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

only if there is light rail going over the bridges

someone link to the part of this thread where jon starts having a tantrum

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

but you have to admit, a great deal of practical area would have to exist that people wouldn't necessarily want to visit if they didn't have to! you're conflating aesthetic appeal with environmental/economic viability. areas can definitely mix the two, but it is a stretch.

well I'm on a totally different page right now! not talking about economics or incentives or whatever. I think our nation's current built landscape - 90% concrete, almost no sense of 'place', nothing built to exist 100 years from now - is basically a tragedy, and it was possible to build medium density suburbs w/ a sense of permanence and character without breaking the bank, but we took the cheap fast big route.

But we didn't tho

Not to be glib but my house was built in 1948 and isn't going anywhere, many if my neighbors have houses from the 1920s - they turn 100 in the next ten years! Not all suburbs are what you think they are

plz go find the last post I wrote when I said 'streetcar suburbs are generally nice'

ppl itt not really getting the whole idea of "generalizations", they tend to have these things called "exceptions"

if you try to build for a 1000 years, you just end up with some ozymandius tragedy bullshit. might as well just make it disposable.

the part of this thread where jon starts having a tantrum

wow

Not to be glib but my house was built in 1948 and isn't going anywhere, many if my neighbors have houses from the 1920s - they turn 100 in the next ten years! Not all suburbs are what you think they are

my quote: 'streetcar suburbs predate the car, and even today, without the streetcars, are noticeably more pleasant places than post-streetcar suburbs.'

again I have this extremely narrowminded view on suburbs, I mean definitely, as long as you aren't reading any of my posts. suburbs can be a lot of things depending on when they were built and where both within america and within the world, the word can mean different things in different contexts. I live in queens. historically queens was entirely a suburb of manhattan. today, to a large extent it still is, but it is 'complicated' because I live in a part of queens that's denser than san francisco. but there are incredibly 'suburban' parts too. there are detached houses and lawns not particularly far from me. and big box stores. it's not simple, at all. that's why I'm actually really fascinated by the borough.

I've said this like 100 times but again - generally when I talk about suburbs, I'm using the word in the sense of 'low density, car-oriented developed area' not 'area that is outside the downtown area of a city'. the first definition might not ring true for every 'suburb' in the country but it's got a pretty clear meaning.

sleeptime

agreed on streetcar etc etc

I think the parts where iatee isn't short-sheeting himself, we are giving him short shrift.

hey, I went to that SB board game store a few months ago!

ppl itt not really getting the whole idea of "generalizations", they tend to have these things called "exceptions"

except that, I don't know the statistics, but it feels like those strawman mcmansion gated community + box store developments are actually the exception in a way, and that large swaths of suburbia are 50 years old or older. At least in California.

gah now I have to turn on my computer and post one more time

Btw the area I live in didn't have streetcars

Just to be clear - mainly because I am on the other side of a big old river.

then your area is generally not nice obv.

a streetcar named derpsire

except that, I don't know the statistics, but it feels like those strawman mcmansion gated community + box store developments are actually the exception in a way, and that large swaths of suburbia are 50 years old or older. At least in California.

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

so that was just a decade - the 00s were worse.

hmm not showing up

http://i.imgur.com/h62Dc.jpg

note that you're sorta right about LA! we pretty much invented it.

yeah, I guess I have a skewed view, because the places I've lived are mostly purple on that map

but on the bright side, that shows a way out, right? suburbs don't necessarily stay suburban forever, and they can somewhat densify over time.

yes tho there are limits and some exurban places are pretty much hopeless - some already are ghost towns, many more will be. still, while there are some positive things happening here and there, the overwhelming majority of new housing is still suburban and 'baby steps in the right direction' aren't gonna do it when you look at the magnitude of the problem.

but we live in a car-oriented world, have a car-oriented voting population and on top of that the urban populations we do have are underrepresented in congress. it's not a priority right now, but when people finally realize it is, they'll also realize how long it takes to fix these things. America is pretty adaptable but that yellow space on the map isn't just gonna disappear and serious transit systems take years of planning and development. and serious $. look at the paris 'grand paris' plans if you want to see a country that's willing to make serious investments in densifying its suburbs.

suburbs have a weird romance for me bc i have never lived in one so i only think of them in terms of movies abt bored teenagers really

yeah the suburbs in eg edward scissorhands always seemed a pretty sweet deal tbh

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2370/2272313457_a92c459821.jpg

yeah i agree w/plax, i grew up on a farm and then lived in the city since but yeah i sort of have this weird image that the burbs in 80s movies actually still exist, seemed like this magic safe zone of ramblers where kids could have adventures

this hit home for me when iatee put that enormous carpark google streetview up and it seemed really pretty to me

Yeah don't confuse this for policy advocacy, but that image stirs something primal in me. I like walking around the city, but walking around suburbs somehow always was the most magical experience to me. It feels otherworldly.

