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

not a big hipster community in sa, fixie rapid transit may be a fair compromise

fixie rapid transit has been known to increase hipster density but it depends on the hipster zoning laws

whiney to thread

re: buses vs rail

http://www.humantransit.org/2011/02/sorting-out-rail-bus-differences.html

glaeser can kinda be a clown but it seems like he's becoming the public face of this type of thinking:

http://portlandtransport.com/archives/2011/02/on_market_urban.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1969/12/how-skyscrapers-can-save-the-city/8387/1/#/

I don't recommend his book, I couldn't get past a few chapters. article is okay.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/23/business/economy/23housing.html?hp

Sales of new single-family homes in February were down more than 80 percent from the 2005 peak, far exceeding the 28 percent drop in existing home sales. New single-family sales are now lower than at any point since the data was first collected in 1963, when the nation had 120 million fewer residents.

But people are still buying houses, even houses in the suburbs -- it's just that there's so much extra stock that there's no need to buy NEW houses.

also maybe people's taste has gotten better and they've collectively admitted that American architecture has gone completely to shit until you get to ridiculously unaffordable prices, where it's only gone 75% to shit

My architect friends have said something to the effect that they wouldn't live in many houses built after 1970.

yeah people's taste hasn't gotten better, they're just buying shit built in 2005 instead of 2011. but at the very least the construction spree (which lasted half a century!) is on its last legs.

pretty amazing how much the american landscape can change in two decades:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_payZfX5rZ08/SZT8yMcoJJI/AAAAAAAAADA/gOrL2s-FVus/s1600-h/nat-geo-sprawl-map-2001.jpg

(looking for a graph 2001-2011)

er
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_payZfX5rZ08/SZT8yMcoJJI/AAAAAAAAADA/gOrL2s-FVus/s1600-h/nat-geo-sprawl-map-2001.jpg

really digging my new suburban house

piedmont sprawl on that map is kind of amazing.

cant believe how much shit iatee was getting in this thread 10 mo. ago. him & goole & laurel otm

hahaha u crazy.

like i am generally super down w/all of the people you mentioned, but that back and forth 10 months ago was so stupid strawmen level suburbs full of cakeeating treefuckers/suburbs full of true grit community holdthereowns that i cant even look back at it without going ugggghhhhh

note - i am guilty as well obv

excited to have this argument again but iatee and goole and laurel werent making cultural arguments about cake or whatever!

yeah iirc I tried to avoid making cultural and/or racial arguments and mostly just repeated 'this is economically and environmentally unsustainable and it's not as 'free market' as one might think, the government has always promoted it through various subsidies/laws/taxes' - I don't think people in cities are all cultured motherfuckers, in fact I have good evidence for that not being true. I think people remember me saying things that they think I secretly must believe.

I mean I am actually eating cake *right now*

I must have had ahold of something extremely dank and sticky to have resisted the urge to argue with iatee about this shit back then

dank bag RIP

haha you wanted to argue that suburbs are sustainable?

lol no they're catastrophic obv it's just that I'm generally suspicious of the crusading-against-the-suburbs mindset because it often dovetails with people who talk about "flyover states" & generally hold weird my-class-has-shit-figure-out opinions that I find odious

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_payZfX5rZ08/SZT8yMcoJJI/AAAAAAAAADA/gOrL2s-FVus/s1600-h/nat-geo-sprawl-map-2001.jpg

― iatee, Sunday, April 24, 2011 10:09 PM (

great map! there's a lot of yellow in what looks like around pittsburgh on it tho?

also even though hi-density people are probably right if I had to live in a hi-density city I would literally commit suicide inside of a calendar year, not joking or being funny something goes very wrong inside me in hi-density situations, being around that many people is v. v. hard for me so I got personal issues with it so when I am exposed to the probable accuracy of hi-density arguments I think "oh great I managed to duck suicide all these years and now I gotta do it for the good of the planet, wtf"

(and finally the one thing that seems self-evident to me is that none of the vaunted hi-density centers would survive a week if the people in the we-wag-our-fingers-at-you-resource-wasters places weren't growing their vegetables & raising their livestock & trucking it to their hi-density centers)

basically what i get from this thread is that people who live in suburbs are really sensitive about it

well you might consider the thread's opening post:

My friends move to the suburbs when their babies are born. They become inexplicably conservative and boring. What happens out there?

