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

I'm assuming it's due to assuming that the market for such stores would be larger in the suburban shopping island, that property is cheaper out there and the buildings are either build-to-spec or at least fairly new when leased, and that people are already used to those areas as shopping destinations and they're able to keep a larger stock due to larger buildings.

Still, this whole area still kind of drives me nuts sometimes.

oh man des moines...yikes

I'm assuming it's due to assuming that the market for such stores would be larger in the suburban shopping island, that property is cheaper out there and the buildings are either build-to-spec or at least fairly new when leased, and that people are already used to those areas as shopping destinations and they're able to keep a larger stock due to larger buildings.

Basically.

what's all this yikes about, here?

when i lived near des moines the places i wanted to go were about 1000 miles away

des moines freaks me out in a way i can't really describe

actually iowa does in general

I was planning on leaving pre-downtown revitalization, and here I am a decade later. Oh well.

i think it's because i grew up in southern minnesota and obv our area was like exactly like northern iowa (flat cornfields) but as a kid if you headed north it felt like you were heading towards civilization (like..um...mankato haha or obv the twin cities) but iowa just seemed like this indication that the huge gaping nothingness kept going forever (or forever to the kid's mind)...like i liked living on a farm but sometimes i think i got slightly agoraphobic, like you were so alone you could just blow away in the wind or something

Iowa City is awesome, have known like 30 cool folks who hailed from there.

Only know one person from Des Moines and he is batshit insane and I am not gonna ask if you know him.

(did not mean that as a slur on Des Moines the place).

Grand Rapids is one of the largest cities in Michigan and I'm going to say that 100% of the city functions as a suburb and not as a city at all. (There's a teeny tiny downtown area where you can walk between stores but not enough of the population lives within walking or transpo distance of it to make any impression on the total.) Almost every single shopping area in the whole city is a variation on the big box store with massive parking lots, surrounded by other big box stores and chain restaurants with massive parking lots.

In the few areas where there are neighborhoods with sidewalks and independently owned smaller stores, I've had shop-keepers try to dissuade me from walking 5 blocks because maybe I didn't know that I might run into a rough element (read: non-whites) between point A and point B.

I cannot hate Grand Rapids enough in one lifetime.

Northern Iowa and Southern Minnesota are barren wastes, yeah. Driving up I-35 is a complete slog once you get north of Mason City until you reach like.. Owatonna? Is that the one I'm thinking of? In any case, I would go completely insane if I was from there.

Iowa City is pretty sweet, I'd rate it as a cut above our other college towns and everyone knows about the writing workshop. For the love of god, avoid pretty much every other part of Iowa, especially Sioux City. urgh.

One of my best high school friends spent his grade school years down there in pig country MN, it scarred his brane forever.

The only times I've been to Grand Rapids were to go to this independent coffee shop I liked and to the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, which not only had some interesting exhibits but also showed art movies. (I saw julien donkey-boy there, IIRC.) I would drive an hour from Kalamazoo for this. So it's not all bad.

Oh, I also saw a Pavement show there.

Northern Iowa and Southern Minnesota are barren wastes, yeah. Driving up I-35 is a complete slog once you get north of Mason City until you reach like.. Owatonna? Is that the one I'm thinking of? In any case, I would go completely insane if I was from there.

haha yeah owatonna (birthplace of Owl City) is at least somewhat decent size...my town would be head west at 35/94 interchange and drive about 45 minutes

They think about the ends but not the means.

OK, guys, go home to your suburban duplexes and rent controlled apartments.

your bars, your temples, your massage parlors

got a lot of love in my heart for Iowa no matter what any of you say.

OK, guys, go home to your suburban duplexes and rent controlled apartments.

your bars, your temples, your massage parlors

Wrong thread guys, the write a Hold Steady song thread is elsewhere.

I love the rural midwest places the way I love cheesy-ass 80's movies about nuclear war. I don't think they're very good at all, but something about them I just find so compelling.

(grew up in small town Southern IL, btw)

driving across iowa with a girl in the summer, stopping and swimming, miles and miles with the windows down and we'd talk and plot and slow down through sweet boarded-up downtowns. yeah i love iowa too

your bars, your temples, your massage parlors

― the dj screwtape letters (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Wednesday, June 9, 2010 10:57 PM (6 minutes ago)

NICE

for some reason I take "temples" to mean "reform synagogues" here

your bars, your temples, your massage parlors

That's not the Hold Steady, that's One Night in Bangkok.

miles and miles with the windows down

THIS IS NOT VERY ENERGY EFFICIENT U NARCISSIST

As a longterm dweller within a suburb, I am interested to know what harm this indwelling may have done to me, in the opinions of various ilxors. But reading 750 posts seems a bit excessive in relation to what is, after all, only a mild curiosity. Can someone summarize? thx

you are stupid complacent selfish and ugly

egad! I must put "move" on the to-do list right away.

you are welcome

you forgot fat

My whole life is crumbling before my eyes.

