Quaint's Nice, But Sprawl Makes Me Weak at the Knees

"It finally sank in that if there's a contest between charm and convenience, I was coming round to the American view: Quaint's what you want on vacation, but modern's where you want to live."

This jackass can't figure out that not only do we live in ugly suburban sprawling places, but here in America you also have to deal with the inconveniences of the quaint English town he was living. Instead of farmers and tight roads, we get an accident that makes the commute much worse.

Most American cities are so poorly planned, they are hideous along with being inconvenient. London is hard to get in and out of by car becuase it is such a big city and they focus much more of their resources to highly efficient public transport, instead of paving their entire city into roads which end up overcrowed and soon as they remove the contsruction signs.

"Freedom from the dead weight of historical tradition; opportunity to make and remake the world as you want it, not trim your ambitions to the strictures of the past."

[sarcasm]How difficult it must be for the English to deal with all culture and history, have to live life attached to a place with importance and meaning. It must be tough. All those old buildings they must preserve and re-use, why dont they just tear down those 1000 year old buildings and put up Wal-Marts, McDonalds and Starbucks? Those poor Brits.[/sarcasm]

 

Sprawl is ugly and not convenient.

But having said that, the beauty of America is that there is something for everyone. For those people who like driving their SUV 1/2 mile to the strip mall to eat at a chain restaurant, there is plenty of suburban sprawl for them to enjoy.

There are a few small towns with vibrant shopping districts where sprawl has been halted through legal action for people who prefer a stronger sense of community.

There are plenty of major urban areas with cosmopolitan offerings for those people who want to live there.

So, I disagree with Lindley's feelings for sprawl and his connection between sprawl and America's greatness. Sprawl is ugly, will be regretted in 50 yrs. and doesn't make America great. But America is great because it has something for everyone.

Murf

 

My program for ending urban sprawl is simple...take all the money we spend on stability and defense in the Middle East, all the aid to Israel and Egypt etc., the fleets that patrol the Indian Ocean, the Rapid Deployment Force (assuming that's still around), the % of our Air Force and Army that is allotted to the Middle East...

and pay for it through gasoline or energy taxes.

Problem solved. End the sprawl subsidy. Suddenly, long commutes are less "convenient" for your checkbook.

Yeah, all of those Ayn Rand fanatics in the West are gonna scream. Eff 'em.

 

Is that a program or is that a communist manifesto? Sprawl exists because people like it. Yeah, I'll admit, I like going to urban areas to hang out for several hours...then I want to go home to the peace and quiet of the suburbs. After the pain of trying to find a convenient parking spot or any freaking parking spot for that matter, and getting out and walking thru urine soaked streets after being gouged for $10 or more to park and have some street walking skank grab my crotch and ask me if I was looking for a good time, it just gets old and I long for the sweet smells of suburbia.

 

Come on, Ian. Detroit has something to offer? Remember the last time you headed downtown? It ended with you in the hospital and your sockpuppet telling us all you were in pretty bad shape.

Say hello to C-Web when he comes to trial.

Frankly, I care about the revitalization efforts of urban areas, but I live we where I want to and don't get into this conversation. I just couldn't believe there was anything good in Detriot.

Waiting for lovefifa.

 

No, sprawl exists mostly because people have to live somewhere and that's all that's offered to them - that they can afford anyway. Well, that and 'white flight' and the mistaken belief that they could escape the responsibility for the adverse effects of the social, political and economic order imposed on them...

As soon as people can afford to live elsewhere - in wealthy rural estates, inner ring suburbs built in the early 20th century or any of the rapidly gentrifying city neighborhoods - they're almost always gone like a shot from a high powered rifle.

My g-g-generation was the first to have the majority actually grow up in the suburbs from birth and it's people my age or just a tad older who gave birth to the "yuppy" and have been causing city residential real estate prices to get insanely expensive over the past ten years.

superdave is right, though, if we ever stop subsidizing sprawl and forced it to pay for itself, it would become economically unsustainable. Also, if people ever learned that there are viable alternatives to sprawl and get enough imagination to stop using cookie-cutter building codes from the 1950s, then maybe people could demand that contractors build the places they really WANT to live in that are more convenient and efficient. Maybe Segroves can help enlighten you.

That'll teach you to live in a shithole like Detroit.

I live in Chicago and have none of the problems you mentioned. Of course, I don't own a car (by choice) and therefore I find the jackasses from the suburbs who paid $400,000 to buy a dinky 1 bedroom condo here, refused to give up their two bigass SUVs and now sit in Starbucks whining that they can't find a parking spot rather amusing.

