That wiki definition is pretty much exactly what I’m talking about. It might be in the city or outside the city, it might be mixed use or it might be strictly residential. People might work there or they might work in the city. It’s mostly single family houses, which leaves out both parts of large cities and farmland but not much else. Sure,most of the country is suburbia under that definition but that definition ties together a lot of places that have only one thing in common - single family houses. But there are a lot of differences between an area of single family houses on half acre lots in a strictly residential area and one of single family homes on 2000 sq foot lots in a mixed use area and calling them both “suburbs” makes the word almost useless. Whether you believe sprawl is a problem or not, an area of 2000 square foot lots where people can work close to home is not going to have the same pros and cons as a strictly residential community of half-acre lots where most people drive twenty or thirty miles to work. And it doesn’t really matter what the actual pros and cons are- those two areas will be almost opposite of each other and people who like one won’t like the other.
So you can see the folly of applying a one-size-fits-all solution to the problems of our core cities. The problems of Chicago aren’t necessarily shared by Dallas, Detroit or Denver.
No, but it is disproportionately white, suburban and rural males over 40 who take the positions adopted by my interlocutors in this thread. One can always find exceptions, of course, but a random sample of young urban Latinas is unlikely to dig up many who rant in this Glenn Beckesque manner. Again, it’s more like what Neal Stephenson observed, way back in 1992:
There may be some isolated truth to that but there are for most stereotypes. There is a word for people that make bold assumptions about individuals based on their race or the socioeconomic status they have but I suppose that only applies when it is directed against approved groups in the Progressive orthodoxy. All I saw was a hate message that could be rewritten in similar form to apply to any stereotype. Is that really what it is all about?
You and BrainGlutton are either going to get married or end up hating each other. He has been our radical Progressive whipping boy for years but now you are showing up trying to outdo him in the most outlandish way possible. This can’t end well.
You’d better believe it only applies then.
I am already married. 
BG does have his(?) head on straight though.
Not sure what you mean by “the most outlandish way possible”.
Also, I didn’t really just show up. I have been more active recently, but I was first an active member of the SDMB when it was on AOL back in the 90s; and I was also active on AFCA for a couple years around Y2K. I think I first posted on this web version of the SDMB about a decade ago.
Of course it does, and you know it.
Remember, it’s the proposal cited by the OP that would impose suburban white governance upon the inner cities, not the opponents in this thread.
Which isn’t a bad thing-hence why I support it. The irony is that this will give the white surburbanite bourgeois class the opportunity to correct all they denounce about corruption in the inner cities.
True.
Your apparent racism is refreshingly open. However, if you looked at the election returns you would have noticed that there are more Republican govenors than Democrat governors and more legislative houses with a Republican majority than a Democrat majority. You’ve probably noticed by now that only the U.S. Senate has a Democrat majority while the U.S. House has a majority of Republicans. While a majority of the people who bothered to vote voted for Obama, all other political races are local.
Obama may have said that the sprawl is over but I don’t see how he, or you, are going to force people to live in Big City when they’ve chosen not to.
What are Obama’s, or his smiling and nodding minions, chances of using eminent domain or a national guard or a private/government security forces to meld the 25,000 cities in the U.S.A. into 12,500 or fewer cities? Or will all of Obama’s subjects willing submit to giving their tax dollars, not to the city of their choice, but to their new Big City of Obama’s choosing?
Due to the preponderence of rural Red states.
A look at the results will shew that the majority of votes were cast for the Democrats in the races for the House of Representatives but due to the concentration of Democrats and Republicans and some gerrymandering, this was not reflected in the seat totals.
Actually if everyone eligible to vote, voted Democrats would have a far larger majority.
Obviously these reforms will not be brought about my government edicts at the point of a bayonet but rather by gradual reforms, first adopted by certain cities, to be followed by others as they see that the system works better. I doubt the President is much concerned over this issue to be frank.
Calling me racist is absurd, but to be racist in the way Glenn Beck uses the word–that I will take as a compliment.
I also noticed that Democratic House candidates got more votes than did Republicans, just inefficiently distributed; and that the demographic trends clearly favour Democrats. How long do you think you can hold out? The oxygen tank brigade you call your base isn’t getting any younger, you know. 
In some areas, there already is, in effect, a consolidated city government in the form of a state government. For example, I would guess that in Massachusetts, the majority of people live in the Boston Metro Area. (Probably in Rhode Island, an expanded Providence would cover the entire state.)
Fundamentally, how is the State of Massachusetts different from an expanded Boston?
The main difference, it seems to me, is that advocates of expanded cities want to expand the lines enough to increase the tax base and take control of the better schools and city services, but not so much that the core city dwellers lose control over the government. In short, these sorts of proposals strike me as basically a resource grab.
Hell, I live just south of Richardson (like a mile), and the ONLY way I can tell is that the street signs go from being standard white on green to being white on blue with some stylized “R” for Richardson in the lower-right corner.
I have no idea where the Garland border is, even though I know it’s nearby as well- I don’t think the street signs change color. I also couldn’t tell you where Addison begins and ends, except that I think the Farmers Branch signs are maroon, while Addison’s aren’t, and I work in Addison!
