I don’t need to use my imagination, I can look at Europe, where it is reality, and a better one than here. People drive there but they drive less. Residential densities are higher, neighborhoods more walkable, public-transportation options both practical and available.
:eek: Watch your follicles, suburbanites!
Quote:
**That is not just an esthetic problem, it produces residential segregation by income. If every house in the neighborhood is more or less the same then it costs more or less the same, and only people whose income falls within a certain range will live there – the richer will not and the poorer cannot. I hope you can recognize that as a problem. **
So, it is a big problem when people are allowed to live where they want?
Spoken like a true commissar. Lenin wold be proud!
In any municipal unit there will be usually over half the residents who pay less than their “fair share”. You buy in the cheapest subdivision in the nicest school district and send your five kids to the public schools, you could be said to be a freeloader. Where does it end? How atomised do municipalities have to be before the affluent stop resenting people less affluent than they are getting a slice of “their” pie? Will they be satisfied only when all revenue comes from poll taxes? Not a rhetorical question.
And that this quality is what is appealing. Not the diversity. Not the access to culture, the museums, the live music, the dance clubs, the variety of food…It’s not the walkability or access to public transportation. It’s the controlled oppression that liberal city dwellers are lusting for! The mind boggles.
And don’t forget homeowners associations. Talk about oppressive planned societies.
For all I’ve read it’s a dying movement – I would love living in one of them. But only as bachelor w/no kids. I don’t quite understand “communal child rearing.”
It’s not common, but you do see something like this in a few neighborhoods in ultra-liberal and generally rather pricey Berkeley, CA. Not usually the very rich ( they do tend segregate a bit more heavily ), but poor - to upper-middle class and everything in between. A consequence of historically very strong rent control and some subsidized affordable housing, unusually combined with desirable properties/amenities.
Does it work? Eh, IMHO it has its pluses and minuses.
Be careful when idealizing Western Europe as a whole. That is a common Progressive fantasy and mistake. The whole package also includes a few thousand years of people completely slaughtering each other for any reason or no reason followed by a few decent decades after WWII and then economic collapse again in the present day. I don’t know what countries will be able to pull out of it eventually but be careful who your role models are especially since consolidation in the form of the Eurozone and Euro currency helped the catastrophic failures spread much more quickly than they would have otherwise.
It actually makes a much better counter-argument.
Ok, sure, yeah. But the bike lanes in Amsterdam are great.
[shrug] But their physical density and walkability and mass-transit systems have nothing to do with any of that. They result from the fact that Europe has a much longer history than the U.S. and most towns there were built before mass automobile ownership was available. In any case, what matters is not how they got that way, but that such a built environment appears to work better than ours in daily life.
Bedford Falls wasn’t a city. It was a tiny town. Just like the small town where I grew up, that people deride as being a suburb. Just like my particular suburb (in Michigan) is currently. It (Beford Falls) is a horrible example in favor of cities, because it’s not a city.
I guess now we have to rant about how small towns that are nowhere close to a major city suck the life out of everything.
Exactly! Bedford Falls is the kind of town suburbia killed! See post #154. Haven’t you ever driven through an old town like that and seen everything boarded up? I have.
Of course, George Bailey still could have walked everywhere if he had grown up in New York City, as he apparently wished he had.
But not if he grew up in Levittown.
Sure I have but I don’t see what that has to do with the subject at hand. Towns live and die just like everything else. My home town in Louisiana doesn’t exist in any recognizable form anymore because it was only created as a railroad and steamboat stop. Time marches on. Now it is a major natural gas producer which making it more valuable to the nation than it ever was before but the community has evolved and adapted to the changing circumstances.
Here is another town that I know well because I lived there for ten years. Holliston, MA is a suburb of Boston (the pictures don’t do it justice because it is strikingly beautiful in that New England kind of way) yet it is also a colonial town and almost complete intact including Main Street. There are more 1700’s houses than you can shake a stick at and a couple from the 1600’s as well. There is no fast food in town other than a Subway off of a quaint office building and only a couple of gas stations and red lights. I live in a slightly larger town now just down the road and it is mostly the same. That is not what most people think of when they form mental stereotypes against ‘suburbia’ yet is closer to the norm around here than not.
You can’t pretend to know everything about the entire U.S. just based on what you see in your immediate vicinity. You will fall prey to confirmation bias coupled by limited data. I have had the privilege to travel across much of the U.S. and the world. There are gorgeous and thriving towns thriving across many areas and they do not demonstrate the stereotypes that people are trying to fight against with a sledgehammer. There are also shit cities, suburbs, and towns sprinkled all over. Don’t ever think that applies to all or even most of them however. The people that don’t choose to live in cities aren’t all held hostage by the Hank Hill’s of the world.