 

What about the fact the neighborhoods that are more dense typically have a higher crime rate? Why should an individual have to move into high rises and share walls, when they can move 20 miles away and have land they can call their own?

 

like joe, i live in the city, and don't experience any of those inconveniences. the overcrowded nieghborhoods, are the ones yuppies move into in hordes after college, trying to perpetuate the dorm/frat house life style. since with them comes a starbucks on every other corner, along with all the other obligatory chains that make them feel cozy despite being in the big city-yes it gets crowded, and yes the streets are filled with urine, because outside the police-state rigour of the suburbs they know no bounds. regardless of how many years of college you have, if you've spent your formative years in a bland, cookie cutter environment, deprived of real human experience, you'll never be much more then a khaki wearing barbarian. i live in a comfortable neighborhood, with tree lined streets, low rents, plenty of parking for the biggest c*ck extension you can buy. i'm a walk away from public transportation which would take me 15 minutes to downtown, should i choose to go there. thankfully, there are enough brown faces to keep chip and jenny away for the time being.

 

Fixed your post.

 

This is actually changing as lower income people are forced to move to the 'burbs to man the fast food joints, lawn care apparatuses, lower end retail shops and services., etc. In the Chicago area, for example, some of the toniest suburban high schools are now seeing the beginnings of gang problems. This is in addition to godawful traffic gridlock, hour-and-a-half-one-way commutes to work (how convenient, eh, Ian?) and all the other woes of sprawl because far suburbs like Aurora and Elign have become centers for the low-income migration. There are now some suburbs I wouldn't drive through at night (if I had a car, that is), let alone walk around.

Californians who have fled to the Rocky Mountain states are experiencing the same phenomenon. doubtless Joel Garreau's beloved "edge cities" are beginning to experience the same all around the country. You can run, but if you don't change the way you live, you can't hide. Your lifestyle and consumption patterns will eventualy catch up with you and wreak their vengeance.

In contrast, as CFnwside alluded to, while the post-frat crowd may be pissing in alleys in a few "party" neighborhoods like Wrigleyville and West Town as they experience their first taste of life in something besides the soul-crushing wasteland of sprawl or a cornfield university, there are now whole neighborhoods of Chicago where you can now walk around at night in a safety that wasn't there 10 years ago. Not only that but as the city's tax base rises one side effect of the doubling and tripling of housing prices and therefore property taxes is that the schools will get better as they get more resources. Of course, the people who really needed the improvement will be forced out of the city by the skyrocketing property taxes but that's just one of the unfairnesses of the system.

 

Must be Logan Square...

 

My little brother moved to a job at CNA in downtown Chicago straight out of school at Ohio State. (Living on-campus at OSU is relatively urban, compared to the strictly upper-middle class suburbanite upbringing we experienced.) After one week and two parking tickets, he sold his Saturn. He's been there for just over a year now and has moved into an apartment on East Wacker and can walk to work.

I'm jealous.

Me, I bought a condo earlier this year, and once they finish the road reconstruction nearby and put in the sidewalk, I'll be within walking distance of everything I could ever need/want except a grocery store (full-blown mall and many many strip malls). The only other places I looked at were vintage 1930's construction in a relatively high-density suburb close to downtown Dayton and within walking distance of many light commerical shops. Unfortunately for me (since I'm anti-sprawl) my wife grew up owning a horse on her own property, so it looks likely that I'll be owning my own small horse farm before too long. Which wouldn't be a problem except that I'm a software engineer, and will likely be working in the city for the rest of my life. Commute hell. I'll feel better about the whole thing if I can at least make a stab at making the house solar-heat efficient and perhaps even solar powered.

 

I've never been to MK but they're trying to steal Wimbledon FC, so they suck.

As far as US sprawl is concerned, yes some people have to like it because people live there. ut that doesn't ignore the fact that sprawl causes market failures that affect the rest of us. Sprawl means more pollution, higher transportation costs, fewer watersheds & forests, and less cohesiveness in towns & cities which leads to poverty and crime.

The tenets of "manifest destiny" and individual rights mean much less when your exercise of individual rights lessens others' quality of life. This is what Ian and other sprawlers fail to realize.

 

according to the daily telegraph, 54% of English citizens would like to live in some other Country.

So on a British website message board I posed the questions "do you want to live in England, if not, what Country would you like ot move to?"

Most of the responses were "the United States" and many of the reasons were that there was much more to do and convenience.

