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

is it a dreamlike paradise

I levitate to work

omg

brooklyn is really not that bad yall

It will be when all the rural yokels move in!

no, then it will be brooklyn

suburbs are only cheaper if your free time is best spent driving home and to work

(completely bullshitting because people definitely live and work in suburbs too, but I'm generalizing)

NO GENERALIZING ITT

http://zeekeekee.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/kowloon_walled_city_hong_kong_gotham_batman2.jpg

TS:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/125/361507066_3ec7faee14.jpg

vs.

http://www.danielbouws.com/assets/hdrtokyo.jpg

THERE CAN BE NO IN-BETWEEN

barenaked ladies oaks vs daft punk city

Well, put that way, there is no way Daft Punk's city could be anything less than completely awesome.

That last picture looks like a city from F-Zero.

I cannot believe this is "primeval" or inherent to humanity. A lot of people throughout history have lived in far closer-knit communities with scads less privacy than we moderns (particularly Americans?) consider normal.

you're assuming 1/2 the people in those far closer-knit communities didn't wanna get the fuck away from the other 1/2.

Another point I wanted to make about living in more walkable cities: the weather in a lot of places in the USA is really shitty. Living right along the West Coast is great, and since I've spent all of 2 weeks of my life north of Pittsburgh I can't really speak for the Northeast, but pretty much everywhere else is either a swampy hellhole in the summer (which lasts for like six months) or insanely cold in the winter (which lasts for like six months) or both (i.e. the Midwest + Great Plains). Like: San Antonio, Atlanta, Houston, New Orleans in July are really shitty places to be, spending 20+ minutes walking to/fro the grocery store, spending time waiting for the bus/train (although I guess you can put AC in train stations). Those places are shitty in June and September too, and not that great in May. So I dunno: living here in Paris where a hot day is 30C, it makes walkability no big deal. Whereas when I go back to the USA and it's fucking 95F+ all summer, and around 100F a goodly part of July-Sept. with heat advisories from the NWS every day, I just want to get in my car in my garage, crank the AC, drive, then run into the store or whatever & run out again. Basically, the climate of wide stretches of the USA sucks for walkability. And I guess you can just sneer & say "don't live there" but there are jobs in those places & I doubt the US economy has enough jobs for everyone to move to e.g. Portland or whatever.

the climate here sucks during the summer too, they've solved the problem by air conditioning the entire city

when I lived in FLA I dreamed of someone building a huge dome over the place which could be air conditioned.

I've been recommending they do it to Manhattan for years.

http://popupcity.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/Manhattan-Bubble-By-Buckminster-Fuller.jpg

Scootch it down slightly pls so my house gets in kthx

See, I said upthread we were working towards Logan's Run territory, but did anyone listen? Nooooooooo.

euler:

I imagine many people in montreal or scandinavia would trade weather w/ any of those places, and they've managed to build decent public transit systems that a decent % of the populace uses. most of the cities you mentioned existed before the invention of cars or AC. and yeah - I'm sure it sucked, but arguably not as much as the world will suck 100 years from now if we don't completely alter our consumption patterns.

much of america lives under miserable weather for some periods of the year. but by your standards, so does...the majority of the world? in fact, an 'average american' probably deals w/ less bad weather than your 'average non-american'. america is not in any way special on this measure.

the fact that 'the jobs are at these places' (and a large % of new jobs are going to these places) is dependent on a lot of things, esp cost-of-living. oil related jobs are location-dependent, and yeah, they're gonna be in texas. tech jobs don't need to be in texas.

and before anyone jumps on me for 'average non-american' - yes, I realize you can't do an 'average' of people from hawaii and minnesota or zimbabwe and finland, but let's say you take 100 random americans and 100 random non-americans from around the world - I would bet that the 100 random americans would have a lower % of 'days that euler would consider bad weather' than the 100 non-americans.

iatee's perfect city, realized in SimCity: Magnasanti.

That's how it'll work in the future – we'll build arcologies and tear them down & then build over where they had been, fooling the census people into thinking those 400,000 people are still accounted for.

http://sylviagarza.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/bio-dome.jpg

Did a little fooling around on Google Maps today to see, based on where I live now in relation to my office in Cleveland, what would be the equivalent if I worked in our NY office, which is on E. 52nd. Apparently I would live as far as Fort Lee or Jersey City, Borough Park, Flushing Meadows or Morris Heights, to name a few.

I live 10 miles from where I work, which translates to 12 mins drive.

dunno what your point is, but all of those but fort lee have easy transit to midtown xp

Was just an intellectual exercise for me. Since I bike to work, wondered what I'd be facing in another city.

Fort Lee has plenty of commuter buses and some off-peak and weekend bus service, although no full-time underground rail option like the MTA or the PATH to NJ.

He he

ha

yeah Montreal is a good case---I was there in October one year & it was really cold already, gather the winter is savage. But I spent a lot of time in the underground city---didn't have to go far outside, at least within what I gather was the city center.

& it's true that other parts of the world have shittier weather than e.g. Houston or even Chicago for that matter (which has shitty winters & summers imo) but the parts of the world with the best public trans for the most part don't have shitty weather. My impression is that the big cities in Scandinavia are pretty mild in the winter but maybe I'm wrong there.

define mild? stockholm hits the low 20s and stays there, day and night, for about four months. and it rains and snows a fair amnt in the fall

And that day is like 30 minutes long, right?

low 20s are paradise compared to Midwest US winters (at least the ones I've had the misfortune to experience over a bunch of years)

well BOO HOO

hahaha yeah max speaking as the dude in mpls/stpl that sounds like balmy paradise to me

Hey, West Michigan is totally survivable. It's cold, sure, but it's no Upper Peninsula.

why do you guys LIVE IN THESE PLACES

I would live in Plainfield, Boonton, Briarcliff Manor, or Levittown.

This is why, max:

http://media.mlive.com/grandrapidspress/photo/-cbe46ad4df102dc9_large.jpg

I don't think weather plays as much a role as you'd like to think. Los Angeles has amazing weather when compared to basically any other large metro area in America (depends on tastes, but I'd take LA's weather over most of Europe's) and it clearly didn't naturally bloom into a walkable, transit paradise. Whereas Chicago has better public transit than most of America, and worse weather than most of America. There are historical and political reasons for these things - weather might be a variable somewhere in the mix, but it'd be hard to argue that it's a key factor in a world where it's easier to live without a car in Finland than it is in California.

yeah, iatee, I agree; it's part of the mix but it's def. not the main reason why cities in the USA aren't walkable.

ftr, lots of cities in Europe aren't particularly walkable; e.g. provincial cities in France like Besançon. It's def. complicated why this is so.

FYI the average high in Stockholm in Jan/Feb is about 31 F per wikipedia, which really isn't that bad.

can someone define "walkable"

Basically the weather in every part of Europe (except maybe Russia) is better than the weather in every part of the US except the West Coast.

xp

like, Boston is "walkable" but you're not going to see all that many people walking from Charlestown to Back Bay on a regular basis, so what exactly do you mean here and is it something that is actually particular to certain cities or (as I suspect) is it something you can basically do in any major metropolitan area as long as you pick the right places to live and work?

Walkable means that you moved close to the grocery store.