It is affecting me.
Actually the whole emotional validation of choice aspect is utterly irrelevant to me.
Well then that’s good considering this thread is about sprawl and not the suburbs. Notice the thread title (sub)urban sprawl. That means suburban and urban that’s why there are parantheses, and why I went to painstaking effort to differentiate the definitions of sprawl and suburb though you like everyone else has ignored me again and again because for you its more about lifestyle validation than discussing the actual issue. I couldn’t care less about your lifestyle validation. So your examples of having to drive in the city are still examples of the problems with sprawl, and not counter examples as you are putting them forward here.
When I lived in a small town in New Mexico my house was broken into more than it has been in all of my New York City apartments combined.
What does this have to do with sprawl exactly? Would you clarify that for me? Again I remind you this isn’t suburban vs urban, it’s sprawl.
Because cost and carbon footprint are not corrolated.
pquote]Cities are more expensive to live in (and would be even more expensive if the population pressure wasn’t eased by the existence of the suburbs). That means if you want to maintain the same standards of living for the population, you need to pay them more. For example, teachers in New York City earn a median salary of about $55,000 per year, as compared to about $44,000 for the national average (and I’ll bet the average is even lower if we excluded all the large cities). That means it costs more to educate children in the city, or the children get worse education because they can afford fewer teachers.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t see how this is meaningful. How much do they get paid in Seattle, DC, Baltimore, Houston, Miami, Phoenix etc…? Yes, New York City has a higher cost of living, but as teachers salaries are paid out of property taxes and our property taxes are lower than the suburbs around, I don’t know what you’re driving at.
No it isn’t.
Yes, it’s heavily subsidized, just like the roads you drive on. Again, I fail to see your point.
Efficiency and desire have nothing to do with one another. Yes, I do have more than I need, and yet my footprint is likely much lower than yours.
Sounds like a horrible place to live. New York is nothing like that.
If I owned a bike I’d go for a bike ride around here without a problem. I wish I owned a bike, my last one was stolen and I can’t afford another one yet.
I’m 31 with a wife and child. If you’d actually read my arguments it would be helpful. You guys are all assaulting me on this validation of choice tip you aren’t even discussing sprawl. It’s incredibly personal for you.
I understand perfectly. It’s a problem with sprawl that you cannot walk where you need to go, but an even bigger problem is that people won’t even walk when they can. A quarter mile isn’t a lot of walking, so it’s really sad that we are all so weak and frail that saying people should walk a quarter mile instead of drive it is met with such derision.
The issues that I see with modern suburbia as opposed to more traditional growth patterns* are thus:
- Lack of meaningful transportation options.
Don’t want to drive anywhere and everywhere? Too bad, there might not be a sidewalk to get you to the deli 300 meters down the road from your work. Even if there is, you are taking you life into you hands by trying to cross the 5 lane traffic sewer. Never mind if you are too young or too old to drive. Then you are dependent on friends or relatives to be your chaufer or you are a prisoner in your own home.
- Loss of farmland and open space.
I live in one of the denser areas of the country and we are approaching a point where many of the towns around here have almost no open space left in them. Since the end of WW2, the state’s population has about doubled, but the state’s land use has increased at a rate much higher than that (sorry I don’t have the actual stat on hand).
I’m of the school of thought that having farms and open space is better than having yet another cookie-cutter subdivision, not only because I like the availability of locally produced foods, but because farmland and open space has its own intrinsic value. Surely we don’t need new developments in far flung exurbs with little or no infrastructure when in most cases we have plenty of capacity further in toward the city centers.
- Loss of Commons
What I mean by this is loss of communal gathering places. Modern suburban existence minimizes them greatly. With the exception of parks and stores, there are no places where people meet and interact. I think of that famous picture of the victory celebration in Times Square after WW2; there is no place in post-war suburbia where something like that could happen today (to illustrate, I remember after 9-11 people hanging flags from highway overpasses). I can’t help but think that a big reason for the oft-lamented decline in civility and personal responsibility in our society is because we’ve enabled people to go though life in sort of a bubble where interacting with society at large is the exception rather than the rule.
*This doesn’t just mean New York City, there are plenty of small towns and cities that were built along traditional patterns (think Princeton, NJ or Evanston, IL)
The problem isnt SPRAWL then.
Its lazy people that dont want to walk very far.
Grip about that then.
YOU think people should walk. Most the people you’d have doing all the walking think differently.
And its not just walking. Walking takes TIME, lots of it compared to driving. You can easily cover 10 times the distance and a HUNDRED times the land area per unit of time by driving rather than walking. And if you are hauling young people, old people, or more than a bag of cheetos, or the weather is bad, driving pretty much becomes a no brainer.
