Free Republic

Suburban families are really busy. They are working to support McMansions, impeccable yards, expensive and immaculately cleaned and polished automobiles, expensive social functions and clubs, gym memberships, day spa hair nail/pedicure, tanning, waxing, and massage expenses, housekeepers and landscapers, shopping excursions, and youth sports. They are wrapped up, so to speak, in image cults, which literally take every second of every day. Meanwhile, in the land of facts and truth, their nation dies off in hunks. Older citizens realize this. So do many citizens under the age of 25, but the 30 to mid-40-somethings are largely non-functioning citizens. They are...

At first glance, Robert Bruegmann -- a childless academic whose modernist apartment building sits in a dense, upscale Chicago neighborhood -- seems like the kind of guy who'd hate the suburbs. His peers and predecessors have, for decades, decried the unplanned, low-density, auto-dependent growth of shopping malls and subdivisions. But his counterintuitive new book, "Sprawl: A Compact History," charts the spreading of cities as far back as first-century Rome -- and finds the process not just deeply natural but often beneficial for people, societies and even cities. "Sprawl has been as evident in Europe as in America," Bruegmann writes, "and...

BURLINGTON, Vt., Dec. 9 (UPI) -- U.S. researchers are studying the ecosystems of the suburban enclave to determine the effects of lawns in global warming. "The suburban landscape is large, and it's growing," said Jennifer Jenkins of the University of Vermont, one of the scientists reporting their findings this week at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. "There's this enormous land surface that's falling through the cracks." Jenkins said forests, wetlands, bogs, rainforests and deserts have had the brunt of scientific study, but the suburbs have a big impact from the use of pesticides and fertilizers...

Don Morissette looks like a character from a 1950s sitcom — clean-cut, with a square jaw and quick grin. He talks like one, too, saying that all families should have the opportunity to live in big houses with big backyards. “Kids need lots of room and backyards to play in,” said Morissette, who owns one of the region’s oldest, largest and best-known home-building companies. It’s the sort of thing the 49-year-old Morissette has been saying for much of the 32 years he’s been building homes in the Portland area — including his term as the only home builder to serve...

NASA Earth Observatory has this neat graph of the lawn area in the United States. It's a very close match to the "night light" image made a couple of years ago. I linked the little picture below to the bigger one (which is only 380 K). Click on the link for the accompanying article. Yann-Arthus Bertrand took this impressive photograph of the "crater lake" inside the caldera from the Pinatubo eruption of 1991:

http://www2.dailynews.com/news/ci_3078927 Gas prices changing suburban lifestyles By Lisa Mascaro, Staff Writer 10/02/2005 Santa Clarita mom Kelli Caprine has a grueling weekday commute. From behind the wheel of her GMC Denali, she drops off three of her four kids at different schools each morning and picks them up in the afternoon. On Mondays, she drives the kids to Boy Scout meetings and gymnastics classes. On Tuesdays: football practice, cheerleading and church class. Wednesdays bring baseball practice, more cheerleading, church and, sometimes, guitar lessons. Thursdays: Girl Scouts, cheerleading and football. Also, there are away games. With gas hovering around $3 a gallon,...

The battle's over. For half a century, legions of planners, urbanists, environmentalists and big city editorialists have waged war against sprawl. Now it's time to call it a day and declare a victor. The winner is, yes, sprawl. The numbers are incontestable and the trends inexorable. Since 1950, more than 90 percent of metropolitan population growth in America has taken place in the suburbs. Today, roughly two out of three people in the nation's metro areas are suburban dwellers. "The burbs" have become the homeland of American success, with an increasing share of our national wealth and half the poverty...

As minorities move to suburbs, hate follows For three years, Reginald and Lori Doster have put up with racial slurs, KKK graffiti and an arson attack that terrified their daughter. So next month, the African-American couple plan to leave their Taylor home, taking with them bitter memories of living on a predominantly white block. The Taylor case is one of a string of recent incidents in which black people are being greeted with racial violence after they move into neighborhoods with no or few African Americans. With Detroit's black population increasingly leaving the city for the suburbs, it's a problem...

The Rev. John Bennison scheduled a peace vigil Saturday in his small church in the Contra Costa town of Clayton because he hadn't heard of anything happening nearby to mark the second anniversary of the Iraq war.There isn't much to hear about. The antiwar movement's failure to take root in the suburbs is one reason the movement is struggling to redefine itself and gain political power 2 1/2 years after hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to city streets in the run-up to the U.S. invasion. Antiwar leaders point to a number of reasons for the movement's lack of buzz...

