Here's one:
Posted on 01/29/2006 7:17:24 AM PST by SmithL
A well-made, raised-relief map is a beautiful thing. You know what I'm talking about, don't you? It's a map mode of molded plastic, so that mountains protrude into your personal space. This is handy when you are riding your bicycle across America. You can see where the tough climbs will be. Avoid Gunnison, Colo.
My map of the 48 states is made by Kistler Graphics Inc. in Denver. Not only the texture but also the colors are delightful: a rich mix of tans, greens and blues.
The artist uses one other color, yellow, to mark urban areas. I think about those splotches when I hear gloom and doom about suburban sprawl, and you know why? Because compared to the entire land mass of the United States, they are tiny.
A lot of cities you would consider large do not even merit their own yellow splotch, but merely a black square. For example, Portland, Las Vegas, Indianapolis, Salt Lake City, Miami and Phoenix.
In fact, in the entire western two-thirds of the nation, between the California coast and the Mississippi River, there are just four yellow splotches, and you have to look really hard to find them. They sit unobtrusively next to mountains and rivers. Can you guess them? I'll tell you at the end of this column.
On my map, the distance from San Francisco to New York is 50 centimeters. The distance from International Falls, Minn., to Brownsville, Texas, is 30 centimeters. That means my America comprises roughly 1,500 square centimeters. It looks to me like all the yellow splotches combined could fit into Vermont.
My seat-of-the-pants analysis is confirmed by Steven Hayward, a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco. He writes: "Developed land accounts for less than 5 percent of the total land area in the continental United States. The amount of land developed each year, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, is 0.0006 percent."
So I have to ask: Where in the heck is this suburban sprawl crisis?
The answer, to me, seems obvious. There is no crisis. Suburban sprawl is just another hoax that liberal governments use to try to stop us ordinary Americans from doing what is natural.
In this case, we want to find a roomy place to live and have a little money left over after paying the mortgage. But social engineers, trying to perfect humanity, don't want us to spread out. They want us crammed together in dense cities to keep us in line and take away our Swiss Army Knives.
In this sense, the suburban sprawl myth is similar to the global warming hoax. Al Gore types begrudge us the freedom that cars provide, so they scare us with threats like "You're destroying the coral reef of Mexico!"
Well, so what if we are? I didn't even know Mexico had coral reef. As I have asked before: Who ever promised us an Earth that would never, ever change? Who ever said coral reef should exist forever? Ask a dinosaur: Species come and go every day.
In other words, if coral reef does die out, soon enough it will be replaced by some other interesting organism. Did you know there were no bats on Earth until we emerged from the last Ice Age 12,000 years ago? That's right: If not for global warming, there would be no such thing as these fascinating, sonar-equipped flying mice.
This is how the world's climate works, you see. You lose a reef, you gain a bat. Deal with it, OK?
Now some more about suburban sprawl. It is not the evil that it's made out to be. 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. ...
"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.
"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."
The writer Thomas Sowell adds: "In some places housing prices are astronomical -- three times the national average in much of California, for example. Despite the old rule of thumb that housing should cost no more than one-fourth of your income, there are parts of California where tenants and new homebuyers pay at least half their incomes for housing."
So what are middle-class people supposed to do in cities such as San Francisco? Pitch a tent in Golden Gate Park? No, of course not. They move eastward, building communities in the undeveloped land between Oakland and exurbs like Stockton.
And what if they do? As Sowell points out: "You could double the size of every city and town in America, and still nine-tenths of the land would be undeveloped."
Steven Hayward, the researcher quoted above, has found a rich analogy to the suburban sprawl panic in Chapter 7 of "Alice in Wonderland":
"There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house, and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it: a Dormouse was sitting between them, fast asleep. ...
"The table was a large one, but the three were all crowded together at one corner of it: 'No room! No room!' they cried out when they saw Alice coming. 'There's PLENTY of room!' said Alice indignantly, and she sat down in a large armchair at one end of the table."
Duh!