 

Let's say I'm a farmer, and for all the backbreaking work I get a pittance for the beef grazing on the property, because of big boys in Kansas and Australia.

But I can't turn this valuable property into suburban homes because it offends the sensibilities of hypocrites like obie and Pankowitz.

Farmers get subsidies too, so do city-dwellers. Some of you just can't stand others having a life different from living in a rent-controlled dank apartment, being harassed for owning a car and being gypped every time you get groceries.

 

yep.

 

i didn't choose how i grew up, although now i am glad it was in the city, and am choosing to stay. and it's not so much snobbery but pity i feel. i can't imagine what it must be like to be a teenager, or in your early 20's, and have a trip to cineplex or barnes and noble to look forward to on a weekend. i can't imagine what it must be like to walk outside your door, and not be surrounded with life, and culture, and diversity, and all the things that make human experience a dynamic one. i understand that urban life isn't the only worth living. i've been to the country (in europe anyway), and although i wouldn't spend my life there, i recognize a different set of guiding principles. there is a relationship with the land and it's annual cycles, which with itself carries a whole other rich experience. the suburbs are in my opinion a big sham. they pretend to take the best of urban life and set it in a country-like, quaint environment. well, to put it in simple terms, it's no city experience without a screeching, rusty train outside your window, and it's no country experience without stepping in cow sh!t. the suburbs give us a generic, assembly-line substitution of both, and as a result deliver neither.

 

As have highways. The idea that gas taxes "pay" for roads is as scurrilous as the idea that the lottery "pays" for education. Money into the pot, money out of the pot.

If I walk to the store, I pollute less than someone who drives. If I walk to work (which I do), I pollute less than someone who drives. If I live in an apartment, I use less electricity than someone who is heating and cooling a 5,000-sq ft house. I don't water a lawn. I don't require a big-box megastore with multi-acre parking lot to equip my McMansion with "stuff".

Generally speaking, in only the most congested areas like NY are public transportation alternatives used now to full capacity. Most public transportation expenses going on now are extensions of current lines to more remote locations where sprawlers have plopped themselves down. If people were more centralized, we wouldn't need as big a system moving fewer and fewer people.

The most recent MTA station that serves NYC, Wassaic, is over 2 1/4 hours away on a commuter rail. Who does that serve? Sprawlers. Meanwhile, the NYC subway hasn't been expanded in decades.

But this responsibility has shifted from the cities to the suburban towns, and rarely are these issues even being taken into account. It's like forest clear-cutting -- yes trees are a renewable resource, but rains on a bare mountain wash away the soil that's necessary to grow new trees.

Around here, though, the damage was done a century ago. Suburban sprawl generally takes over land that has not been subject to development previously. So overall suburban construction does more harm now than urban construction.

The people are coming whether you invite them or not. But instead of them being your next-door neighbors, they'll be your highway neighbors as they go to the next new sub-development. Enjoy the traffic.

 

Mike, are you telling me that the federal subsidies for mass transit are greater than the subsidies for fossil fuels? (If you include everything...aid to Israel, the fleet in the Indian Ocean, the CIA funds for spying on the Mideast, the increase in asthma cases, etc. etc.)

I have a very, very hard time believing that. But I'm willing to admit I'm wrong, if you can source this.

 

Good God that was a long time in the making.

There is one good thing in Detroit.

My job.

Other than that, there's nothing but ************, beer, and skanks. And that ain't all bad.

BTW, I enjoy living in the nice suburbs and driving 35-40 minutes to downtown Detroit for my work. Have you guys ever driven THE LODGE? What a rush!

 

Anyone idealizing obie's vision has only to take a trip thru eastern europe and look at the planned communities. Big concrete monstrosities going on and on. I'll bet alot of them end up taking long busrides to work, too.

For Superdave: please explain how aid to Israel is a fossil-fuel subsidy. Please explain how federal fuel taxes translate into a subsidy. To help you out, the tax take on gasoline for the last ten years (fed taxes only) is roughly $225 billion. (18.4 cents per gallon). State taxes average 20 cents per gallon, so add $245 billion for $470 billion in taxes paid the last ten years. This neglects things like income taxes by oil companies, taxes on other fuels like diesel.

 

Easy...imagine our foreign policy if we didn't need the Mideast's oil, or if oil were spread equally around the world.

 

Using Eastern Europe as a "model" of urban redevelopment plans is like using David Duke as a model of modern Republicanism.

Have you ever been to Paris?