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

I think a lot of the strip residential buildings are like, time-share / 'I have a place in vegas' type things and are not priced for workers on the strip. I think you could turn a lot of the hotels into apartments one day.

Off-strip housing is pretty cheap in LV now! The real estate market crashed so hard.

yeah I have friends who have been trying to sell their house for years now. they had been planning to move to Washington and just had the worst timing possible.

I've got an internet buddy from Vegas who posts these ritzy rat pack/"Casino" places for sale on the market for $150,000.

And there are a lot of 'em.

sadly none of those are in CityCenter

lol citycenter

electric bills are probably a motherfucker out there.

It's just down the road from one of the largest hydroelectric plants in the country!

how much is a water bill out in these places (desert communities)? the same as everywhere else or...?

i ask this because a while ago i swear i read that Phoenix water bills were very low (less than even water rich states).

You know, I've never lived anywhere with a water bill, not even growing up. How much are water bills??

Obviously I've lived in many places with "city water," but never anywhere where I or my family got a bill for it.

Ours in the Little Rock metro is $32 a month. That's water and sewer, according to the bill.

Oh, so it doesn't vary depending on how much you use? My parents had a water bill when they lived in Michigan, but I can't remember if it was metered.

They lived way out in the middle of nowhere, but they had municipal water and county trash pick up. The trash service was paid for by their taxes. Michigan is a state with a fuckload of problems, but I've never known anywhere else with better public services, and public schools. The schools were great in a lot of ways, but the biggie for me was: They provide free paper! It still blows my mind a little.

(done digressing, sorry)

My friends from Michigan were appalled to learn that free paper is not the norm around the country.

(I lied, I wasn't done digressing.)

We have electric/water/sewer/trash combined in one -- ranges from $150 in the winter to $350 in the summer.

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2011/10/suburban-sprawl-ponzi-scheme/242/

I'm liking this atlanticcities site

Pasadena, CA charges me a connection fee of $14/mo and a usage rate of $1.63 per HCF. I used 5 HCF over the past 2 months (they bill bi-monthly), but I'm the guy with the dead lawn.

ok, here's a quote from the Phoenix water department

Phoenix’s combined water and sewer rates remain among the lowest in the country at $58.46 per month

http://phoenix.gov/waterservices/customerservices/payment/rates/index.html

it's weird to me that cleveland, where there is practically unlimited freshwater, pays more for water than a city like phoenix. i suppose infastructure costs play a bigger role in pricing than the acutal water itself.

My water bill in Cleveland Heights is about $35/month, and then there's the quarterly sewer bill that's like $60.

Phoenix is relatively close to the Colorado river, so transportation costs probably are low. I think I also read once that one of the reasons John McCain is so popular in AZ is that he made some kind of deal that got the state lots of cheap water.

OK, a friend and I were just talking about some of the ridiculous real estate deals available around town:

http://iowarealty.com/buying/detail_ml.asp?SearchFilter=8&list_numb=384569

4 bedroom, 1.5 bath, older well-maintained house, limited yard because it's on a corner but you can walk to a huge park, garage, seven blocks from a large grocery store, and right down the road from a bar/restaurant district. $150k.

This is in the 1915ish area of the city, so it's older growth but still "in the city" as far as my area goes. People still are all about buying new houses in suburbs with no trees and no walkability, but to their credit, probably less home maintenance. Still, my mind boggles.

The Southwest has its eye on the Great Lakes. My gut reaction is that they need to step off. They've almost tapped out the Colorado River by stupidly building lush Oases in the desert, and it's time they face reality. Fortunately, there are international laws that prevent diversions of water outside the Great Lakes basin, but it seems like they're not fail-proof. How is Canada's military doing? Could the U.S. hold its own in a war over water? Chicago would probably be a big target.....

Wow, that DM,IA house would be a find. Must be haunted or have tree branches growing in the walls.

PP, the entire block is like that. This one is a little larger for the price than most, probably because it looks like an older couple is selling it. afaict from the assessor's website, they moved in after the gentleman came back from the Korean war and have lived there ever since.

Is there some sort of stigma attached to being south of the Interstate? Weird.

And that vent cover going 65º up the wall, is that a Midwest thing?

I have some personal ish with that house, like, "laminate flooring" and the fact that if the inside ever had the tiniest bit of architectural detail, it's gone now. But it does seem like a fantastic deal, if it weren't so hard to get a loan that you basically had to pay $150K in cash to buy anything right now?

