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

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2012/11/what-republicans-are-really-against-population-density/3953/

not that this is new or anything but I like this graph

http://cdn.theatlanticcities.com/img/upload/2012/11/26/density_red_blueWEB.png

Isolated Cabin Dwellers More Likely to Vote Republican (The Atlantic)

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/12/27/how-people-live-in-the-suburbs/

http://www.houzz.com/ideabooks/6557287/list/Get-a-Bird-s-Eye-View-of-America-s-Housing-Patterns

The "multifamily island" looks to me like it might actually be an business hotel/extended stay sort of place.

HIPSTURBIA http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/fashion/creating-hipsturbia-in-the-suburbs-of-new-york.html

are american suburbs more fun to grow up in than english ones? i imagine you spend your days zooming about on yr skatebaord and then go home and listen to hardcore. in the sun.

They were awesome for the skateboarding years. Pure hell when I got old enough to want to go to shows.

I grew up in a "suburban" part of a city - inside city limits but public transit was very limited and there was no commercial area within walking distance. It was good in some ways -a yard to play football in, places to build snowforts and sled, quiet, etc. I was pretty miserable as a teenager though when I couldn't get anywhere without taking a long bus ride to the metro -- 1hr trip to anything worthwhile. Although I guess that's better than not having it at all.

I spent my weekends in a planned community. Cul-de-sacs out the wazoo. Walking and biking paths snaking through the neighborhoods. Only two ways into the town. Playgrounds close by. That part of town where every street was named after a PGA golfer.

As a kid, my step-brother and I would enter a drainage tunnel and walk along through it to see where we'd come out at. Our local playground was this "tree-house", where there was a long tube with a ladder inside it that would lead to a circular platform, walled off with metal bars.

It must've looked pretty sharp when people started moving in during the late 70s, but by the time we were done with it around 1990, all that new had worn off in a bad way. All those houses with the wooden facades started looking pretty bad. Traffic was getting heavier, winding up and down those curvy streets to the cul-de-sac of your choice. Those walking and bike paths that went between and behind the houses were perfect for scoping out burglaries, peeping toms and even the occasional rape. People kept peeing down the tube of our "tree-house", so the community nailed plywood over the openings.

We went back over there recently for a Christmas party. There's a big five lane "loop" going around the city, mere feet from some people's backyards. They razed all the land around the lake my family would picnic at, so now it looks like this little pond surrounded by strip malls and Walmart Neighborhood Grocery. Those two routes into the city were clogged and I read that they're thinking about adding a third artery, if the state highway department lets them put in a new interchange on the interstate.

Instead of the planned "New Town" that the commercials for the place advertised, it looks now just like a regular town... albeit one that is choking itself through the shortsighted planning of that utopia that never quite came to pass. And it's STILL 30 minutes removed from any other city. I don't know why people still move out to those brick mini mcmansions on the slab. The crime is still there. The county property taxes are the same as in the "big" city. You can't see the stars at night. I honestly couldn't tell you what is the pay-out for all that.

That part of town where every street was named after a PGA golfer.

We had a part of town where every street was named from Tolkein.

A Frodo Lane, everybody wants one.

haha I was just thinking "Out on my skateboard the night is just hummin'."

this is a good piece about the nutty vegas street names

http://www.theawl.com/2013/01/the-street-names-of-las-vegas

there's a road near me called 'good intentions road'

I drove down it once and it got really warm inside the car

Of course.

I like the vegas article

http://fakeisthenewreal.org/reform/

did we talk about this? this seems like the right thread for it, somehow

lumping AK and HI into the continental states seems like a major error to me crossedarms.jpg

I think you mean contiguous, Alaska is still on North America, man

http://i.imgur.com/z6wu8or.png

Some of the name choices are just dummmmmmb.

keep looking for a state named "Candy" next to it

Seems like a fun way to shake things up in the states, can we vote on this to be put into legislation somewhere

if you want to move you have to find someone in another state to swap with

no they just redraw the borders every day

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/10/business/homeownership-may-actually-cause-unemployment.html

trolololo

https://twimg0-a.akamaihd.net/profile_images/2312704942/Troll_Face.jpg

cool jpg man

suggest ban

Me too, btw. Keep that shit outta here.

