I just noticed that you’re in Europe. I’ve never been 
, but I have the impression that walkability in the form that you describe it is much more common in cities there. Is this true? Please don’t say yes or I may have to abandon all rational courses of action and move there tomorrow.
(I realize that just because your identifying info says you’re in Denmark doesn’t necessarily mean you’re an expert on European city design…any insights would be appreciated…)
Fuck rural America, these goddamn exurbs are draining the life out of what really matters – urban America!
Um, sorry but it’s true. I’ve very rarely had a need for a car in all the places I’ve lived here. Of course some places are better than others. Denmark has loads of bicycle-related concessions, such as bike paths. Loads of people use them, even when the weather sucks, but I prefer to take the bus then.
I could walk to the center here, but that’d take about 20 minutes. 7 on a bike which is very doable. But you have to live in a smallish town to be able to walk most places you need to go. But mass transit is generally much better on the continent.
Walkability is directly tied to urban transit.
Something I loved about Toronto was that in the downtown area, I could walk out the door, hop on a bus or subway, and be somewhere really nifty in a few minutes. The urban transit meant that I was effectively walking with seven-league boots.
Without ready access to continuous bus or subway service, such as in the burbs where busses might come by only occasionally, or not at all latenight, or not anywhere close to where you live, walkability is lost.
Sorry I didn’t get here earlier.
I think a lot of “sprawl” - both in terms of the size of homes and where they are built, is attributable to artifically low energy prices. Indirect government subsidies range from road construction and maintenance, military intervention to maintain access to energy, drilling on public lands… If folks had to pay for energy what most other countries pay, not so many folks would be building huge, energy inefficient homes in the sticks.
And big box stores are great for buying goods cheaply. So if acquiring inexpensive products is a primary goal, well - they are great. But I’m not sure they - and the trading practices that support them - are great for the quality of life of their employees, community, and the car reliance they encourage.
Today’s American lifestyle places a predominant value on consuming large amounts of cheap resources, and ammassing large amounts of consumer goods. And the exuban lifestyle if a grand reflection of that.
(Sorry if this thread is too old; I’ve been out of town.)
Are you serious? Are you a Christian? What does the name of a church have to do with anything? Or the aesthetics of the building in which people worship? God doesn’t live in the hearts of those who step foot in strip malls?
A building with a steeple is certainly more expensive than a strip mall rental with a neon sign. Maybe these churches give their money to the poor instead of buying a building.
The point (if I remember, it was so long ago) was to make fun of the crowd that laments about “traditional American values” while they live in strip-malled exurbs where they have to drive everywhere. Meanwhile the targets of their pontification often live in traditional communities in places like Massachusetts and Vermont, where single family houses are close enough together that people can walk to school and shops. I find it ironic to be lectured about tradition by some jerk in a polyester suit and white shoes preaching out of a televised mega church in a strip mall next to Sam’s Club, whose interpretation of the bible is at odds with those nice Unitarians, Anglicans, and Methodists that founded the country.
Few of those preachers on TV speak from “strip center” churches.
Houston’s Second Baptist has a TV presence around the country. Two of the newer “campuses” are in former Cinemark theaters. But the larger ones are huge–even though their architecture was apparently inspired by insurance company regional headquarters.
www.second.org/global/default.aspx
Pastor Ed Young is well known in Houston for his smarmy TV ads. He’s also known as Tom Delay’s pastor.
exurbs and the destruction of rural america is, some say, what the residents want. But in reeality I think it is what the developers and those who like the returns of REIT’s want. Tell me, how effective is a volunteer village planning commission in protecting the identity and natural resources within its limits?
Who attends the meetings and knows who the players are? What are the odds that a complacent nostalgic populace can really g up against a professional developer with a network of bankers, architects, and business’s all vying for the develpment of commercial, industrial and residential sectors.
i agree that too many people like their cheap shit in great quantities and they like to get it while the gettings good & to hell with the 7th generation. Darwinism by consumerism.
Fuckin A man. I know my neighbors now well enough that I can recognize them by sight and have said ‘Hello’ and ‘How are you?’ to them. That’s … as much as I really want to know them.
I didn’t develop that attitude in a city, either. I developed it in the rural, tiny, everybody-knows-everybody coal patch of 300 that I grew up in. Sometimes you actually want to take a shit without your neighbors knowing what color it is!
I could give a shit about sidewalks. I have no interest in carrying my groceries a couple of miles on foot, or spending a half hour walking to a restaurant I can get to in five minutes by car. I like where I live because there’s enough breathing room to not feel like a sardine, but I’m not in that rural hell where all my neighbors knew every god damn thing about me and I had no privacy.