Readers may send email to mbowers@starnewspapers.com. The four yellow splotches between the California coast and the Mississippi River are Denver, San Antonio, Dallas and Houston.
Here's one:
looks like he may have gotten his timeline screwed up, for sure - tough the thoery appears to be correct re: temperature and evolution of the bat.
Either way, you are correct - accurate info goes a long way toward building credibility.
Nothing could describe the American Left more perfectly.
These are the people whose restrictive covenants empower a board to approve or disapprove the color that you paint the inside of your house.
These are the people who want laws "with teeth in them" to prevent you from smoking--even in your own home. (I don't smoke. Never have.)
These are the people who repeat the mantras dictated by Leftist leaders in Washington, TV, academia, and Hollywood: "Bush lied!" e.g.
These are the "commentators" who repeat the catchphrase du jour: "Everybody does it," e.g., "The Smartest Woman in the World," "Private Morality Has Nothing To Do with Public Performance," "Perjury Is Not an Impeachable Offence," et al. ad infinitum--and the morons who believe them and parrot their catchphrases.
These are the people who worship at the shrine of Camelot (which, like the original Camelot, existed only in the imagination) and still consider Jack and Jackie-O the epitome of greatness.
These are the people who shout down speakers and to whom freedom of speech is abhorrent.
These are the people who voted for Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, John Kerry, Michael Dukakis, and Al Gore.
These are the people who still have "Kerry" bumper stickers on their cars.
These are the people who want to commit hari kiri when their children don't get in an ivy league school.
These are the people who are slaves to popular culture and the latest fads.
These are the people who consider Barbra Streisand to be history's greatest soprano (and a great mind).
These are the people who read the New York Times, the "L.A. Times", the Boston Globe, and Time magazine and watch CNN and network news.
These are the mindnumbingly boring Leftists--the denizens of "The Mainstream Newsmedia", academia, Hollywood, and the Democrat Party--who would sell their souls for membership in the "Liberal Community" (an Orwellian misnomer, of course, there's nothing liberal about these people) and who would die to be on the A-list!
These are the people who are locked in the Leftist paradigm and thinks it's reality and who cannot imagine anything else.
These are the people who are Politically Correct!
These are the people who cannot be honest, even with themselves, and whose imagination is sclerotic.
For liberalism, imagination, and the joys of freedom, abandon these people and their mindnumbingly boring paradigm and submerge yourself in Middle America.
Maybe by example, you will help some of them break out of the paradigm,
And, even if you don't, you will save yourself. (It's like trying to save someone who is drowning. Don't let him drown you in the process.)
One of the more idiotic statements I've read in the last while.
I agree. Baseball wasn't even invented until the mid-1800s.
The author is definitely confused on that one, which is too bad because he makes a few good points and that comment dismisses everything else he said. What he said is probably true for particular regions like Indiana-Ohio-Michigan which were glacier covered about 15,000 years ago, and now have large bat populations. But defintely was not true for the whole earth.
I'm with you. We live on the edge of a very large US city, and I've also lived in Germany and Canada. In the US, although I'd like to live closer to where I work (and I've lived in Philly, San Antonio, DC and Honolulu), now that I have a family I wouldn't dare. US inner cities are dangerous and the schools are terrible. When I lived in Canada and Germany the cities were livable because they have planned for co-existing commercial and residential purposes. As a kid I could go anywhere--other towns, museums, shows, etc. because there was a safe, efficient reasonable public transit system in place. I think lots of suburban families would choose to liver closer to where they work if they could be assured of a safe environment with decent schools. Who wants to spend 3 hours a day commuting to work? Believe me, it's much nicer to be able to get to work in 15 minutes and be so close to restaurants and shopping that you can walk, and even have a drink or two with dinner. Instead we are being stuck with this soul-less cookie cutter enviornment that is leaving us nothing to tie ourselves to, and look at what it's doing to the kids who are raised in these environments. I'm not sure that we really have much of a choice here. The big winners are the developers--the rest of us lose.