Looks like it used to be a nice foursquare until That Deck came along. The siding + stucco = exterior combo is something else I don't understand. But again, in sheer value, that's crazy.

fwiw, most houses in this area that have carpeted floors have:

a) hardwood underneath that could be refinished
b) (occasionally) completely serviceable hardwood that just needs to be wiped down underneath carpet/pad

Laminate probably means "there was vinyl tile on top of hardwood and it was too much work to get it off and the Home Depot was having a sale on this nice oak-printed flooring" tbh, but that's okay, getting old adhesive off is just a lot of work.

No shit!

I might throw down laminate upstairs in my place where I am tearing out the current carpet, just because refinishing the back half up there would be a pain in the ass

We had an old house with hardwood floors that when it came to selling it, we laid carpet down on top of it. People still want carpet and it was a cheaper to do that than to try to refurnish the woods.

Nonetheless, we took pictures of the hardwood before the carpet went down and put them in a little book for the new owners. Least they know what's under there.

So for $150K you get something that is, hopefully, structurally sound, and you just inherit whatever maintenance issues come with a 1914 house with forced-air heating and so on, and you spend the next 10 years slowly rehabbing every room one at a time and then another 5 years refinishing the exterior, residing, losing the aftermarket treated-lumber decking, landscaping, etc. I understand the appeal but I feel like I'm too old for that shit to take 15 years, at this point.

America's commutes start earlier and last longer

I'd like to see the impact of telecommuting on that graph still

Yeah I'm either going to halfass some stuff but I really want to pay someone to install hardieplank siding and do something sweet with my yard.

Check out these awesome overdesigned garages: http://www.greengarageplans.com/

Wow, they do seem preeeeeety great!

I miss having a tiny bit of outdoor space, mostly for washing things or spreading them out in ways that I can't in the house. Scrubbing a shower curtain, drying out some blankets, or spray-painting ANYTHING is virtually impossible. But roof access would honestly do the job just as well.

morning commute times

Wow, they do seem preeeeeety great!

I miss having a tiny bit of outdoor space, mostly for washing things or spreading them out in ways that I can't in the house. Scrubbing a shower curtain, drying out some blankets, or spray-painting ANYTHING is virtually impossible. But roof access would honestly do the job just as well.

I lay out an old blanket and old shower curtain when I want to spray paint (studio apartment, no roof or yard).

I have a shower curtain liner now. It turns out I can throw it in the washer with bleach and run it on the warm cycle.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/can-highway-spending-ever-be-fair/2011/10/13/gIQAuF5xhL_blog.html

it turns out that all highways are essentially subsidized by the gov!

Well, yeah! Pretty much a key point of even any local freeway expansion/remodel news article

Apparently my hometown is 'running out of space', and apparently city officials think the solution is to keep allowing developers to build really awful suburbs. Hooray!

I would just like to say that I met iatee the other night and we did NOT recreate this entire thread in drunken conversation. We recreated the "higher ed, is it worth it" one instead.

Did you reference the thread where the conservative blogger dude showed up and iatee went on about being a lawyer with a beemer?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/can-we-stop-gas-prices-from-squeezing-the-middle-class/2011/10/21/gIQAV0im3L_blog.html

transportation in america to me feels like a dam that's about to burst

while he's right that much of the new public transit in america isn't aimed at lower-income people, that alone doesn't discount public transit as 'probably the answer to the problem' - things like giving buses and bikes their own lanes + finding ways to disincentivize driving can increase alt transit options on a small budget. but that requires people willing to give up certain conveniences.

I lead my eighth graders in a discussion about assumptions society has about people in urban, rural, and suburban settings. Part of me thought it would be a redux of this thread but it turned out most of them don't even know what the suburbs are. And bcz this is lol Arizona they finally defined the suburbs as "where all the old people move to."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/us/suburban-poverty-surge-challenges-communities.html

hey NYT stop reading ILX

As a result, suburban municipalities — once concerned with policing, putting out fires and repairing roads — are confronting a new set of issues, namely how to help poor residents without the array of social programs that cities have, and how to get those residents to services without public transportation. Many suburbs are facing these challenges with the tightest budgets in years.

maybe people who need centralized services / can't afford to throw away their paycheck on ever-increasing transportation costs shouldn't be forced into ~the american dream~

things haven't gotten nearly as bad as they're gonna get