I’ll also ante up and explain from a personal perspective why people might want to move to the suburbs. I’m a 40 year old white homeowner with a wife and a pre-school age son. I live within the City of Dallas, albeit in the northeast part that was once considered to be the suburbs around 1970.
What I see from my perspective is a city government that is not terribly responsive to the needs and wants of residents like myself, and seems to be more concerned with the poor and indigent. So from my perspective, I pay a lot more tax to the city than I get back; I can’t even get those assholes to fix the broken sidewalk in front of the house where the water meter apparently leaks because there’s no money in the budget to fix roads and sidewalks, but by God, they’ll pay for poor people’s house renovations in Fair Park, or they’ll put in rec-centers in south Dallas, or any number of other low-income projects that don’t benefit me, mine or anyone else in my neighborhood, except maybe the Section 8 jerks that seem to blight my area of town (yes, 2 of the highest crime areas in Dallas are the 2 big apartment concentrations nearby, according to the DMN)
So that being said, I can totally understand people who want to move to Frisco or Plano or one of the other more affluent suburbs- they both get a marginally better say in how they’re governed and how their tax money’s spent, and more importantly, the community’s values reflect their own- they’ll get their sidewalks fixed when they’re broken (a buddy reported his much less dire sidewalk issues in Frisco and they fixed it within a week).
School districts here in Texas are independent, meaning that they frequently overlap with municipalities and counties, but are not beholden to anyone but the state.
What this means is that school districts are another variable that people have to deal with; not many people want their kids going to DISD, because it seems like 90% of the focus is on preventing poor students from dropping out or getting pregnant, not on actual academic success. Therefore they go to Richardson, Plano, Frisco, or one of the other nearby school districts, where again, the priorities are more in line with what they want.
I think the “suburban lifestyle” tends to be a result of this kind of thing rather than a goal in it’s own right.
Why wouldn’t people with the resources not move farther out to do this? In my case, it’s not decided yet- my wife and I don’t really want the “suburban lifestyle”, but nor do we want our kids going to a primarily low-income school with 90% of the kids on free lunches either; the values of their classmates and the focus of the school is going to be different from ours.
Vastly different, unless you consider an “expanded Boston” to be the whole eastern half of the state. But that’s the point, the eastern half of MA is a complex arrangement of bedroom communities, small towns, agricultural areas, centuries old towns, small cities, resort towns, and established suburbs. Yes, they all have a relationship with Boston, but they aren’t part of Boston. And the entire western part of the state is very different socially, politically, and economically.
I grew up in a suburb outside of Boston that still has a town meeting to handle local government. Why would that town want to join a metropolitan Boston government where their local voice would be completely lost?
Sorry, I missed this comment. But I agree completely, it’s essentially “we want to reallocate your money to serve our needs, but we’re going to be careful not to let you have any significant political power”.
And a good deal of it is simple busybodying. Some folks hate it when other people don’t do as they are told. Of course that’s not confined only to folks on the left, but ISTM to be at least as common there as on the right.
Right-wing busybodies care who you fuck. Left-wing busybodies care where you live, what you drive, what you eat, how much money you make compared to someone else, what history your children are taught, if you own any guns, and are you wearing your helmet.
Regards,
Shodan
Right wingers don’t care what history children are taught? Really? Have you not heard about the controversies in Texas? Have you not noticed Bill Bennett and Newt Gingrich writing history books for schoolkids?
Let’s first of all remember that the situation described in the OP is not a “proposal”, but an extant reality, which the editorialist is bitterly bemoaning. And that board’s members are appointed by the Minnesota governor, making your objection moot. (It is true that **BG **seems to advocate putting them only under the aegis of the people who live in the MSP metro; maybe that is what you meant by “proposal”.)
You do realise this only strengthens the position that treating these as separate administrative entities does not make sense. (Where I live, cities/towns do not border each other, and there is plenty of farmland or forest between them.)
Of course you are.
Ah yes: those damn poor people, getting all the good stuff! They are so fucking lucky, aren’t they?
Your post just raises the same questions I keep asking but which your side seems to shy away from addressing directly. In fact, I’m tired of rephrasing them over and over, so I’ll just quote myself and ask again:
(1)
(2)
Well most of the Eastern half of the state is probably within the Boston Metropolitan Statistical Area
I agree with all of this. The point is that if you expanded Boston to include the entire Boston Metropolitan Area, you would probably end up with a government which is not too different from that of Massachusetts as a whole.
So one can ask why people would advocate for something which pretty much already exists.
And the answer (it seems to me) is that those who want to expand Boston don’t actually want to include the entire metro area. What they want is to expand the borders enough to fatten the tax base and gobble up better schools and city services – but without changing the current government all too much.
In short, a power and resource grab.
Probably they wouldn’t.
I don’t know how this got to right vs. left or what Obama wants to do or gerrymandered districts but unless it’s the position of the democratic party platform to eliminate suburbs by having larger cities annex them, all that other stuff is irrelevant.
And the reason no one responds to the outlandishly absurd scenario above is because it is just that. Not worth of response because it is so asininely stupid. You may as well suggest that unless cities can annex other cities then aliens will come from space and turn all the crickets into purple flying unicorns. It’s that pathetically stupid of an example. For the vast vast majority of all suburbs, the above has not played out and there is no annexing.
This idea is an effort to grow government, and acquire more taxes. Par for the course.