Wow, that’s quite a bit to lay at the feet of my humble profession. I had no idea I was so powerful. I promise to use my powers only for good from here on out.
Childhood obesity is probably just as likely to be a result of them sitting on their collective asses watching TV or playing on the computer as it is from living in the suburbs. Suburban lots are typically much larger and have much more yard - you know, for swing sets and running around and playing.
The entire point of new urbanist thought is to create communities, not just housing developments. Put the elementary school within walking distance of the housing. Create cvic green spaces where people congregate and interact. Create walkable places for people to live, work, and play. By being more concentrated, you put more activity on less land and that helps preserve green spaces, cuts down on vehicle trips, encourages civic interaction, and is a more efficient use of space in general. The fact that we use it here as a redevelopment tool to reuse blighted areas, brownfield sites, and other areas is an added bonus.
The second thing will not kill us unless you fall out of a window onto us. :eek:
The people who think privacy is superfluous scare me a lot more than the idea of suburbs and planned town centers. Fortunately, crowding and loss of privacy are not mandated by the State as of yet.
A few decades ago a sensible diet and exercise were promoted by health professionals (and generally ignored) in the same way that they are today.
It would be interesting to know how your eating out of a garbage can to promote solidarity with street people fits in with “a healthy lifestyle”. :dubious:
I can argue. Obesity is rampant in Harlem, my old neighborhood, and everybody walks to school and hardly anyone owns a car.
Good Lord, where are the 300 million people in this country living, anyway – KOS campsites and abandoned WalMarts?
And yet you and VCO3AWOL are criticizing a town plan that actually seeks to address this problem because you don’t like the way it looks. It’s funny that you don’t want to live in Disneyland, because “Main Street USA” is in fact a tribute to the carless, centralized little town you’re trying to imagine.
And have either of you Baudrillarean Cassandras actually visited a real American city recently? You might have noticed that they’re all completely full of fucking cars. Not just LA and Pheonix and Dallas. Even the ones with great mass transit systems, like New York, San Francisco – millions of cars. So please stop pretending that a properly dense “real” urban area is the apomorphine for petroleum addiction. Americans will continue to own cars until it is economically impossible to do so. And then they will all buy horses, and hipsters will complain about how great it was before all the horseshit in the streets.
True. I did overstate the degree of similarity the Town & Country Villages had to today’s pre-fab Town Center’s (T&C Villages didn’t have housing) but the basic idea was the same. And you are right in that for all the effort the designers and architects took to recreate the layout of a small town’s central business district, in the end they were still car-oriented suburban shopping centers/malls not real city centers. In fact, like many of the cheap, souless, and minimally designed strip shopping centers, a number of T&C Villages ended up having a lifespan of only about 35 years before they were abandoned by the major retailers and bull-dozed. (Oddly enough, the T&C Village in San Jose was replaced by Santana Row which is an upscale Town Center development. It would be interesting to see if Santana Row shares the same fate as T&C Village in another 30 to 40 years.)
So when someone builds a shopping center that includes attached condos, what do you do?
You whine about it. Too soul-less. Not authentic enough.
The trouble is that you claim to want certain things, yet turn up your nose when developers build things that match what you’re supposedly in favor of. Why is that? You’ve grown up a bit in the last few years I’ve known you on the Dope, but you’ve still got quite a ways to go.
Exactly. It might be more appealing to my taste and yours if everything in these places didn’t match, but the more important thing is that it’s allowing people to shop without using their cars. It’s got housing and retail mixed in together- the functional equivalent of one of those old downtowns. Half a loaf, and all that.
It does have chain restaurants and stores, but so do a lot of traditional downtowns these days. The chains can coexist with local businesses, especially if they’re not in direct competition. A chain supermarket or movie theater can do wonders for a downtown area- witness what happened in Jack London Square in Oakland when a chain movie theater moved in, for example. And a chain might have more resources to take a chance on revitalizing a dodgy area than an independently owned shop, restaurant, or theater would, and might have some pull to attract people who otherwise wouldn’t go to that area.
I grew up in Fredericksburg, VA, which has been around since the mid 1700s. It is a fine city, with a great downtown and tons of character. My family has lived there since it was founded. I’ve heard countless stories about how great it was to have downtown packed with shoppers in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and a big portion of the 1970s.
In the early 1980s a big, suburban-style mall came to the suburbs and, sure enough, the dept. stores moved out of downtown and into the mall. The mom and pops stayed downtown and struggled for a bit because of the lack of foot traffic (the great part of going downtown was that you went to the hardware store and then remembered, “Well, I need some socks - I’ll just run in Leggett’s.” After that, you walked a little more and got a hot dog at the rec room). There was a general wailing and gnashing of teeth about the “Death of Downtown.” It didn’t die, but it wasn’t quite as strong.
People (mostly young professionals) then discovered they could buy houses and rent apts. over the stores for a little bit of money. Plus, they were downtown and could walk to the bank, to the library, to the bar, etc. All of a sudden, its cool to live downtown.