which is an extreme iteration of the anti-suburbs feeling but you do get this feeling like I used to get when I lived in the non-Chicago midwest: "even if you might have interesting thoughts, most of your neighbors have gotta be dumb as cattle, right?" and it's like lol @ anybody who thinks they get cool kid points for where they're from

I live four blocks from downtown in a relatively small city but a city all the same btw fwiw.

so you were going to argue with iatee about something he wasnt saying, but because sometimes some people who agree with him think bad things about flyover states it prob would have been worth it? idgi

I don't know dude it was just a lol post maybe don't overthink it

u need to get out of the suburbs, youre getting conservative and boring

anyway i think we can all agree lol momus

http://todayilaughed.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/high-five.jpg

(and finally the one thing that seems self-evident to me is that none of the vaunted hi-density centers would survive a week if the people in the we-wag-our-fingers-at-you-resource-wasters places weren't growing their vegetables & raising their livestock & trucking it to their hi-density centers)

iirc about 2% of americans work in agriculture today. truth bomb coming up: most people who live in the suburbs are not farmers.

they are farmers of conservative boredom

well you might consider the thread's opening post:

My friends move to the suburbs when their babies are born. They become inexplicably conservative and boring. What happens out there?

which is an extreme iteration of the anti-suburbs feeling but you do get this feeling like I used to get when I lived in the non-Chicago midwest: "even if you might have interesting thoughts, most of your neighbors have gotta be dumb as cattle, right?" and it's like lol @ anybody who thinks they get cool kid points for where they're from

none of this shit was from me!

right, but the places the food comes from aren't high-density areas. it doesn't really matter what % of Americans do the work; the meat & the veg is largely traveling on highways to the urban centers n'est-pas - so when the "suburbs" argt becomes a "hi-density vs. lo-density" argt, the question of food has to be addressed in a realistic way - like everybody knows eating local's the way to go both for taste & energy efficiency & thriving local economies but getting people to live that way would require either a profoundly charismatic leader with a v. intense plan, or outright Stalinism

xp you're not Momus? shit I gotta recalibrate everything now

suburbs suck, the end

^^ if only the recent Arcade Fire had consisted of this one phrase and a swelling string section.

the idea that we'd all live in small, sustainable communities where people only consume local food and goods, truthfully, I'm completely behind that. but as soon as we turn those communities into places where people want cars and iphones that sustainable edge is completely gone - people in modern rural communities don't just consume goods and energy from outside, they consume food from outside too. so I mean you're on a weird tangent here - sprawl is not a phenomenon that really has anything to do with food, beyond 'moving food around has become so cheap that people who live in the middle of nowhere can still afford nice food'. las vegas and phoenix didn't boom because they were close to lots of nice sustainable farms.

none of the vaunted hi-density centers would survive a week if the people in the we-wag-our-fingers-at-you-resource-wasters places weren't growing their vegetables & raising their livestock & trucking it to their hi-density centers)

If you really want to help humanity, you could truck this bullshit to the nearest family farm and donate it to the cause.

...damn

sprawl is not a phenomenon that really has anything to do with food, beyond 'moving food around has become so cheap that people who live in the middle of nowhere can still afford nice food'. las vegas and phoenix didn't boom because they were close to lots of nice sustainable farms.

they could not have boomed (have boomt? idk) w/o transport of food is the point, you can't grow shit in Las Vegas except hydroponically! I'm a big gubmint libral I think unsustainable tariffs should be levied against interstate ag caveat arguer tho I have no idea what I'm talking about on this subject because I'm interested enough in the subject to shoot the breeze a little but it's not really my area of interest on account of as I say if I ever have to live in a high-density place it's curtains for underrated aerosmith so my sympathies to the reasonable argument are offset by the survival instinct

haha laurel just murked you

underrated aerosmith bootlegs laurel has pwned

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0411/53595.html

L-R: laurel, ua

http://www.wbodydb.com/forumpics/owned_baby.jpg

I live in a sort of high-density version of suburbia, but this weekend went to my brother-in-law's, who lives in the part of the state we all grew up in - what I would consider an ideal suburban neighborhood. Anyway, for those of you who don't hate on suburbia, check out the fucking grass and trees:

http://a8.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc6/216180_10150230077498783_556118782_8672568_5886763_n.jpg

Squee! It is one of my most sincere hopes that I get to live somewhere with that much lawn some day.

Also, his neighbors were very chill and not at all dicks.

my parents live in suburbia but they have also transformed their backyard into a tomato and vegetable garden, ya'll should come over sometime, have some tomatos, eggplants