Posted on 05/17/2006 3:30:32 AM PDT by billorites
The greenies found a word that makes development sound bad, and people are eating it up. Sprawl sounds evil, but if you asked people would they rather live in a subdivision or a 10-story appartment building, everyone would pick the nice house with their own yard.
The dynamics of urban traffic flow have changed with the rise of the "city without a downtown". Until the 1980's, a typical city featured a downtown core surrounded by subdivisions. Workers drove in in the morning, and drove out in the evening. Massive highways and commuter rail lines were built like spokes of a wheel emanating from the downtown hub. Starting in the 80's, corporate jobs began moving from the downtown office tower to the suburban office park. This is best illustrated by two famous office comedies. "Nine to Five" (early 80's) was set in a huge office tower with a bar downstairs while "Office Space" (mid 90's) was set in am office park with a trendy restaurant across the parking lot. The result of this change is that more and more workers commute from one suburb to another instead of from the suburb to downtown.
bump
I hate people who hijack a thread, but in this case I'm going to have to hate myself. In my area sprawl is being driven partly by immigration. There are half a million illegals in my neck of the woods, and who knows how many legal immigrants, and people do move further and further out from the center of the city in part in order to avoid the social consequences of this crowding. They're creating sprawl in an effort to avoid crime, overcrowded schools, and awful local traffic that are made worse by an additional half a million people. By moving out more they're trying to recapture a vanished vision of the suburbia they knew as children: safe, clean, green, quiet, with the friendly residents not stressed out by the need to fight traffic and crime all the time. And when the place they moved to gets swamped by social problems they move even further away, creating even more traffic on the major inbound arteries.
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
I dunno--sprawl does decrease quality of life. It does stink when you move to an area for its natural beauty and (within 10 years) most of that gets cleared to build new developments and strip malls. Not to mention the increase in congestion. I was told the land behind my previous house was "forever wild"--but that didn't stop then from tearing down the forrest to build a road (one of the reasons why I ended up moving). Of course, the answer is to move EVEN FURTHER out to get back the lifestyle you used to have, but that costs $$ and you can't enjoy it if you're commuting 3+ hours a day. And, of course, sooner or later the sprawl will catch up to you again.
With all the illegals they're bringing in, most urban areas and suburbs will be looking like Rio slums soon enough.
You have two free market solutions to solve your "sprawl" problem.
1) Buy a home in an HOA that restricts building lots to five acres or larger. These HOAs will usually dedicate large areas as public green space.
2) Buy 10 forested acres in exurbia and build your house smack in the middle.
This one statement sums up the problem better than anything I've seen in a long time.
I've lived in Phoenix, Colorado Springs, San Diego, Greensboro and some unrecognizable small towns. Each new place, I resented the people who were selfish enough to move in after me. LOL
-ccm
An environmentalist is someone who already has a house out in the woods.
--Dennis Miller
Why is it that the same people who blather endlessly about "sprawl" are usually engraged if someone has the audacity to suggest restricting immigration?
I live near Hanscom Air Field where there have been on-again, off-again plans to turn it into a commercial airport to take stress off of Logan Airport - some 25 miles to the east. Everytime this is considered, the Yuppies in the area throw up thousands of lawn signs saying "Protect our Community" and other such nonsense.
Of course, all these Yuppies do a lot of flying and order a lot of stuff overnight by FedEx but they just want to keep the planes flying over the riff-raff in Revere, Lynn, East Boston and Dorchester. Now the skies around here are full of private jets and military aircraft coming into Hanscom. Hanscom is already the second busiest airport in New England. But for some reason, commercial jets like those from Delta, American or USAir are just not acceptable.
Chotchkie's!
He's an environmentalist, but he has some valid points about Florida development destroying the land.
Yep, suburbia is great except for the liberal socialist whiners, and public transportation is actually the "criminal delivery system" designed to move the gang bangers, thugs and rapists from their "turf" to their hunting grounds.
I worked on a type of zoning implementation committee in a small timber town, and got an eyeful of an urban planner's wet dreams. I finally quit the committee after being called a "land raper" by one of the "I've got mine, just try and get yours" liberals. Land use planning is socialism, period.
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