I know they can do this, I just don’t think they should do this. I think it is wrong for a group of people to come together and try to prevent others from mving in the area or attempt to raise the price for others who want to move intot the area.
No, corporations respond to the desires of people. Corporations don’t make money unless they supply a product that people want. If developers are selling the houses you so despise, that means that people are buying them. You simply don’t like the choices other people are making about how to spend their own money.
You have the right to say how your property is developed. You don’t have the righ to tell someone else how his property should be developed. It’s not your property. It’s a pretty simple concept that’s been lost in this nation. We have a bunch of busybodies who want to force everyone else to live life according to the busybodies’ desires.
You, in fact, should. Let other people do with their property as they desire. If they somehow use their property to hurt you, then you have an issue. Simply disliking how their house looks or how they have cut down their trees is not harming you.
To what limit though. There should be guidelines to what can be put up. I would be rather pissed if someone put an 11 story high-rise next to me or decided to build a rendering plant next door.
There was some annoyance at the guy who bought a property behind me, got a permit to build a three story building and surreptitiously tried to stick a fourth story on. (Don’t ask me how he thought he could get away with it.)
I think that there is room for development and planning as well. Developers run the gamut from fairly respectable to incredibly shady as to planning commissions.
For better or for worse, most people who can afford it want to live in suburbia. As long as it is enconomically feasible for them to do so, they will. Corporations aren’t brainwashing the masses into wanting a larger home, people want that on their own. As long as the demand is there, the exurbs will continue to be built. However, if I buy into an area where the zoning says that one house will be built per acre, I will be rather upset if someone tries to build high density housing next to me.
Everyone who idealizes farming communities and rural agricultural areas and so on should come out to live or otherwise spend substantial amounts of time in the Dakotas, eastern Montana (no farther west than 100 miles east of Lincoln), and Wyoming. Come and experience this place, especially in towns like Chinook and Big Sandy and Browning. Come and drive five hours at highway speeds on two- and four-lane highways to the nearest city that has what even looks like what you’d call suburbs. Come to the towns where there is one station on the radio if you’re lucky, no book stores, no coffee shops, no Chinese restaurants, and no way of getting the staples of life without shopping in one of the Big Evil Big Boxes two-three hours down the road.
That, or stop talking about rural culture as if it actually existed.
I’m not asking you to … perhaps you should be asking someone else?
I hate that people in the city can’t get good local food.
I hate that people in the suburbs can’t get to social services or buy a pint of milk without a car.
I hate that farmers can’t make a good honest living at it.
The system is busted. It’s all busted, and it’s not the fault of people living in any of those areas who are doing what they need to do to live a peaceful and productive life.
Let’s not reinforce urban/rural divisions where they don’t need to be. My issue is with institutions (particularly governments and governmentagencies) that enable unsustainable development at the expense of families, farms, and communities. We all suffer from this.
Well, you complained about people coming into your city, or developing their own land. So, what do you expect those of us in rural areas to do, exactly?
I live in the middle of nowhere. It sucks, but it’s where my job is. Either things have to come to me, or I have to go to the things. Either way, someone is bitching about me.
An ironic flipside to this thread: My closest friend used to live in Midtown Atlanta (from the Gay southern Latin phrase meaning “where God lives”), an extremely popular area with gays and with “dual income no kids” couples and even a few families. It’s very densely populated Inside-the-Perimeter (ITP) area of Atlanta close to the CBD. He lived in a Truman/Eisenhower era apartment complex was across from Ansley Mall, a large series of strip malls with a couple of supermarkets, the obligatory Starbucks, bookstores, Pier 1, gyms, restaurants, porn shop, bars (gay and straight), and all else you’d expect from the neighborhood’s demographics. There are easily several thousand people who live in walking distance of Ansley Mall.
He’s furious because his former apartment complex, the apartment complex that was next to his, and Ansley Mall itself has all been purchased (for a huge amount of course) and is scheduled to be demolished once leases expire or are bought out in order to build condos. This is not the suburbs or the exurbs but the urbs, keep in mind.
The people of the area are furious because, among other reasons, “The reason we live here is that everything we need (groceries, books, porn, food, etc.) is in walking distance at Ansley Mall! Now we’re going to have to drive in Atlanta traffic to get what we moved to this area because we could walk to! We might as well live Outside-the-Perimeter (OTP) in Stone Mountain or Dunwoody or Indian Creek!” (From my understanding, moving OTP is to Atlanta urbanites not unlike moving to Brooklyn is to Manhattanites- something they just really don’t want to do in spite of the “more space for less money” incentive.)
So, at least in one area of Mid-Town Atlanta the desirability of urban housing is, weirdly, causing a suburban move. And I’m sure this isn’t an isolated instance.
My sister lives down there, and my brother-in-law, from his home comfortably ensconced OTP, mind you, said to me once “There’s no intelligent life outside the perimeter.”
Kind of the way Manhattanites view the bridge-and-tunnel crowd, it seems.
And you want to change this regardless of what people in the suburbs actually want?
Let me give you a hint, because I live ‘in the suburbs’: I don’t want somebody coming in from the outside and determining that my life would be better if I could walk to Whole Foods or what the hell ever is popular with the ‘in tune with nature, do-good’ crowd today.
I chose to live here because it’s not right next to all that shit, but it’s close enough that buying groceries doesn’t take a day.
Leave my suburb alone. I don’t want to live in a 30 story building shoe-box apartment with no parking lot. The people who do, will move into one!