No wonder they call Africa "The Dark Continent." :)
Well, then, the solution is for you to voluntarily move into the city and live in a high-rise condo or apartment. It is not for you to get the government to force me to do the same.
The urban sprawl movement is driven by the same soccer moms who elected clinton. They moved out to the suburbs 20 years ago and have a nice place with lots of open space around it. But they don't want anyone else to move near them and have a nice place.
Problem is--they don't own the open space. Someone else does. So they get the government to confiscate the value of the property of the owners of the open space (by prohibiting development) and give that value to the soccer moms. It's the "I've got mine. Now you stop getting yours" mentality.
The folks running the open-space movement, of course, have a different agenda. People are a lot easier to control and much more dependent on the government if you stack them up in boxes in the central city. So they manipulate the soccer moms, not telling them that the real goal of the movement is to get their kids living in high-rise boxes in the central city.
This is what the commies want, Soviet-style apartments for everyone.
Ha, ha. Bats have only been around ten years. Check their logo.
That's mostly the result of who lives in American central cities vs European and Canadian cities. Until recently (the Muslim problem), they have not had a welfare dependent underclass there. So the cities are nice and safe--at least they were ten years ago when I spent much time in Germany.
If you made the central cities in America nice (cute shops, urban malls, starbucks, loft housing etc), it would require moving the underclass out. Because if the underclass stays, all the cute little urban malls and renovation mean nothing. It will still be a dangerous place that the residents trash within a few years.
The underclass has to live somewhere. Where do we put them if the Starbucks class retakes the central city? I guess we send them to exurbs.
Nice for you to dictate what others need or should want. People choose to live away from crime and have their own homes. If others enjoy the sameness of housing and restaurants and stores, who are you to dictate that they shouldn't have that right. These people pay taxes also. Maybe they choose not to waste it on urban schools, city graft and unionized labor.
Actually, the solution for me was to sell my home in the city and move so far out into the sticks that seeing a vehicle on the road is an event. To each his own, but having 5 Home Depots (with Lowes right across the street), 3 Super Walmarts and uncountable Walgreens (with Eckards right across the street) within 20 minutes driving distance doesn't seem like good urban development to me.....
I've lived in a lot of places from Texas to Oregon. Occaisionally I've gone back to towns where I once lived and looked for the places I remembered. In towns where there was a lot of change few places from years past were recognizable. It's almost like those parts of my life never existed since no evidence remains.
There's a small town in Kansas, Council Grove, that remains much as it was in the 60's. As my father said, "This town must seem pretty boring to most people, but it's a good place to raise a family."
I agree. Back in the 60's, Waco, Texas had a thriving downtown. There was a J. C. Penney's, a Sears, several five and dime stores, four theaters, quite a few restaurants, some governmental buildings, and tons of specialty television, furniture and office shops. The bus system was very healthy. Several things happened. First, the Feds offered Waco a ton of money for "downtown revitalization." Part of it was used to close the main street, Austin Avenue, and make about six blocks of it a "walking mall." They tore up the streets for four or five years, during which time about 80% of the businesses went bankrupt. This was also when forced busing came to Waco. Downtown property prices went through the floor, and most of the buildings sat vacant for years.
Downtown Waco became a dangerous place. In the last few years it's come back some, and the area by the Brazos River has turned into a neat little combination shop and restaurant area. However, the reason is because the police started actually patrolling, and private companies started turning the old warehouses into lofts for Baylor students. It's a shame that the place had to die, originally. My uncle was one of the people who lost his business thanks to the "planned development." A house in Woodway, which is a satellite city of Waco, costs about $20,000 more than the same house in Waco, because of the school system and the low crime. Waco has started growing again, primarily because there are now quite a few private schools.
Downtown Austin, when I lived there, had the same problems at their parks, which are some of the most beautiful anywhere. Transients urinating in public and homosexuals using the bathroom meant it was not an environment people wanted to take their children to.
I don't find that disturbing at all.
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