parking. The ability to idle the car while you're getting ready in the morning without it getting stolen, so it's not 10° below zero the first 10 minutes you're sitting in it.
Oh, and most cities are grimy, noisy, shitholes.
No problem with anything you said -- to live in either one of the two cities that are near me would take more than half my salary -- plus as a single female, I like living in a really safe area -- but I will note that one of the problems with the suburban Lawn Fetish is that it's an environmental nightmare. And anyone who falls for it is part of the problem.
I live in a small town that is rapidly becoming a suburb, much to my chagrin. Having started as a small town, everything I need is either walking distance or a very short drive. There is good public trans. including the commuter train I take to work every day. My backyard is woodland, not manicured lawn. It's quiet and safe and there is lots of green.
Downside: All this prettiness, and its proximity to two major cities, has made it too attractive to developers, who are overrunning the once-farmland with huge, hideos McMansions. It's horrible. Every day a new development goes up. People who live here are being priced out.
Oh, yeah, and it takes me two hours EACH way to get to/from work.
There are no easy answers.
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