ABC's hit anti-suburbia series, "Desperate Housewives," continued its winning ways on Jan. 16 at the Golden Globes, where it picked up an award for best comedy, and star Teri Hatcher was named best actress in a comedy. Since its premiere in October, "Desperate Housewives" has hit the 24.6 million viewer mark in a single night and provoked national controversy with its Nicollette Sheridan/Terrell Owens sex ad. It has also triggered massive conservative consternation. American Decency Association president Bill Johnson calls the show "nasty and destructive to the American family ... cultural-rotting programming." Parents Television Council founder L. Brent Bozell III...

It's long been an irony that the same American who gushes over a delightful corner patisserie in the 16th arrondissement buys into a subdivision that is the antithesis of Parisian street life. There are no corner bakeries in the gently curving streets of suburbia, for an Old World clutter of transit, shops and residences is precisely what's been designed out of the suburban landscape. Does the irony lie in our rote desire for a suburban home, or in the fact we've had so few choices? Many of us would love to live in an urban neighborhood rich with transit and...

SPRINGFIELD - As a Harvard Law School student in 1990 eyeing his future, Barack Obama expressed little interest in transforming his Ivy League degree into a swanky job in the suburbs. "I'm not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me. And I'm not interested in isolating myself," Obama told the Associated Press in an April 1990 story. "I feel good when I'm engaged in what I think are the core issues of the society, and those core issues to me are what's happening to poor folks in this society." Obama, of Chicago, is now the Democratic nominee for U.S....

We're living in the age of the great dispersal. Americans continue to move from the Northeast and Midwest to the South and West. But the truly historic migration is from the inner suburbs to the outer suburbs, to the suburbs of suburbia. From New Hampshire down to Georgia, across Texas to Arizona and up through California, you now have the booming exurban sprawls that have broken free of the gravitational pull of the cities and now float in a new space far beyond them. For example, the population of metropolitan Pittsburgh has declined by 8 percent since 1980, but as...

Islamic bomb attack foiled by raids in the heart of suburbia By John Steele, Home Affairs Correspondent (Filed: 31/03/2004) A suspected Islamic plot to launch a huge bomb attack in Britain was disrupted yesterday in one of the country's biggest anti-terrorist operations involving 700 police officers from five forces. More than half a ton of ammonium nitrate fertiliser, a basic ingredient of home-made explosives, was discovered at dawn in a self-storage depot in the west London suburb of Hanwell. Police made a series of raids making a number of arrests At the same time eight men aged between 17 and...

Last Friday night I had a chance to head into the big city (Atlanta) for a little culture. I have three young children at home and it was a rare opportunity for me to venture out of Suburbia.....

NIONDALE, N.Y., Feb. 19 - One by one, the children of suburbia are leaving Long Island.There is the 24-year-old graduate student who moved to Washington State to study anthropology and found that it was cheaper to live in Seattle than Hempstead. There is the sheriff's investigator, Timothy Ortwein, who left and bought his first house, in West Virginia, at age 23. And there is Emil Soskin, 24, a third-year law student who is fed up with strip malls and subdivisions and longs for an apartment in Greenwich Village.New York's suburbs have long struggled to hold on to young adults, but...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - You drive to work, you drive your kids to school, you drive to the grocery store -- no wonder you have put on a few pounds. U.S. researchers said on Thursday they had quantified the price of living in sprawled-out American communities and weight gain leads the list -- six pounds on average, to be precise. Their findings, published in special issues of the American Journal of Public Health and the American Journal of Health Promotion, are aimed at urban planners, county and city councils and other groups involved in laying out communities. "We found that U.S....

<p>I recently moved my family from the rugged blue-collar city neighborhood of Brookline to the palmy suburbs of Shaler. The move was mostly for a bigger house, but also to escape the crime and drugs beginning to permeate my community. After several trips and several hundred boxes being unloaded, I settled in to my new life. My wife and I had done all the research and checked out the school district for crime and, most importantly, for multilevel marketers -- we found nothing. Surely, my family would be safe here.</p>

  Red barns and silver silos rise amid gently sloping fields of soybeans and tomatoes, a stone's throw from sprawling country estates on tree-shaded, winding roads.But in the idyllic setting of South Harrison, battle lines are being drawn between Gloucester County's rural past and its suburban future.On one side are farmers such as Lou Chiulli, who has 33 head of cattle on a plot of land behind his house on Franklinville Road. The money he makes by selling the cattle supplements his income from his 142 acres of organic crops and his job as a union tile-setter, he says.On the...

Author defies trends in speech on sprawl By Pateen Corcoran, Staff Writer March 24, 2002 WEST CHESTER -- Don't focus on open space. Cookie-cutter is not necessarily bad. Return to tradition. These were some of the unconventional words of wisdom preached by author and urban analyst James Howard Kunstler when speaking about suburban sprawl, a phenomenon of growth that is plaguing the nation and is all too familiar reality in Chester County. About 100 local planners, students and residents attended Kunstler's lecture, titled "Can America Survive Suburbia?" on Tuesday in Phillips Memorial Hall at West Chester University to hear his...