If people WANT decent sized yards, things are GOING to be spread out. Thats just the way our space time works…
You know this doesnt happen in the burbs right? 
Well, then what the heck is SPRAWL anyway according to you?
If you spend much time walking or taking the subway its not sprawl, but if you spend the same amount of time driving is IS sprawl? Thats the impression I am getting from you.
Again, IMO you just dont like the idea of people using fuel to get around. Well, more fuel than you at least.
You realize this is almost complete hooey right? How much of NYC was gathered in Times Square for the WWII celebration? My guess would be whoever happened to be in Times Square when the announcement was made.
This is no different than a bunch of centrally located buildings in the burbs.
The problem IS sprawl.
They go hand in hand. The culture developed around the cult of the automobile and we adapted to suit. There was a time where walking was a reduction in status, now it’s less a reduction in status as it just laziness.
Yes, and their health suffers as a result. You have this idea that just because someone has an opinion that it’s valid. Some opinions are downright stupid. This is one of those cases. You are harping on it because for some reason you feel invalidated by my case against suburbia. I’m sorry you feel invalidated but I’m not going to change my position because you’re being a curmudgeon about it. Not to worry, I am in no position to force your suburb to change.
Well that’s fine, if you NEED to drive by all means have at it, but if the day is nice and you are only going 300 yards, then save some money on gas and health care and walk a little bit. But as **MichaelQReilly **pointed out, the problem in many cases is when suburbs are designed so that you couldn’t walk even if you wanted to.
It’s not just a matter of being spread out, but a matter of lack of public transit and sidewalks. We’ve all been to places like MichaelQReilly described where the store is within walking distance but you’d have to play Frogger to get to it because the walking infrastructure simply does not exist. So you are arguing all about your ‘rights’ to live the way you want to live, but what about the rights of people who live in your suburb but cannot drive for whatever reason?
His point is that there really are no centrally located buildings in the burbs that resemble a town square like that in most of the burbs. You live in an Eastern suburb so it’s likely that you have one, but in the cul de sac from horizon to horizon model out west and down south, you just don’t have that. This is why open air malls are becoming so attractive, they at least give a nod to city design.
You’re right; on the rare occasion that a major war against fascism is won, or there’s some other once-in-a-lifetime celebration, a city is a better place to celebrate it, if big crowds are your thing. But nobody ever said that cities didn’t provide things suburbs don’t. There’s no doubt that downtowns can do things suburbs cannot; but then, suburbs can do thing downtowns cannot. They have different functions. So what?
I can’t help but think we’re again diverging from the issue of whether suburbs are environmentall costly and what can be done about that, and again falling into the “I don’t like suburbs” bit. If you don’t like them, don’t live there. I don’t like lots of places, which is why I don’t live in them.
Actually, the big reason for this oft-lamented decline is that it’s all in the imagination of bitter old people. If suburbia caused such a phenomenon, one would expect it to be more prevalent in suburbs, but if people in cities are more civil than people outside cities that’s news to me. In fact, it’s bunkum anyway; people are just as civil and personally responsible as they will ever been and they’ll always be more or less the same. I’d remind you that in the pre-WWII era, before suburbs as we’re currently discussing them existed, it was vastly more common for grown men to punch each other out, to call minorities by words never used in polite company today, and any number of other appalling behaviours. Public drunkenness was more common. Every generation has its problems with manners.
Oh, now you’re just being ridiculous.
I do like New York, it’s a really cool and exciting city with more things to do than there is time to do them, but there’s bums all over the place and they have to close Central Park at night. There are lots of places in New York City no sane person would walk alone in after dark, and some I wouldn’t want to be alone in during the day. NYC still has a crime rate that in any city here would be considered a public emergency - New York’s violent crime rate is twice that of the city Sam lives in (which is, by Canadian standards, considered a violent city.) If you don’t see the panhandlers and aggressive thugs in NYC, you must spend very little time looking.
No, I know that it does.
Sprawl is how things are organized an inefficient use of the land, just building wherever there is space to build rather than actually planning around a civic design.
Well, you’re looking at effects and not causes, but yes, that is an accurate description of the effects of sprawl.
Right, you think this is all a personal grudge, because it’s all about personal validation for you. But no, it’s more than just being about fuel though that’s an important part of it. I also think people should use LED light bulbs which would reduce their footprint AND their bills significantly.