I drive almost 60 miles round trip for work every day. I spend the forty minutes driving home letting go of the day. I don’t want to live three feet from my job, and I like my isolated little bubble of transportation. It stops when I want it to, it goes when I want it to, and it makes detours if I feel like popping off to Wal-Mart or Target or any other place on my way home to get some groceries, some DVDs, or whatever. I don’t have to worry about when my car is leaving if I want to have dinner here with people from work. And when I get home, I don’t have my neighbor opening their door to ask why I was late, like I did in rural hell.
I don’t want to walk to the grocery store every day because I can’t carry enough home with me to live on for a week. I tend to grocery shop once a week or every other week. It takes a couple of hours, and then on any day in between I can decide something like ‘I’d like mango chicken tonight’ and not have to go to the freaking store to carry home a mango and couple pieces of chicken. I like that I can save money buying things frozen in bulk instead of having to get the more expensive, not frozen package that’s smaller. I’d rather pay 5 for 3 pounds of chicken than pay 3 for 1 pound. Walking to the grocery? Fuck it.
Give me my back-deck culture, my car and my apartment. You can keep the bus, and the walking to the market, and the living like a human termite colony in some monstrous high rise apartment building because it’s more ‘practical and efficient’ to save space that way. I want three trees a patch of grass, a Target within a 5 minute drive, and my car parked outside. I lived in the city. I lived in the country. I left them both for the ‘suburbs’.
It’s what I wanted for all of the 18 years I lived in the coal patch, and the five years I spent living on the dirt road in the middle of nowhere. I wanted a grocery store less than 20 miles away, and a movie theater, and something other than fucking corn fields and cows. If they had built those things there, I would still be there.
I left because most of the people who think it’s so quaint and lovely to live in rural have never had to actually deal with the practicalities of living there - it’s not a damn Norman Rockwell painting. It’s hard, and it sucks.
Holy crap! I have to echo miss elizabeth: Your wife owns Knit/Purl? Too cool. Looking at the Web site is . . . let’s just say the term “eye candy” springs to mind. Great, great yarn selection.
Fuck, that’s cold, man. Only 2 percent of the population might be involved directly in farming, but nearly 20 percent of it is involved in some aspect of the agriculture industry (farming, manufacture, slaughter, etc.) – that’s nearly 60 million people. 20 percent of the United States’ gross domestic product comes from agriculture. Are you just saying “screw you” to millions of people? Do you want the agricultural industry to be taken over by a corporate mentality, as in the chicken farm example stated upthread?
I had to laugh when I read this. My sister and her husband both flaming liberals, vote Democrat no matter who is running etc. Moved from a small town out to a large lot in the country in a small subdivision on FARMLAND, then they were all in a snit when someone wanted to subdivide the farm across the road. They drive 30 miles round trip to a bigger city to work,(in the morning and evening the road is bumper to bumper leaving town to the 'burbs) drive to same city to shop at the larger stores so they don’t have to pay higher prices at the smaller town closer to them.
They have theirs that’s all that matters
I love it when people blame developers for this. You do realize, don’t you, that developers are out there to make money, right? And to make money, you have to build things that people want? If developers were building houses and buildings that people didn’t want to buy, they would go broke. You can condemn people’s taste all you want, but the evidence is pretty clear that developers are delivering a product desired by millions of people.
Well they are building things people dont want. Of ccourse they are there to make money, and sometimes they want to create a need where there is really none in order to keep pulling in the dough hand over fist.
Try and tell me about the desires of the people for a local 691 unit mobile home park that the developers said a market survey determined a need for? Yeah right, the park plan was ramrodded thru a rural planning commission under the threat of a lawsuit from the developers. Now the developer has returned to the PC, admitting their market survey was a bust as they have sold less than 30 lots in the mobile home park after 3 years. There was no actual need in this rural community for a humongous mobile home park, but the developer had a dream on how to turn $2000/acre into million dollar ventur that would only beneift himself and the landowner. His development would have sucked resources out of the township and returned very little in the way of local taxes. That is not what the people wannted, and said so loud and clear. So that is why they (the developrs) threatened to sue.
So, we have the clearcutting of a oak pine forest and the dredging, and ditching of a minor wetland less than 5 acres (unprotected) the installatin of a road that goes nowhere.
This PC now has a request before them to rezone again that same plot of land by the same developers who are trying to create a need for a different kind of housing development. They are trying to create a need where none exists in order to sell their product, they are not responding to what the locals want.
Why should I care about that 2%? After all, all those truckers, meat packers, producers of equipment for agri-business, etc., are all going to have jobs no matter who owns the farm. It isn’t like farms are going to disappear any time soon.
Are we talking about the same corporate mentality that brought us affordable automobiles, personal computers, and access to porn at home 24 hours a day? Well, yeah.