Now, you’d be hard pressed to find a parking spot downtown on a Saturday. It is just as packed as anytime during the 30s - 70s. No, the dept. stores aren’t there, but the mom and pops are, the upscale boutiques catering to people with more disposable income are, the small markets are, and the mixed housing is there. It creates a dynamic that’s wonderful. People are on the street. There’s a community there.
To the extent that neotraditionalist planning wants to recreate that, I say go ahead.
I think what I don’t get about the problems that the OP and even sven have with this type of development is this…what would be a better option or solution? The urban area I live in is jam-packed full of people. The are putting in condos where they can, but it’s a land-locked town, with nowhere to build other than tearing down old houses and such (which they are limited by, because we have historic districts here). Many Chicago neighborhoods, both in the city proper and in these urban-type suburbs have this kind of development going on, and are getting so crowded that they just can’t fit any more people in. Many, many (I’d say most) of those city dwellers have cars, because they may be able to shop in the neighborhood, but their jobs are located elsewhere. If the job isn’t on the train line (or your home isn’t), then you have to have a car. So even in the city, modern problems are still at issue. Our economy just doesn’t tend to allow jobs and homes to necessarily be within walking distance.
So, the cities are filling up, and some people don’t want to live there. Eventually, suburbs will always become a necessity. The suburb I grew up in is actually an old town which became a suburb when urban sprawl grew out to it. It has been developing that way since the 50s, and, as mentioned earlier in the thread, is still developing. The subdivision I grew up in was just a bunch of houses on winding streets, much like subdivisions have been planned out for years. It was nice enough to live there, but you had to get in a car to go ANYWHERE, even school.
So now developers and urban planners are coming up with compromises. Houses like the ones I grew up in now have retail districts as part of the plan. It looks a little cheesy, maybe, when it’s brand new, but these things tend to mellow with age. The house I grew up in had little tiny trees when I lived there. Now the trees are big, and the houses are a little aged, and it’s all a lot more homey and attractive. Heck, the house I live in now is quite old & worn, but it was brand spankin’ new 100 years ago. EVERYTHING starts out new, and gets old, you know? And unless someone can magically find a way to fit the exploding population into only existing buildings, what are we to do about building new ones? I’d love to hear a good suggestion from the OP or from even sven. You may hate the suburbs, but where do you propose that all those people live? Move into the city? Where would you put them? And what should be done differently in the suburbs, so that they will fit your ideal aesthetic?
Excellent question. If you don’t mind, I’m, also going to ask this:
Loop-and-lollypop suburban subdivisions? Soulless, sterile, and ugly.
New Urbanism and traditional neighborhood development? Pretentious Disney-like fake villages that lack authenticity and an organic sincerity.
Mixed-use lifestyle centers with a mix of commercial and residential uses? Fraudulent, pre-fabricated, and corporate.
Urban infill and revitalization? Rich gentrifying yuppies displacing the homeless, minorities, and poor and working-class people who are more “real”.
Suburban strip retrofitting, mixed-use rezoning and densification? See “New Urbanism”, “mixed-use lifestyle centers” and “urban infill”. (There’s a strip retrofit project planned for an area near my house, and many in the local orthodox Jewish community are upset, because the project displaces some kosher restaurants, a Judaica store, and some other Orthodox-oriented businesses.)
So, what’s left? Tell me. How would someplace like this suit you?
(added 1974 - Portsmouth County - #74002240)
Bounded by Paradise Creek, Victory Blvd., and George Washington Hwy., Portsmouth (Independent City)
(3100 acres, 759 buildings, 1 structure)
It was originally designed as military housing, and was a town center [complete with a little plot of grass with a bandstand/gazebo thingy], a sort of horseshoe of shops with apartments on the second and third floors, 2 schools, 2 churches [might have been a third original to the build] a post office, and a passle of houses all on a funky swirly grid [go to mapquest and type in 20 bainbridge ave, portsmouth va. The main 2 streets are Afton Parkway, and Prospect Parkway. The sort of D shaped block in the center is the town center. Very Norman Rockwellish. The house we had on Bainbridge was what was officers housing, 3 bedroom, 1 bath, livingroom with a sun room, kitchen and diningroom. Sort of craftsman meets edwardianish. Some of the buildings outside of the Aylwyn/Gillis/Alden/Dahlgren square were mostly multiple family row houses and duplexes for the enlisteds.
I think you are right. I was hoping at least even sven would defend her position.
To me, it’s simply easy to see why the urban environment might not be for everyone. I love my old house, it has character and it’s cute and all that, but it’s expensive to upkeep…we work on it constantly. My husband is handy, which helps. If he wasn’t, there is no way we would be able to afford the work we have done on it. If we had to pay someone to do it, we might as well buy a McMansion and live without worrying what the next big repair bill would be.
On top of that, there is crime in our neighborhood. There are gangs at the high school. There are bums who drop empty 40s and other garbage in our yard. We don’t have that much space for the kids to run around outside. The traffic is awful. We put up with this stuff because it’s an interesting neighborhood and it suits us. I can easily see why it wouldn’t suit everyone. There are plenty of days I look at the nice developments some of my friends live in, and think living there would make life a lot easier and less stressful. I see no reason to look down on the desire to live such a lifestyle.
And, as I said, there aren’t enough “authentic” urban or small-town environments to go around, anyway.