I guess you can find beauty in the scene, but it's hard to find character. there are hundreds of parking lots in California that are in no way distinguishable. same stores, same big box architecture, etc. if you were plopped in a random parking lot, you'd have a hard time figuring out what city you were in. and if you tried to walk outside of the limits of the development, well, there is no beauty in having to cross de facto highways in 15 seconds.

again I'm making this point outside of 'why people should live in dense areas' - I don't think 'because suburbs are increasingly bleak and bland' is a good argument - for one, as buzza mentioned, chain store coup has been happening in big cities too.

but I do think the built legacy of late 20th century America is a pretty embarrassing use of resources and the scope is a lot larger than many people believe. again that map was *one decade*.

Feel like plax is dude in american beauty videotaping the plastic bag

china - walking around a residential area is fine (assuming sidewalks exist) - but do you enjoy walking around the arterial roads? do you enjoy walking to the grocery store? that's the thing - walkable doesn't mean 'pleasant to walk in'.

I like walking around golden gate park but I wouldn't want to live in golden gate park.

I like walking through the suburbs, but yeah, not alongside an expressway. I didn't have a car when I lived in LA and know very well how hard it is to walk between neighborhoods there (Westwood to Hollywood and back was a disaster that involved walking on a lot of lawns in Bel-Air). I still kind of liked it though!
I mean, I know it's pretty atrocious planning and should be fixed. I'm just someone who spent the first 22 years of my life between San Jose and LA with no car, so walking through sprawl is a nostalgic thing for me. Not going to defend it otherwise.

yeah i sort of have this weird image that the burbs in 80s movies actually still exist, seemed like this magic safe zone of ramblers where kids could have adventures

― the 500 gats of bartholomew thuggins (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, September 8, 2011 7:39 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

I have no idea what a kid would even do in the city.

Like, I'm picturing Kids, the Wire, and the Royal Tenenbaums.

that's the thing - walkable doesn't mean 'pleasant to walk in'.

it should though! because if people have the choice between a drive & a walk and one isn't more pleasant than the other, they're always gonna choose the faster one

I agree, actually

that's why we need to make improvements beyond just density - even most relatively dense places in the country are unpleasant to walk around because they've been refurbished for the automobile age. drastic changes towards making a place more pleasant to walk are almost always going to also make it less pleasant to drive - which is is good, when we're trying to get people to switch modes of getting around, but which is why it's not an easy sell, even in manhattan. removing traffic lanes, widening sidewalks, readapting parking lots and spaces, lower speed limits - these things do come at the cost of making driving less convenient.

remember how hard ppl freaked out when jsk pedestrianized part of times square

and I'm expecting someone to say 'surely there's a compromise' but keep in mind that we're starting from a world designed top to bottom for drivers. free parking, subsidized highways and roads, gas taxes that are lol compared to the rest of the world. *anything* is going to seem like a burden on drivers, cause on a policy level we're starting from the position of 'we do basically everything we can to make driving cheap and easy in this country' xp

I think people in my neighborhood have mostly reclaimed the street. I was driving home a few weeks ago and a woman was brushing her dog right in the middle a few feet from the neighbor kid skateboarding.

I think she was doing that so all the dog fur would be in the street and not in her yard which makes me a little annoyed, but.. hey, I guess it's not just for cars

Oh yeah, so what kids do in cities: kick a soccer ball in the street

Are you sure that soccer ball wasn't actually a broken chunk of eroding sidewalk?

remember how hard ppl freaked out when jsk pedestrianized part of times square
--max

yeah this - which has of course been a huge success - is a pretty good example. this is one of the most pedestrianized areas in the western world, and making even modest strides in the right direction is incredibly hard. it's absurd, but ultimately due to our political system. still it's pretty amazing how much stuff she's been able to accomplish.

I think it was a vagrant's decapitated head

speaking of jsk iatee did you see this profile of her from a couple days ago

http://www.observer.com/2011/09/road-warrior-janette-sadik-khan-is-the-best-mechanic-the-city-streets-have-had-in-a-generation%E2%80%94so-why-do-motorists-dislike-her-so-much/?show=all

wayyy better than that hit job the times did in the spring