Posted on 07/06/2008 4:43:26 AM PDT by shrinkermd
While millions of American families struggle with falling house prices, soaring gasoline costs and tightening credit, some environmentalists, urban planners and urban real estate speculators are welcoming the bad news as signaling what they have long dreamed of -- the demise of suburbia.
In a March Atlantic article, Christopher B. Leinberger, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor of urban planning, contended that yesterday's new suburbs will become "the slums" of tomorrow because high gas prices and the housing meltdown will force Americans back to the urban core. Leinberger is not alone. Other pundits, among them author James Howard Kunstler, who despises suburban aesthetics, and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, see the pain in suburbia as a silver lining for urban revival.
...But the suburbs remain home to a majority of Americans and a larger proportion of U.S. families -- and people aren't leaving those communities in droves to live in cities. Even with economic growth slowing, many suburbs, exurbs and smaller towns, especially those whose economies are tied to energy, are continuing to do better than most cities in terms of job creation and population growth.
...The problem for many cities is that they lack the jobs for people to move close to. Since the 1970s, the suburbs have been the home for most high-tech jobs and now the majority of office space. By 2000, only 22% of people worked within three miles of a city center in the nation's 100 largest metro areas.And from 2001 to 2006, job growth in suburbia expanded at six times the rate of that in urban cores, according to an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics by the Praxis Strategy Group, a consulting firm with which I work.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
The conclusion being that the oil crisis is partly, at least, politically contrived by the Democrats to fullfill there desire to punish and force conservatives back to the core city.
Done properly, and with no holds, this approach would be widely repeated and believed since it contains both truth and a conspiracy theory hard to deny.
Dream on. The rise of suburban campus-like workplaces, plus the simple fact that suburbia would never have existed if people did not prefer to live there reveals this Democrat opium dream.
Miserable people huddled in cities, writhing like maggots in cheese, vote Democrat. That's all these dreamers want.
It’s not a bad idea but people shouldn’t be forced into it.
Our inner cities used to be places that were lively and interesting and safe.
The problem isn’t jobs; the writer must think we are idiots to believe it is only jobs.
Gangs, crime, corruption, horrible schools that the city councils and mayors refuse to clean up.
What young family is going to live in an inner city and subject their children and themselves to these hellholes?
btt
The real issue is the endless miles of residential tracts where people have to hop in their cars and drive 5-10 miles to do anything: 20-30 miles to work; 10 miles to the mall; 5 miles to get a tube of toothpaste at the nearest convenience mart; a couple or five miles each way every time your kid has a playdate, etc. These are the areas where it is simply impossible to live without a car. They are also the areas that tend to be hopelessly congested because everyone is in his car all the time. It's often even hazardous to walk or ride a bike because sidewalks have disappeared, it being assumed everyone is in a car.
Yes, I have a car but I could live easily without one. I live two miles from work and can bus, metro, ride a bike, or walk. Church, schools for the kids, groceries, and adequate light shopping are all within walking distance. Serious shopping is a couple of metro stops away; I'd probably choose to drive because I'm spoiled, but I could easily dispense with that if needed. In fact, when the kids grow up I may well dispense with a personal car and go the ZipCar route for weekend expeditions. Not a bad way to live.
Why should anyone have to give up their automobile to placate those who dislike them for real or imagined reasons?
Seemingly, we are going to use public policy against drilling to force them out of their vehicles. Public policy means government power.
This might sell in the crowded East but it will never sell in the heartland.
Actually, my freeper friend, I find all of that a terrible way to live. My closest neighbor is 1/4 mile away. I have deer coming through my property. So what if I have to drive five miles for toothpaste? BTW, I’m glad you enjoy your lifestyle. I’m all for diversity of lifestyles. I just don’t want some one telling me I have to live yours. (Which you didn’t do.)
“Miserable people huddled in cities, writhing like maggots in cheese, vote Democrat. That’s all these dreamers want.”
you got that right!...urban areas are looking more like they are straight out of “Blade Runner” every day.
I would add that the issue is petroleum-powered automobile dependency. Whatever ‘big oil’ is, it’s involved. Why else would this country have slept through the 1973 Arab oil embargo and then continued on like nothing had happened? As always, just follow the $$ to get to the truth. We need to drill now, and we need to ultimately attain energy independence. Short-term relief, long-term independence; it’s as simple as that. I recommend familiarization with H.R. 6260. If this country can put a man on the moon using computers that would make a Commodore 64 look like a CRAY, we can attain energy independence.
Wife and I live in the city. Have a nice old house with a small yard. Nice old neighborhood. Great neighbors.
I’ve been here 10 years and frankly, I’m sick of the noise, crime, and pathetic city services for the high taxes.
My neighbors have lived here since the 50s and wouldn’t live anywhere else. That’s great. Its just not for me, and my wife and I are willing to make sacrifices to make living in the country doable.