Progressive types and control freaks in general, I plead to you once and for all, drop the bigotry and the ill-founded assumptions and open your mind outside of your own little universe.
I agree every accessible drop of petroleum in the Earth’s crust is destined to be pumped out and used sooner or later, but that does not mean it is destined to be burnt. We also use the stuff for plastics, fertilizers and medicines, you know. We should be saving it for all of that however we can.
That is the problem and Debaser is correct in any realistic view of the world. You can’t save petroleum or byproducts like you can money in a bank account. It is a global commodity and any single metro areas are just a dust mite on a flea of the dog that represents the entire world. It will all be used until alternative energy sources become viable and there are none that are even close to ready for production on that scale yet (nuclear energy could have mitigated that somewhat but Progressives shit the bed on that one 40 ago so you can’t get those powerplants online fast enough either even if we started a full campaign today).
You can build all the bike paths you want (I like them too) or flood the market with next generation of Prius’s and hope to God you see a 0.1 percent decrease in potential worldwide emissions over ten years but even that is not going to happen. The only hope on a worldwide scale to switch electric power plants and fleet vehicles over to some type natural gas power over the next 15 years. It has already started on a relatively small scale and is going to ramp up quickly. That won’t solve the problem completely but it is the best hope for mitigating it rather than feel-good curbside recycling bins and having citified U.S. yuppies trying to run everywhere while dressed in the newest apparel.
The true problem is human overpopulation which happened a long time ago but people refused to believe it because they thought some technology would come along to nullify it yet that never happened. In fact, increasing lifespans have made several key problems including environmental and economic ones much worse. If you are truly Progressive and care about Mother Earth that much, it would be much more effective to limit future births than to try to change the habits of the entire existing human population.
I have news for you though. Mother Earth has seen much worse and will recover just fine no matter what we do or don’t do. Everything in between is just about human lifestyle choices.
What killed those towns was not suburbia, but technology, an increasing population, and young people who needed to find jobs and have some fun. Technology reduced the number of hired hands needed to run a farm. The farms consolidated because forty acres and a mule was an uneconomical agricultural model now. And you must remember that every last Bumfuck, Nebraska or New Hampshire began as a support center for the farms of the area. Fewer farms and farmers meant the Bluebird Diner couldn’t survive, but service went downhill after Juanita run off with that traveling man, anyway.
Technology let Bob Smith handle more cows down at the feed lot with the same number of workers. Cars and trucks made the stables obsolete, so there went those jobs. Emmett didn’t need any help down at his Fix-It Shop because modern electronics last longer than the old tube technology he knew, and often can’t be repaired anyway. The old widget factory, which lasted as long as it did by taking contract work for the military in Dubya-Dubyas One and Two, could no longer compete, and the founder’s grandkids didn’t want to spend their lives in a foundry. Instead they moved, not to Suburbia but to the bright lights of the Big City. The wars and movies had a lot to do with young people abandoning Mayberry, too. They saw there was a whole 'nother world out there, and by 1918 there was a very popular song lamenting their migration from Podunk, “How 'Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree?).” Cities, chock full of factories and fun, killed Mayberry. Suburbia came later, long after the first tumbleweeds tumbled down Main St.
Yes, there are parts of the city that are very nice to live in, and I know that some of the appeal of suburbs is that they are not like that ancient, Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting places.” 
There are many elements of the city that can be brought out here, and the governments of many suburbs are doing just that to enlarge the tax base and improve property values (another way to increase revenue) by making their existing downtowns more liveable. My own town offers substantial remodeling grants if you take over a moribund storefront.
However, you have taken a romantic (and often unrealistic) vision of how things were and how they should be and turned it into how things MUST be. It ain’t gonna happen.
And while we are playing Dueling TV and Movies, submitted for your approval is a little tale written by a man like you who regretted the changes the modern world made to small town life, but with, of course, an inescapable twist at the end: A Stop at Willoughby.
That is some devastating Krugman, BG. Let’s see if the pro-sprawl set can come up with any riposte or if it will just be crickets (or changing the subject).
The earth has seen worse, but the earth doesn’t really care about much, does it? I think the worries here are about the adjustments humans will have to deal with.
I do think it’s pretty funny that basic urban planning is apparently some assault on freedom, but telling people how many kids to have is totally reasonable.
“Gangs,” eh?
Gee, what is that whistling sound…?
I’m sorry, what were we talking about again? Is this thread about Atlanta and Detroit now or is supposed to be universal? They are two completely different sets of issues and Detroit is a perfect example of why you don’t want too much governmental power centered among the city proper. The same article admits admits that Atlanta’s problems can’t be corrected by the types of totalitarian reform that you are suggesting.
Let’s assume just for giggles that you do know what you are talking about. Can you break it down into a more unified plan for all metropolitan areas that will have a sum total of greater benefits than unintended negative consequences?