I don’t see sprawl as such a bad thing per se… I am a bit of a contrarian when it comes to urban density. The less density you have, the less your resources are likely to suffer. You may not get old-growth greenspace but a city park or a row of lawns is better than rows of high-rises.
The problem with sprawl is that it causes horrendous traffic between suburbs and the cities, and the communities themselves have no walkable neighborhoods. The cities get trashed through heavy use from people who don’t live there, don’t pay local taxes, and don’t care about the effects. People in the suburbs don’t get out and meet one another spontaneously except in carefully choreographed car-centric interactions at church, little league, etc.
There are many ways people could have walkable suburbs and use their cars less without giving up convenience, independence, or autonomy. But it’s been this way so long that nobody can even imagine it being otherwise.
I realize no such thing. Tell me, where in modern sprawl (besides stores or if you go to the park) do you encounter strangers on a regular basis the way people in a city do every time they walk down the street.
The point about Times Square isn’t that the whole city was there. It’s that traditional growth produces communal “meeting places” that are almost non-existent in modern sprawl.
Maybe you try debating the subject like an adult instead of personalizing it as if any criticism of suburban sprawl was a personal affront. No one is asking you to agree with mwas or forcing you move to the West Village.
I don’t have a personal stake one way or the other. I’ve lived everywhere from Manhattan to rural-ish suburbs and everywhere in between. I’m not going to argue that one is objectively better than another based on my personal preferences. There are clearly pros and cons to both living styles.
There is, however, a legitimate concern that because of the high energy usage in the suburbs (and I’ve seen enough literature that point seems self-evident to me, so please correct me if it is not), that they are not sustainable if fuel prices dramatically increase long-term. It seemed like kind of a big deal when gas was at $4 a gallon.
With the exception of the mega-mall, the burbs don’t have centrally located buildings. At least not centralized in the sense that they provide a common area for people to congregate. And even when buildings are “centralized”, they are really just near each other, but separated by a quarter mile of parking lot.
Even if they wanted to, it’s not practical. The store might only be a half mile away. But that might be a half mile down a 6 lane highway having to deal with high speed traffic, exhaust and whatnot.
A list of the safest and most dangerous cities, NYC is not on either list.
If you sort the table by violent crime rate New York is in the bottom third of cities listed. Just below Bakersfield California, also lower than Milwaukee, Wichita, Portland Oregon and many other much much smaller towns.
It’s WAY down the list for forcible rape, near the bottom actually and way down for Manslaughter as well.
Yes there are bums but they aren’t EVERYWHERE in EVERY neighborhood ALL THE TIME. I’ve seen bums in the suburbs too.
I see panhandlers and aggressive thugs, but not so much in my neighborhood. Though your view of what is an aggressive thug might be quite different than mine. The guys hanging out on the street corner being loud and boisterous might count as aggressive thugs to you, to me they count as people being in the streets and actually keeping them safer because they care about their neighborhood, so I’ll deal with the loud music on a Friday and Saturday night.
So maybe Canada is safer overall than the US, but New York is one of the safest big cities in the country.
Convention centers, libraries, and then there are parks & recreation facilities (which can include buildings full of stuff to do).
As has often been brought up in this thread, and, quite frankly, something New Yorkers like to brag about, is that New York is a rather unique city. A lot of things can happen in New York that really can’t happen in most other cities in the United States.
In 1964 Kitty Genovese was raped and murdered with maybe a dozen or more people who had witnessed various parts of the 30 minute ordeal but did very little to help her. New York attained a fair reputation for being crime ridden and having a population that was callous. New York has certainly changed a bit from the 60s and 70s but let’s not pretend like a lack of civility in the U.S. has anything to do with the suburbs.
Odesio
Walking past someone while ignoring them is hardly what I’d call an encounter. From my experience that’s basically how one encounters a stranger in a large urban area.
no it’s not.
Magiver, how do you (and anyone else who’s arguing otherwise) answer the problem that externalities offer your defense of the suburbs?
Really, it’s up to each individual community to determine what kind of urban planning they want. If a place thinks it can attract people through lots of single use development, not spending tax money on sidewalks and bike lanes, and very big lots, all the more power to it. I’m genuinely fine with it, because whether you live there or not is all personal preference.
My issue is that suburbs offload many of their costs on the rest of the world. Surely you recognize that, if carbon were priced more rationally, suburbs would lose out vis a vis urban areas.
All I’m asking for is fair market mechanisms so that people who choose to live in very car-dependent, energy intense environments have to bear their fair costs instead of offloading them on others. If they want to continue doing that (as many will undoubtedly do), all the more power to them. Individual choice and all that.