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

i dont get what were supposed to do with that sentence you keep quoting

it would be a good thing insofar as the true cost of oil would be laid bare and we would be forced to plan around it, would be a kickstart to plans of upgrading america's public transportation system. the question is now, do you amputate the foot, or do you wait until gangrene sets in and lose the leg. (to give you another cute lil analogy, bro, since you seem to love them)

oh max just keep making snappy terse rejoiners, it's brilliant

rejoinders too

he's not joking we have no idea what kind of response you're expecting

you keep banging on about car-dependent suburbs when i've already said i think they're very problematic

hard to tell when the brilliant wit that is max is 'joking'

please don't rejoin us tho max

no, but really, what do you want as a response to that sentence [only kind of a joke]

like that sentence, the bit before the semicolon is basically "what is going to happen over the next century regardless of what posters on the internet say, barring the invention and mass production of the solar-powered riding mower" and the bit after is "a good way to ease the transition" [there is a joke in this post but the thrust of it is fairly serious]

ok i'm saying i am in favor of those 2 things, and wondering what other major acts would need to occur in order to have sustainable suburbs.

cause there being nothing but rural, small town, and urban (the density cutoff being San Fran) isn't realistic imo. yes yes what we can afford will dictate blah blah but i think we can plan/arrange things so town-center, public-trans based suburbs can work in the long-term. i get that y'all are not invested in thinking about that because you prefer an urban lifestyle and basically fuck all who don't.

um basically SAY 'fuck all who don't'

i know that joeks have been made and there are a bunch of urbanites on one side and you on the other, but you seem to be taking it awfully personally.

ppl are questioning the ongoing economic feasibility of current suburban development. i don't think anyone is suggesting that suburban dwellers are assholes or that they should go fuck themselves

once youve moved off of cars onto public transportation youve solved 80% of what is "bad" about "suburbs." you wouldnt really even be living in "a suburb" as were defining it, and as has been discussed 40m times above

suburban development in america is probably connected w/ america's post-wwII king of the mountain I can do anything fuck it I want it all giant mountain of coke on my desk my dick is 15 inches long feeling

i grew up in an old-school suburb with a lawn and a ballfield over the fence from my back yard. i enjoyed being able to play catch or wiffle hockey in the yard and even had a flower garden for a couple years (my mom had a much larger vegetable garden).

this was a relatively close-in and dense suburb that was built along a river and near several coal mines. it was not a development with identical enormous houses named 'parson's croft' or 'briar ridge', though if i'd grown up in one it probably would have been fine too.

there are levels and levels, some of which are more feasible than others.

yeah GD i dont really know what to tell u except that you are like insanely sensitive and im sorry that you are being forced to read this thread?

b. inordinate desire for privacy / anti-social behavior = correlated w/ political conservatism, and how many republicans we got around here? was trying to think of an ilxor example of someone from a city who hated cities, and...roger adultry came to mind - prob not coincidentally one of the only loud conservatives we've had. I think he was from staten island tho, so...lol...

yeah max i dont really know what to tell u except that you are like an enormous smug dick and im sorry that you are being forced to read this thread?

im not tho!! i am choosing to read this thread

...

i don't care abuot this stupid argument but quit abusing max you look like a jerk

heh this is my fault too, i should just let it go but

oh poor max

http://www.meh.ro/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/meh.ro5380-455x551.jpg

case it's not clear i give fuck all what i look like to smug knowitall holier than thou fucks

yeah dogg i dont really know what to tell u? i really am sorry if i offended u? but maybe u should "take a chill pill"

i don't get offended. i do get tired of the whole "let's make snide remarks and interpret what this guy says in the worst possible way, insult his intelligence, and then when he reacts be all 'whoa dude what's YOUR problem'" schtick. grow up.

all right well i feel like we made a lot of progress today

let the record show that max didn't deny being a smug dick?

"being a smug dick" was kind of my m.o. on this thread, i feel... a little bit bad about it, but i came onto ilx in the golden age of the noise board, needling sensitive posters is what i was raised on, and i dont think ive ever seen ppl more sensitive than suburbanites on this thread

except for me bc I am otm

i don't get offended. i do get tired of the whole "let's make snide remarks and interpret what this guy says in the worst possible way, insult his intelligence, and then when he reacts be all 'whoa dude what's YOUR problem'" schtick. grow up.

