Free Republic

<p>WELLESLEY - They call it The House, and not in a complimentary way. It's a 5,900-square-foot, three-story Colonial wedged into little more than a quarter-acre, a structure that dwarfs the New England sampler of quaint Capes and Victorians nestled in the woodsy neighborhood around it.</p>

Don't want to fork out for a Prius? Can't see tanking up with ethanol? Can't afford solar panels for your roof? Not to worry, you can still do something to fight global warming: Live closer to work. That's one conclusion of a major national report published Thursday by the nonprofit Urban Land Institute. ...A hotly contested bill sponsored by Sen. Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) would require regional planning groups to set targets for reducing greenhouse gases, and could stop millions of dollars in federal, state and local transportation funds from being spent on roads that could encourage sprawl. ...two-thirds of the...

GREENWICH, Conn. -- You know you're in a different kind of town when the signs against drunk driving show a line drawn through a Martini glass to which the artist thoughtfully added a stirrer. Greenwich, Conn., is one such town. Greenwich is home to billionaire hedge-fund managers, private-equity kings and corporate chieftains, as well as ordinary multi-multimillionaires. Interviewing people here requires leaving phone messages with au pairs and catching folks between board meetings. You'd think that Greenwich would be solid Bush-loving turf -- what with all those tax cuts for the rich. It is not. The voters are roughly 40...

When Bing Crosby crooned that he would settle down and "make the San Fernando Valley my home," he wasn't singing about apartments. The Southern California dream back then — exemplified by the World War II-era tracts popping up in the Valley and other places — was of an affordable single-family home, a little house on a patch of green where kids could play out back. But today, construction of condos and apartments is rapidly overtaking that of single-family residences, even in suburbs known for spread-out living. It's part of a broader shift to urbanized living in Southern California, a change...

NVTA to vote on taxes, fees By LILLIAN KAFKA lkafka@potomacnews.com Tuesday, July 10, 2007 The Northern Virginia Transportation Authority is poised to take action on seven taxes and fees that could raise about $300 million a year for the region's transportation system. On Thursday the NVTA meets to make its decision after a public hearing in Falls Church. Much of the authority's decision, however, rests on the result of a legal suit that it will file on Friday, according to members of the authority. That suit will ask a judge to rule on the NVTA's constitutional ability to impose those...

BEE CAVE, Tex.NEARLY two decades ago, Gene and Linda Lowenthal, who were living in Austin, decided that they would eventually want to move to the wide-open countryside. They bought 58 acres in this small town in the Texas Hill Country, about 45 minutes west of Austin, built a small house and moved here in the mid-’90s, finally free of noise and sprawl. That freedom lasted about nine years. Then, bulldozers started appearing on hillsides once covered with live oak and mesquite trees. Houses and traffic lights popped up on once-forlorn roads leading to their home. Plans for a water line...

Parents' fears are robbing children of their childhood. ___ My three boys sprawl on the couch, fingering their Game Boys. I wish I could shoo them outside until dusk. I wish they could tromp to the marsh to search for polliwogs. I wish we didn't have to live in a fortress. But we don't let our children play in the front yard, because a sex offender lives two doors down. Instead, like other families in this neighborhood, we've built private playgrounds in the back. From my kitchen window, I see two wooden play structures, three trampolines, and four basketball hoops,...

There is overwhelming evidence that urban sprawl has been beneficial for many people. Year after year, the vast majority of Americans respond to batteries of polls by saying that they are quite happy with where they live, whether it is a city, suburb, or elsewhere. Most objective indicators about American urban life are positive. We are more affluent than ever; home ownership is up; life spans are up; pollution is down; crime in most cities has declined. Even where sprawl has created negative consequences, it has not precipitated any crisis. So what explains the power of today's anti-sprawl crusade? How...

Half a century ago, millions of young white couples left America's central cities for greener places to build homes and rear families. Their move created booming commuter communities and a new way of life. But that idealized picture has been transformed and the future of those pioneering suburbs is in jeopardy, according to a study issued yesterday by the Brookings Institution, a research group in Washington.

Suburbia often gets a bad rap, but government should accept that people want the picket fence ideal ___ As California's first large urbanized region, the Bay Area has a long and compelling history as a center of city life. When Fresno was little more than a couple of shacks and Los Angeles a gunslinger's cow town, San Francisco already saw itself as a sophisticated, cosmopolitan city. Yet today, this cherished ideal of the Bay Area as a neatly organized, dense urban center is increasingly archaic. The suburbs are starting to take over. Long anxious to see itself as a Pacific...

Suburbia often gets a bad rap, but government should accept that people want the picket fence ideal As California's first large urbanized region, the Bay Area has a long and compelling history as a center of city life. When Fresno was little more than a couple of shacks and Los Angeles a gunslinger's cow town, San Francisco already saw itself as a sophisticated, cosmopolitan city. Yet today, this cherished ideal of the Bay Area as a neatly organized, dense urban center is increasingly archaic. The suburbs are starting to take over. Long anxious to see itself as a Pacific version...

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...