That NYT article is the sort of bullshit that newspapers can't resist, even when they know there's nothing real there. On a par with something headlined "Do Blondes Really have More Fun?"

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/business/in-climbing-income-ladder-location-matters.html?_r=0

I just came to link to the gawker article on that.
this weekend I went to visit my girlfriend at bard college (ah so ok, this will have nothing to do with poverty) and couldn't get a taxi at the train station. realized there is no such thing as a bus in the area, and that it is actually impossible to walk anywhere at all (all semi-rural highways with little to no shoulder).
it was totally enraging and I got to hang out at the locked train station for about an hour in the middle of the night before my gf could scramble a ride. everytime I'm up there I think it's basically immoral or unethical to build a place like that. literally impossible to do anything without owning a private car. I don't know how anyone could justify that kind of planning!

if you can't afford a car you're written off as a lazy criminal. our only hope for better planning is if rich people want to walk or take more public transportation, and it'll only be in enclaves they can afford to live in. the people who need it these resources the least. that's just the society we live in.

one problem with that article is it is doing percentiles nationwide. so a whole areas can go up or down in avg income (witness north dakota). in that sense its not only a mobility story, but a story of which regions have been doing well or poorly, and the two notions get mashed together. also not clear how they inflation adjust, etc. can't drill in more to the details, because the website is down :-(

Pretty crazy that in some of those North Dakota regions there's like a 20-30% chance that a child born in the bottom fifth rose to the top fifth. Just shows how powerful the oil boom is.

remember that's not top fifth north dakota -- that's top fifth nationwide. so just everyone in ND is better off than before -- not an indicator of relative mobility in ND.

sites back up for me, skimmed the data, they don't seem to have put any thought into the sort of things i'm worried about -- no story on inflation adjustment, etc.

also as far as i can tell they're not comparing kids at _their parents age at time of survey_ with the incomes of their parents. so that's why you get this "everything towards the middle" effect. like obv income should grow over time. but because their cohort were born '80-81 they're all 33 or so now. if their parents income is from when their parents were e.g. 40 then at least for some classes of jobs, even if they were exactly in their parents footsteps, they would be making less b/c they're younger. for other classes of jobs you're going to top out in earnings earlier. so that's another confounding factor that makes this data v. up for interpretation

http://www.salon.com/2013/08/03/the_suburbs_are_dead_and_thats_not_a_good_thing/

RIP suburbs

Hey, found a no-car, pedestrian neighborhood away from the city for iatee.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9xxylA5XN1qe0wclo1_500.jpg

A+

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/04/business/affordable-housing-drives-middle-class-to-cities-inland.html?action=click&contentCollection=Middle%20East&module=MostEmailed&version=Full®ion=Marginalia&src=me&pgtype=article

Moving from the US coasts to inland cities & burbs (and finding jobs presumably)

Oklahoma City, for example, has outpaced most other cities in growth since 2011, becoming the 12th-fastest-growing city last year. It has also won over a coveted demographic, young adults age 25 to 34, going from a net loss of millennials to a net gain. Other affordable cities that have jumped in the growth rankings include several in Texas, including El Paso and San Antonio, as well as Columbus, Ohio, and Little Rock, Ark.

Newcomers in Oklahoma City have traded traffic jams and preschool waiting lists for master suites the size of their old apartments. The sons of Lorin Olson, a stem cell biologist who moved here from New York’s Upper East Side, now ride bikes in their suburban neighborhood and go home to a four-bedroom house. Hector Lopez, a caricature artist, lives in a loft apartment here for less than he paid to stay in a garage near Los Angeles. Tony Trammell, one of a group of about a dozen friends to make the move from San Diego, paid $260,000 for his 3,300-square-foot home in a nearby suburb.

“This is the opposite of the gold rush,” Mr. Trammell said.

The Oklahoma Laters.

lol

feel like you'd have to keep a knife at my throat continuously to get me down there

My city's mentioned in that paragraph. Gotta say, the weather's nice, the costs are cheap, my morning commute is about 10-15 minutes.

The state's getting overrun by lunatics, but for someone who doesn't leave the house that often, it's not so bad. We city folk are pretty progressive when it comes right down to it.

Now Ok-lol-homa on the other hand is a different story, imho.