Distant x-post I live in Oak Park, and as far as I'm concerned, if you can see the Chicago skyline, you have sidewalks, you have crime and the Chicago border is within 20-minute walking distance, it's barely a suburb. As for politics, they don't call it the People's Republic of Oak Park for nothing.

Is Grand Rapids really a suburb? The 'Urbs in America are so huge and sprawling it's hard to know where the suburbs even begin.

so when we all live in LA and NYC, what the hell do we do with all this stupid land were stuck with.

― apparently not the band, but the lifestyle (jjjusten), Wednesday, June 9, 2010 1:50 PM (5 hours ago)

sell it to canada?

― iatee, Wednesday, June 9, 2010 1:50 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

the most basic reason why not is that, to the extent we want to make use of resources spread across a great deal of land, we must disperse our population. agriculture, for instance, requires agricultural workers, and agricultural workers require housing, and due to the scale of agricultural operations, that housing must be spread sparsely across an enormous area. that type of dispersion requires transportation infrastructure (i.e. roads) and retail & human services, and those in turn require still more employees, housing and infrastructure. this results in small rural communities, which require larger inland cities, which require lots of housing, employment and infrastructure, and which, to some degree, also require suburbs.

it's true that we'd all be better off with less suburban sprawl (environmentally, at the very least), but hammering the argument that suburbs are evil is too simplistic to be really helpful. i'm more interested in practical, politically & economically appealing means by which we might reduce outer-ring sprawl, or at least curtail of its growth.

man, that could use an editor

we must disperse our population.

but north dakota is emptying out even as US population grows

well, the "we must disperse our population" paradigm arguably makes less sense in the era of big, mechanized agribusiness. and not all regions are gonna be equally attractive, especially depending on economic factors.

good post, contenderizer

there's no indication that yr joking here, iatee

of all my posts to quote. canada, incidently, fares pretty well by my standards - half their population lives in 3 urban areas.

i mean, there are good reasons that we didn't & don't put our residential areas, retail businesses, white collar & service industries, heavy manufacturing facilities, mining and resource harvesting operations, agriculture & husbandry, tourist magnets, greenspaces and recreation areas all within a few massive, coastal super-cities.

the american economy is ~80% service sector. so yeah, good point, we can't bring coal mines to san francisco and I don't think we need to. but it's totally disingenuous to act like in 2010 the american suburban and rural population is a bunch of miners and farmers, that the rural/suburban population distribution are due to the 'needs' of the american economy rather than, well essentially a lot of political decisions. the set-up is inherently *uneconomic* - as the status quo has requires massive gov't subsidies.

distribution "is due to"
status quo has "required"

http://www.chicagofed.org/digital_assets/images/communities/midwest_economy/iowa_trends.gif

hey look, it's iowa, where everyone works on a farm

I live in Oak Park, and as far as I'm concerned, if you can see the Chicago skyline, you have sidewalks, you have crime and the Chicago border is within 20-minute walking distance, it's barely a suburb.

Anything that allows you to justify your display name.

Is Grand Rapids really a suburb? The 'Urbs in America are so huge and sprawling it's hard to know where the suburbs even begin.

GR isn't a suburb of anything but it functions like the entire city is 100% suburb. There's a bus system but everyone HATES it and it takes hours to get anywhere, and the population is so thinly scattered across the barren landscape that there's enough space for people have paddocks and horses within city limits. With the exception of Easttown, Heritage Hill, and a couple of neighborhood enclaves with some amenities, nearly all commerce is done in strip-mall, actual mall, or big box-type shopping centers. I don't know, what else makes it qualify? I don't know the academic side of this stuff, all I'm saying is that GR felt about as small as my home town of 3000 inhabitants -- actually we had more character.

of all my posts to quote. canada, incidently, fares pretty well by my standards - half their population lives in 3 urban areas.

Would that still be the case if their population was 300 million instead of 33 million? Could it be the case? Does climate have anything to do with it? Those three urban areas are about as far south as it's possible to be in Canada.

The same is true of Australia -- more than half of its population lives in 5 urban areas -- but, again, much smaller population, and the hospitability of the land in between has something to do with it as well.

I mean, Texas has about as many people as all of Australia, and only 10 million fewer than Canada, and most Texans live in just a few cities, too. You're eliding a lot of factors just by saying "Half of Canada's people live in 3 urban areas."

pretty sure those 3 urban areas have a lot of populous suburbs too

Laurel, did you see my post about Grand Rapids upthread? Of course, it's possible that I just found the only cool things in GR.

xp yep, and having made the drive to Toronto a few times, they're no less full of strip malls and big box retail than any suburb in the US.

saying suburbs solely due to political reasons misses the simple fact that there's a lot of people who just don't want to live in an urban area! selfish as that may be.