People Who Live In Suburbs: Classy, Icky, or Dudes?

Ugly Condos = new, bland, cookie cutter condos going up in old urban neighborhoods. Kind of the McMansions of cities.

a phrase used by several posters to define the sparkling new high-rises studding the bay and coastlines of major cities.

Also, these "ugly condos" are often marketed as "luxury condos"

I grew up in Greenwich

I forgot that! One of my besties from college is from there. You don't know a guy named St3ph3n P@ul0, do you?

As for the original question, it's predictably unimaginative and reductive.

My hometown is being slowly overtaken by these:

http://www.vegasluxurycondosales.com/images/Urban01.jpg

No, I don't think so. I was a reclusive lad though, and Greenwich is actually a pretty big place.

I actually tend to hide the fact that I'm from Greenwich, because, you know.

xp to jenny

Those look like they are made of corrugated tin.

xp

Ugly Condos: Epidemic across Brooklyn in the past 5 years or something...many mid-construction and now languishing unfinished or unoccupied b/c of the housing market.

The thing is that infill housing is a really smart thing to bring to an already residential space, within reason. Aesthetically, however, blergh.

xxp I do not hate those slope-roofed houses.

AJ - I visited my friend once and I remember thinking Greenwich was a regular town (because I had no previous experience w/ suburbs), but then she busted out her yearbook and I realized she went to a giant high school. I guess I'm formulating my own definition of suburbs as a town that is both easy driving distance to a city or served by some sort of commuter rail and also home to a giant high school.

Yeah, high school had about 2000 kids.

A lot of Greenwich looks just like a normal town but that normal looking house will cost you $900,000.

the fact that people believe that a car and a large house are their god given rights as an american citizen. suburbs should be EXPENSIVE - they should be a luxury because in an environmental and social sense, they are.

What "facts" are you citing here? As a kid of the suburbs, whose family became comfortably middle-class after years of hard work, I'm pretty sure my parents felt they earned the right to spend their money as they pleased.

As a point of comparison, I just returned from a trip to NYC, where the Dominican teens in Inwood (the "ethnics" and "diversity" one is supposed to enjoy in a big city as opposed to the suburbs, right?) all sported the same iPods and boat shoes that I saw on their Greenpoint and Bushwick confreres last night. Talk about conformity.

It is corrugated tin (galvanized steel, actually), and that is the face of "ugly condos" in rejuvenated downtowns through the south and southwest. Its pretty much the cheapest building material available (much as unpainted concrete was in the 60s), and I suspect will face similar issues with resale value once the "hipness" factor wanes.

I also have issues with a double-wide garage door being a home's face to the world. Well designed highrises with integral greenspace would be a big step up from these.

xp By "regular town" I meant "town like those in which I had lived" as opposed to "not astoundingly wealthy." I knew Greenwich was richie rich b/c my friend was blue collar (her dad was a cop) and she told me all about it.

when did I bring up ipods or inwood teens being cool?

I do believe that people have the 'right to spend their money as they please' - I just believe that actual cost of the suburbs does not reflect the real cost of the suburbs.

Sanpaku, what is that....thing?

Somehow my post upthread was the first in the history of ILX to use the exact phrase "ugly condos".

i am trying to find pictures of a couple of my go to ugly condos in mpls, that are built to look like fake cartoony old blocks, complete with foreshortened fake terrace balconies. fuckers

I do believe that people have the 'right to spend their money as they please' - I just believe that actual cost of the suburbs does not reflect the real cost of the suburbs.

So what?

oh yes there we go:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v729/JT-MI/uptown6.jpg

I paid $3 for coffee at La Guarida this morning. It did not taste like three dollars.

xpost

The thing is that infill housing is a really smart thing to bring to an already residential space, within reason. Aesthetically, however, blergh.

is otm

Those mpls condos kind of actually look nice.

I do believe that people have the 'right to spend their money as they please' - I just believe that actual cost of the suburbs does not reflect the real cost of the suburbs.

So what?

wtf so what? I believe we need to structure our world so that people pay for their externalities. that would make living in the suburbs more much expensive and cities relatively cheaper. right now we live in a world where we subsidize and thus prioritize suburban life. this isn't a system that can last forever or one that can spread to 7 billion people.

Corrugated tin not a problem for me but then I'm p. interested in making houses out of old shipping containers so I don't find the idea of metal walls aesthetically horrifying. Same goes for garage- or freight-sized doors opening to the outside (although do these designers not believe in BUGS??), tho admittedly only if one can adapt for keeping heat in the house, toddlers in the house, bugs out of the house, and so on.

xp yeah, the mpls condos look like a decent version of still-modern-but-blended-into-surroundings...? There are some REALLY GREAT little builds in parts of BK where people made new things look exactly like their 1850 neighbors but that's not everyone's mission in life and that's okay.

xp

well that goes back in a way to the subsidies that encouraged post ww2 suburbia in the first place

i sort of prefer the corrugated metal condos to the blended-in fakeness but i like "ugly" buildings in general

iatee, i asked you this upthread yesterday, but please define what you mean by externalities

xpostss yeah see the prob with the mpls condos is theyre in an area that looks NOTHING like that. also trust me they are also way way uglier in person.

ok, so lots of these infill condos here in madison but i have to say they're pretty handsome. but underfull and the people who live there are kind of screwed, as i understand it.

wtf so what? I believe we need to structure our world so that people pay for their externalities. that would make living in the suburbs more much expensive and cities relatively cheaper. right now we live in a world where we subsidize and thus prioritize suburban life

Apparently you live in a world that "prioritizes" urban life. Cities are loud, dirty, and frantic (especially if you've ever visited a city that isn't in the US or Europe).