I’ve never liked the suburbs, although I do see the attraction.
All that said, this article describes typical leftist thought. Don’t make cities more attractive by fixing problems - force people into the hellholes whether they want to live there or not because you want control.
You can keep you city zoo living, I live in the country, we need to drive everywhere we go...so what. There is not a real energy shortage in our nation, it was created intentionally by the democrats. There is more coal reserves in the US than there are oil reserves in the Middle East. We have plenty of oil and we have nuclear energy.
While you call us in the country “automobile dependent” that is just another word of saying transportation dependent. again...so what. It is definitely preferable to living in the human zoo urban folks deal with.
You can accept the delusion of an energy shortage as if there is nothing one can do about it, or...you can help elect folks who are willing to actually use our energy resources to the betterment of us all. Oh and btw, take your damn wind turbines and put them all in the cities...leave our pristine countryside to ourselves. Hell, skyscraper rooftops are perfect places for those monstrosities.
Let the liberals have the cities, with all of the crime, filth and pollution.
They HAVE to be, either by misfortune or by economics. Consider the experiments with crowded rats. It is literally sickening.
Our inner cities used to be places that were lively and interesting and safe.
Yes, I remember.
Now they are merely interesting, in a Jane Goodall sense.
You’ve got this one right.
$4 gas or not, we’ll stay living in our woods.
But in the last decade or so, businesses follow the people, and employers moved more and more out of the City.
Both my banks are within 1.5 miles. Three major grocery chains are within 3 miles. A good hospital is 6 miles away. There is an Industrial Park 4 miles away filled with Hi-Tech employers, and another less than 10 miles away even larger. There are dozens of restaurants, some with valet parking and huge wine lists. Yet, I have so many deer in the yard I am tired of them.
Given this, I see no justification for a city. I can visit several within an hour by car or train any time I want, so cannot imagine, for me anyway, any reason to live in one.
“All that said, this article describes typical leftist thought. Don’t make cities more attractive by fixing problems - force people into the hellholes whether they want to live there or not because you want control.”
It’s a bit more complicated than that. Some believe the way to fix the cities is to make the more affluent suburbanites live in the cities so that they will be more agreeable to paying taxes to fix the cities. In other words, if they have to live in the hellholes then they will want to fix the hell holes.
That’s part of the rationale for universal health care. If the affluent have to use the same health care as the poor, then the affluent will make sure taxes are high enough to pay for the system.
What people living in large liberal cities never mention is that all the goodies city dwellers want and consume - TVs, pizza, steaks, lobster, expensive clothes - are delivered by trucks that use.....oil.
Liberal city dwellers who bike, commute via mass transport and walk are surrounded by goods that come to them via resource extraction and manufacture.
Liberals in cities are huge consumers of oil and its products.
Maybe we should limit the number of trucks driving into large cities. Learn how to grow cotton in the backyard to make your clothes, plant soy beans in your parks for your TVP and tofu. Run your turbines on garbage to generate electricity.
It’s time people in big cities start cutting back on oil use.
I have to agree with this, but not for the same reasons cited.
I see some of these new developments building enormous cheaply constructed houses. Row upon row of houses spaced about 10 feet apart. The driveway is only about 15 feet long, and the back yard is just as small.
In move the liberal yuppies that don't EVER take care of their own children. At 3:30 PM, the place looks like a gangland/hooker mingling crowd after school is out. I'm sure there is a lot of drugs and kid sex going on.
In 20 years, these cheaply made houses will be falling apart. Nobody will be buying them and the resale values will fall (more than the market already has fallen).
All this said, I don't see cities reviving like the libs want. I see new developments forming. Nobody wants to live with high crime, high taxes, and no privacy.
No one is moving back to any 'core city'. California, for better or worse, once again represents the model for growth. In this case, instead of people moving to anyplace denser, the suburbs themselves are becoming denser.
The reason for this is simple: the land is becoming much more valuable relative to the inner-city. And the reason for this is likewise straightforward: the suburbs are where the safest neighbors & best schools are located; the jobs have followed.
So rather than have everyone herd back to one central city location, what we're seeing is the emergence of multiple peripheral sub-urban cores. And all populated by tax paying producers.
Your’s is the point I was going to make. The highway in my area is four lanes each way and is bumper to bumper every weekday. However TWO full lanes of this traffic is nothing but 18-wheelers headed to the urban center. This is not an exaggeration.
City dwellers who walk to work have a limited vision of their true impact on local traffic problems and the environment.
Now imagine if even one quarter of the suburban population moved to the city center and the increased demands this would put on the urban infrastructure.
Finally not to pile on our city FReeper friends, but a big problem in this country is the large masses of people who don’t see the real world beyond two miles from their homes. The world is not as crowded, blighted, or environmentally damaged as they are lead to believe by the MSM or that they experience in their own neighborhood.
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