I feel like the 'when you react' part seems a lot like 'you getting offending'

if you're cool w/ a coordinated policy transition away from a car-dependent lifestyle then the only thing we apparently disagree on is 'would you like to live in the suburbs'...but that still doesn't seem to be the case? I mean is that really the only thing you're reacting to?

as for 'can there be a suburb without cars' - http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/science/earth/12suburb.html - yes, something like that is probably what you're imagining - but again, as max said "you wouldnt really even be living in "a suburb" as were defining it." that place is a 'suburb' of Freiburg, but actually has a higher population density than the city itself. can we build new places like that? sure and we have some experiments here and there, very marginal in the big picture. as the article mentions, it's not even *legal* in most places to build a neighborhood like that. and can we retrofit 1970s american suburbs into something like that? well...not so easily.

I haven't read that Pitt article but

and most zoning laws in the United States still require two parking spaces per residential unit.

that is just fucking insane

and can we retrofit 1970s american suburbs into something like that? well...not so easily.

before you ask 'why', I'll show you w/ my go-to example, my hometown. here's downtown. the large majority of people who live here still own cars and use them to get around. most houses are one-story and detached. but how hard would it be to add a streetcar and to densify someplace like this? super easy. and the grid already makes it super walkable, you can get from any point here to any other point fairly quickly.

http://i.imgur.com/rB1t3.gif

here's a suburban part of the city directly west of that. if you live on any of those streets on the bottom left side of that huge golf course, the only way to leave your house on foot is to walk 20 minutes until you hit...a freeway. you have absolutely no capacity to walk north, east or west. even if the streets did exist, you would hit more houses (north), a golf course (east) or car dealerships (west). there's no way to 'fix' a neighborhood w/ streets and geographic obstacles like this - you can't just add public transit and build taller buildings to those streets.

http://i.imgur.com/xXeIA.gif

er, build taller buildings *on* those streets

Perhaps the exact words you are seeking would be *adjacent to* those streets.

no

there's not a thoroughfare that could be built up within reasonable walking distance of those houses - there's just the freeway and the parallel road which serves the golf course, show grounds and car dealerships. there are some major commercial areas close by both north and west of those streets - by car you can get there in minutes. but by foot it would take an hour, due to the cul-de-sac street design. (also this neighborhood is pretty hilly.)

but building up adjacent throughfares alone is not gonna do it (- is what the 'no' is responding to.) you'd also need to allow neighborhoods like that to become mixed use. (and in this case it'd be pointless, but I was looking for a particularly bad location in this city)

btw $13/gallon gas would be disastrous more for the STORE PRICES, not for your car-driving.

It'd be most immediately seen when people fueled up at the pump, but when you start paying a lot more for food it'd be a bit more of a deal.

Personal transportation using a disproportionate amount of fuel compared to mass transport or product transport is kind of the deal

I'm not advocating 13/g gas tomorrow. but in the long-term prices at stores will have to go up and that's not a bad thing.

prices at stores will have to go up and that's not a bad thing.

Wait, what? I'm not disagreeing with you wrt gas prices, but how it the price of a loaf of bread going up "not a bad thing"?

I live in a hutch on the back deck. It's NICE.

iatee's shtick is that the economic and geographic expansion has been a false effect of wholesale overuse of limited resources and unsustainable social and economic behaviors. The price of real goods rising isn't in itself good, but it's a sign that the necessary contraction is going on, imo.

Okay, I guess I see how that fits into iatee's view now.

I agree with some of these conceits, but then I also wonder why we're not going crazy on development and figuring out floating ozone factories, turning the moon into a remote solar facility, mining the shit out of other planets and asteroids, and going full-on nuclear everywhere.

The future's not for the weak, right?

If our new materials and methods give us cancer then we just need to engineer viruses to kill cancer and super-viruses to kill those viruses, imo.

like I said the government gave me money to build an airship and you are all welcome once we have turned our fertile plains into barren deserts