Although I don't believe people get better, I really thought we'd progressed to the point where indefensible dichotomies like cities = grate suburbs = boring, pre-fab no longer existed.

I will say, looking at the tin houses again, I HATE when the garage itself is the front face or front identity of any house, and now that I look at those, I see that they all have parking front and center on the ground floors -- sorry, Sanpaku. Didn't see that at first.

I don't hate the idea of a garage-style door being the main entrance of a building as long as it doesn't ACTUALLY lead to the garage. I don't want my car's storage area to define my living space because I don't want to live on a scale that's customized for cars alone (and not for people).

xp Cities are loud, dirty, and frantic (especially if you've ever visited a city that isn't in the US or Europe).

Either someone didn't read the thread, or we may as well call Granny Dainger back to thread to cite this occasion of anti-urban snobbery. Also, I called this one yesterday.

I don't espouse this view! I'm throwing back his dichotomies.

re:fakery,

not in a suburb but I laughed a little at the railings on these infill recreated townhouses in Bristol, England, protecting passers by from falling into non-existent basement yards

http://tinyurl.com/34cakvk

What do you think should be done, iatee? " structure our world so that people pay for their externalities" is some vague, abstract shit. I don't disagree with you, but imo you're looking at this from the wrong perspective.

While the popular image of modern suburbia is one of endless subdivision, are there more attempts now at walkable suburbs, of attempting to build suburbs that ape functionality of small towns. I'm not really so clear on changes in recent suburbia in regard to this

At least 2 examples of these are described in that book I reference above, Geography of Nowhere. (Been about 10 yrs since I read it). One of them is in *gasp* FLORIDA. This gets back to iatee, cause it seems like you're arguing that people should be coerced into leaving the suburbs for the city, mainly via being priced out. Which uh would make suburbs even more gentrified and upper-middle class than they already are. It's not feasible or even desirable for huge swaths of land to be abandoned. They should be restructured to be more efficient and more human-scaled. Neither of which necessarily means they should morph into a heavily urbanized landscape.

I really thought we'd progressed to the point where indefensible dichotomies like cities = grate suburbs = boring, pre-fab no longer existed.

well I for one am cheered by the hopeful perspective you'd had until this thread brought an unwelcome dose of reality to your table!

I kinda like it's this way: Both my parents were raised in my hometown. My mom was born there, my dad brought there as an infant. Both went to school there, have lived and worked there their entire lives, and made a life for themselves there. If you think they should be forced to live somewhere else because of their "externalities", you can eff right off.

xp cherry blossom: best thing about that google map by a mile is the existence of a bar called "Ye Shakespeare"

jj:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

That's funny, jj, because those pretend condos look like they were transplanted from huge parts of the outer boroughs here. They probably just developed them for another area and didn't bother to tailor the aesthetic?

One of them is in *gasp* FLORIDA.

thats Seaside isn't it?

http://www.theseasideinstitute.org/

is that a suburb though or a separate small town?

Maybe iatee's vision of what the Democratic party should do includes subsidies for the study of urban/suburban "externalities."

GD: They should be restructured to be more efficient and more human-scaled.

How, seriously, would that be done? It seems like in order to bring necessary goods and services to a human-traversible distance from people in spread-out suburban communities (and a lot of small towns, too), you'd have to duplicate the outlets offering those services x 8945678903 to achieve the same coverage per capita. Is that sensible? Obv it's "sort of sensible" up to a point of spread, after which the idea doesn't scale up anymore. What are some major directions for "humanizing" suburban/bedroom town-type residential areas?

have you guys never run into the term externality before?

I have but only sort of recently in reading a book about reducing waste.

This thread needs more JBR.

Apparently you live in a world that "prioritizes" urban life. Cities are loud, dirty, and frantic (especially if you've ever visited a city that isn't in the US or Europe).

Although I don't believe people get better, I really thought we'd progressed to the point where indefensible dichotomies like cities = grate suburbs = boring, pre-fab no longer existed.

right, except I don't dislike suburbs for being boring or pre-fab or for not having enough bars or brown people or whatever. read what I wrote, this is basically 100% about transportation.

iatee, i asked you this upthread yesterday, but please define what you mean by externalities

when someone drives to work, they create large amounts of pollution, depend on a highly subsidized street and road system and they take up a large % of the urban environment w/ a single of metal. these are all (among the) externalities they create. there are environmental, urban and social 'costs' of this lifestyle, and this person isn't actually expected to pay them. in fact, driving might be cheaper than taking public transportation, when the environmental/urban/social 'costs' of public transportation are significantly lower. there is no logical reason for this to case.

no no, i get what externalities are, i just feel like the vagaries about what the "costs" of these imaginary suburbs iatee keeps talking about are make it impossible to do anything other than shrug in response xxpost

what is the best kind of community

living in a van moving around the country solving mysteries. #2 probably minimum security prisons

What are some major directions for "humanizing" suburban/bedroom town-type residential areas?

Not really sure about the more sprawly type of existing suburbs - other than improving bus services possibly

As for newer suburbs what does everyone think about retrofitting of existing satellite towns (I'm kinda thinking about Pittsburgh here - as a city I guess its still losing population but as an urbanized area?)

pollution, congestion, space, government $. what's vague about these costs?

xp

but dude, like rev and i have both said repeatedly, your idea that suburbs are 100% city commuters is not borne out by reality xxxpost

in fact the majority of my city dwelling friends commute out TO the fucking suburbs which is where all the office parks etc are.