Posted on 01/29/2006 7:17:24 AM PST by SmithL
Did....
Why?
The real problem is that a lot of suburbs are just depressing: tributes to the willingness of Americans to accept mediocrity (mediocre schools, mediocre restaurants, mediocre houses, mediocre cultural amenities) and to pay an increasingly high price for it (traffic, home prices, property taxes, no better connection to one's neighborhors than in an anonymous urban high rise, higher and higher energy bills).
Conservatives can be just as depressed by this as anyone else, perhaps even more so than liberals. However, an important difference between liberals and conservatives is that we're willing to let people make their own choices and have confidence that the market will ultimately sort it all out.
Contrary to what every realtor says, land prices don't always rise.....if the "powers that be" decide to build subsidized apartments all around your neighborhood, it's a good bet that you'll be selling for a lot less than fair market value.
Yes, suburbia does not take up much land, but it gobbles tax dollars, wastes infrastructure, creates stress, becomes part of a combined domestic environmental cocoon wrapped in congestion, pollution, and due to faulty planning, induces social and intellectual isolationism, obesity, etc.
We need more mixed use/high density to make America work and live better, longer and healthier. And not waste resources: paving, sewers, water lines, electrical lines, sidewalks, rescue and services, gasoline for irresponsibly long commutes, etc.
We take up a very small fraction of the available land, yes; but we consume the majority of our resources in these areas.
Speaking of which: if the recent scare price of over $200/barrel as projected by recent CNN story comes to pass, our suburban model will become extinct.
Here's a night-time view of Texas. The blue spotches are the lights of cities and towns.
To give an idea of scale, the distance from the center of El Paso (at the westernmost tip of the state) to the center of Dallas (in the northeastern quadrant of the state) is 643 miles.
I don't think it can be both.
Ok...
Then move WAY the heck out. I am.
In about a month, I'm leaving the Washington, DC area behind, with all its' traffic, gangs, violence, and people at the Mcdonald's drive-through who can't understand a simple meal order in English.
I'm moving to West Virginia, where people are polite, speak English, and moving to a house twice the size of the townhouse I'm currently living in, for about two-thirds the money.
Now all I'll need is a Republican Governor and Legislature, and Republican Congressmen and Senators, not the likes of "Sheets" Byrd and Jay Rockefeller. . .
Click this link to see the whole Earth at night from space:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0011/earthlights2_dmsp_big.jpg
Do you have a link to that photo, and is there one that shows the US as a whole?
"Suburban sprawl is just another hoax that liberal governments use..."Yes. And whatever they say doesn't have to make sense. They just hammer away incessantly, and millions of morons believe them.
It's all about power and control. Politicians frighten, cajole, promise, lure, tax--whatever it takes to confiscate money from the masses to keep themselves in power--and the morons just hand over the cash--like the dumb, driven cattle we're supposed to be unlike.
"In the New Democrat a few years ago, Fred Siegel wrote that sprawl is 'an expression of the upward mobility and growth in homeownership generated by our past half-century of economic success.'"No wonder the Left is outraged. Leftists don't think people should own anything--certainly not a home.
Every penny confiscated from a citizen is a penny spent on keeping politicians in power! And don't forget it.
"An unprecedented 67 percent of Americans now own their own homes. Black homeownership has been increasing at more than three times the rate for whites, and today a record 45 percent of African-Americans are now homeowners."The Left reads this as the potential destruction of its political power base.
"Sprawl is part of the price we're paying for creating something new on the face of the earth: the first mass upper-middle class."This horrifies the Left more than anything.
Karl Marx himself--the father of the Left--considered the bourgeoisie to be the greatest threat to his designs.
The Left has not abandoned its Dream of a worldwide Marxist totalitarian government any more than Muslims have abandoned their Dream of a worldwide Islamic theocracy.
This is one--of many--things that the Left and the Islamofascists have in common--a shared Dream of world domination. The rhetoric differs. That's all.
Cool jpg, thanks.
This warming is linked to an explosion in the diversity of other mammals, but little was known about bat evolution. New DNA data traces the origin of four major bat lineages to a brief period in the Eocene Epoch when the average global temperature rose by about 7C. Bats make up 20% of mammals, yet their evolutionary history is poorly known. The scientists, led by Emma Teeling from University College Dublin, Ireland, estimate that around 60% of the bat fossil record is missing. Writing in Science, the international team of researchers propose that bats originated in the ancient landmass of Laurasia, possibly in an area now located in North America. Insect prey The gene sequencing data suggests bats split away on their own evolutionary path about 52-50 million years ago, at a time when the Earth experienced an event known as the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.... |
Do a tiny bit of research on bats and you'll find out why. The author could have done the same before including that statement, which doesn't say a lot for his standards of journalism.
Those are good reasons not to sprawl, but there are good reasons to move out from the city. My commute is an irresponsible 75 miles each way, but shorter in time and resources than many people who live closer. I am restoring my land to nature, becoming less obese doing so, and am working on getting off the grid at some point. I may be an exception, but this country is full of exceptions.
On the other hand, it probably wouldn't appeal to bicyclists much, since it does tend to be rather ... mountainous, a common problem for a Colorado city at 7,000+ feet.
The United States at night, August 30, 1997.
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