Marc
Sounds like the market worked quite well here. The developer built something people don’t want and now he is sitting with a huge amount of units that are draining his money. I doubt there will be other people going down the same road. See how that works? When developers build something that people don’t want, they lose money. When they build things people want, they make money.
The desires of what people want to buy is not settled by some local planning commission or zoning board. It is settled by the market. The government should stay out of it.
So what? Is it your property? If not, then you have no right to tell the owner of that property what to do with it. If you desired to leave it in its former state, then you should have bought it.
Oh, so the people who already bought houses in that area should get to tell people who may want to buy houses in that area that they should not be able to do so? What a crock. “The locals” should have no say on whether or not new people get to move in. If a developer thinks that there is sufficient demand for new houses, he should build them. If he misjudges, he goes broke. That’s how it should be.
Why I hate sprawl:
My taxes subsidize sprawl, as the folks who live in the suburbs drive through my city every day, polluting the air and putting pressure on my municipal infrastructure, and not paying any taxes in this municipality. So they get the benefits of the city without paying the costs. I directly pay the costs of their convenience not only through my taxes, but also by breathing their emissions and dodging their automobiles.
Sprawl absolutely destroys natural heritage (this part of the world is prime agricultural farmland, and we’re paving it over at a rapid pace - I hope we don’t run out of prime farmland, but with climate changing and soil being degraded, who knows?) and the ecological function of the land (such as storing and filtering water for the city - a task that would take billions to reproduce if we tried to do it mechanically, which we will have to do once the Moraine is screwed up. Trees sequester carbon, reduce pollution, stabilize soil and make the local weather nicer.) and other things that some of us value (like habitats for species that are going extinct).
in many suburbs there is literally nothing to do that doesn’t involve a car, which means kids can’t go to community centres or libraries, because there aren’t any locally
suburbs are entirely inaccessible to me because I can’t drive - I can’t even visit there, let alone contemplate living there.
The problem is, in this area, there is only one way to live in the suburbs - cul-de-sac, car-dependent subdivisions. There is no choice, because that is the only way developers build things (because it’s the most efficient way for them to make money).
I have never met anyone who wants to live in a car-dependent subdivision. They want things like space and privacy and good schools, but I am fairly certain that if such things were available in suburban communities that did have amenities you could walk to, they would be commercially viable. But because of the politics of the region there has been no reason for developers to depart from their straightforward and extremely profitable strategy of land speculation and overnight cookie-cutter houses.
The reason it works is because of cheap oil, and the industries of developers and their political backers who have profited nicely because of it all. If/when the price of oil starts rising, it will be totally unsustainable.
You may have a point with this, except that the people who do come into the city pay some sort of taxes. If they eat in the city, purchase anything at stores, etc., they usually pay some form of sales tax. Some cities have their own sales tax on top of the state sales tax in the U.S. Plus, in the U.S. most suburburbanites pay taxes to the state where the urban center is located. States then funnel money into the urban center. It’s not a direct exchange, but suburbanite tax money is going to pay for urban benefits. So, at least here in the U.S., it’s not quite the situation you describe.
If the farmland was so valuable, it would not be sold to developers. As far as ecological functions, we’re not in any danger of running out of wild spaces. In both the U.S. and Canada there are vast tracts of wild land that have plenty of trees and plenty of habitat for whatever species you think may be going extinct.
So the suburbs don’t have any community centers or libraries where you live? At least in the suburbs I’ve visited, they have much better community centers and libraries than in the cities. I’d much rather send a kid to a suburban DC library rather than the god-awful DC city libraries that exist.
That’s a problem of your own creation.
If there was a demand from people for other houses, a developer would do it. You really think that developers are so stupid as to pass up the chance to make money by addressing this pent-up demand you claim exists?
Again, if the demand were there developers would do it. However, it is most likely that the most economical way to build houses is as you describe. People want to have affordable houses, so they must make trade-offs.
Perhaps, and if so, the market will take care of the problem.
And its a pity, when the erosion of the rural landscape is left as glaring failure on the part of some multimillcorporation, whose investors only see a small dip in returns.
Contrary to shutting the door on development, the locals do have say in the development of a long term master plan that designates land uses. And the locals can determine which developers are ethical, respected in the industry, offer a quality product, and acknowledge the culture of the community where they want to do business.
Who is telling anyone what they want to buy? corporations seeking growth are telling people what they want to buy. But I do have a vested interest in large scale changes to property that may affect my property values, local schools and roads. I do have a right to publicly oppose or support any development in my township. Dont tell me to stay out of it!
And the opposite is also true. Smug city-dwellers look out at the rural land and say, “Oh, I want you people to have to bear the cost of keeping this land pristine and perfect so that I can come look at it. And don’t you dare try to have any amenities.”
Seriously, why am I supposed to go without conveniences for your benefit?