Why are houses in America so...ugly? (Sacramento, Merced: sale, credit card)

[MapleLeaf]

[quote=Den Mathias;10267718]

Originally Posted by hellaslover

You obviously are using a broad brush to describe American architecture. North America has many fine examples of great architecture that puts Europe to shame. You just have to get out and broaden your horizons!

North America has architecture????!!!! Give me a break! Skyscrapers are not architecture!
In think you've never been to Europe.

P.S. I prefer to live in NA , but travel to Europe

[manda777]

Originally Posted by Sandpointian

A final point, Europeans are among the most ignorant people I know. Anybody who has lived in Europe as I have can attest. Racist. Ignorant.Terribly unworldly. And clearly, undereducated.

I disagree that Europeans are ignorant. Generally speaking, compare to the Americans who can't find outer countries on the world map, Europeans can.Europeans are also more aware of Israeli-Palestine conflict unlike the fools in US who are brainwahsed by their media and think all Arabs are sand ******s and terrorists and all Muslims are terrorists.

Originally Posted by Sandpointian

And see a post from a Greek, the most backward and poorest of the EU countries? Are you serious? LOL!! Please...

The way you attack a young person shows how educated and civilized Americans in egneral are.

Originally Posted by Sandpointian

S
P.S. You gotta love the complaining and illusions toward the old country. You see, once cannot cherry pick residence and all the cool features unless one has the cash. Clearly you do not!

Like I said, in usenet. it's Americans who are the most uncivilized, refelecting the egeneral; phenomena in US.

The New World may have made the economic situation in US more favorble than other parts of the world but that doesn't make the dwellers of the New World more competent or better in anyway.

I am an Asian immigrant btw.

[Boompa]

Yeah those Stalinesque Apartment Blocks in England and Germany are certainly impressive

[manda777]

Originally Posted by Kid Quake

And face it, if God didn't put our oil under Iraqi sand we would've never invaded that *****hole.

Yoour oil? You must be a neoolonist and probably proud of it. Obviously, your European acestors nnever TRULY learend what Rennaisance is with your double standard.

Originally Posted by Kid Quake

Iraq could've just said, okay, take our oil and go, but no, they wanted to play cowboys and Iraqis.

You are blaming the Iraqi people? Showing how intelligent Americans are?

[manda777]

Originally Posted by hellaslover

Mikeetc,
i'm not attacking anything. At first i asked why houses are built that way in America. They look ugly the way they are built. There are some nice houses no doubt, but i'm talking about the majority. The only reason i'm attacking America is because someone attacked Greece for no reason and took the conversation to a different level.

Yes, that someone opened the door for Americans to be attacked with his typical American ignorance.

Originally Posted by hellaslover

We started talking about houses and he brought up how poor and behind greece is...i'm just answering back why America sucks compared to Greece that's it. No offence to anyone and especially to americans. America is great just stating the facts

[manda777]

Originally Posted by wburg

Part of why American homes have been built to be disposable is because land in the United States is considered pretty much disposable too. People don't build homes that will last for centuries because American communities don't last that long. Suburbs are a disposable consumer product, intended to be used up and thrown away, because American land is considered so abundant that we can never, ever run out. The suburb gets built, professionals and upper middle class move in. A few years later, a new suburb gets built and a few professionals leave. Middle-class blue-collar folks start to move in--but when plumbers driving Fords move into the neighborhoods, the doctors driving Lexuses start deciding it's time to move up to the newer suburb. As the neighborhood gets less desirable and more of those Fords are up on blocks in the front yard, poorer folks move in, sometimes sharing a single house between multiple families. By this time, even the plumbers are getting ready to move. The neighborhood is now considered "blighted" by the powers that be, and it won't be long before there are calls to redevelop it, or at least knock it down.

Nice explanation.

Originally Posted by wburg

European ideas about land are very different. They ran out of land a long time ago: it is all spoken for. Most European cities are places that have been European cities for many centuries: evidence of their permanence is all around, even in the cities that were bombed out in two world wars there are plenty of examples of old buildings being used and reused, simply because there isn't more room to expand, and brick or stone are more common building materials because wood is too expensive. Families stay in the same place for generations because there isn't much alternative, and nobody is constantly building new suburbs on the periphery, like they do in America.

In the United States, we got so offended by our own old buildings (most of which were far less than a century old) that we effectively bombed our own inner cities in the postwar period with urban renewal. We used bulldozers instead of B-17s, and "urban renewal" acts instead of Norden bombsights, but the result was the same: destroy the old, build the new. Housing policy deliberately encouraged the construction of quick residential suburbs on virgin land--almost all intended for whites only, even outside the more-segregated South, by racial exclusion covenants. So, at least until those laws were overturned in the late 60s and early 70s, nonwhites were crowded into whatever older suburbs didn't have those covenants. Now, poor nonwhites and the white urban poor are the motivating force that encourages the plumbers above to move to new suburbs.

Hellaslover, once again, I invite you to look at older American neighborhoods, not newer ones, if you want to see examples of beautiful American architecture. We used to build some pretty darn nice houses, before we started cranking them out on an assembly line.

The analogy to McDonald's is kind of a good one. Let's take cheeseburgers, for example. Cheeseburgers are the archetypal American food, and done right, they are delicious. Take a fresh-baked bun, put in some flame-broiled high-quality ground beef and a nice slice of cheese, maybe a little rabbit food on top, and you've got a delicious meal. And if you go into a half-decent restaurant, or even a half-decent greasy-spoon diner, that's what you'll get. If you go into a McDonald's, you get a gray hockey puck that hopefully contains more meat than filler, served on a piece of Styrofoam, with a slice of artificially cheese-colored dairy by-product on top. It's still technically a cheeseburger, and it fills your stomach, but it's not quite the same as the quality product.

Contemporary American housing is a McDonald's cheeseburger. It fills you up and it's technically a cheeseburger, but they sure don't make them like they used to--now, they could, but cheeseburger makers would make less money doing it.

[nmnita]

Originally Posted by manda777

I disagree that Europeans are ignorant. Generally speaking, compare to the Americans who can't find outer countries on the world map, Europeans can.Europeans are also more aware of Israeli-Palestine conflict unlike the fools in US who are brainwahsed by their media and think all Arabs are sand ******s and terrorists and all Muslims are terrorists.



The way you attack a young person shows how educated and civilized Americans in egneral are.




Like I said, in usenet. it's Americans who are the most uncivilized, refelecting the egeneral; phenomena in US.

The New World may have made the economic situation in US more favorble than other parts of the world but that doesn't make the dwellers of the New World more competent or better in anyway.

I am an Asian immigrant btw.

I think you need to understand the difference between ignorant and lacking in geography knowledge. If you are a legal immagrant which I assume you are, living in America I can't believe you have this attitude about the country you are now a part of. If we are so uninformed, why are you living here? I don't even want to think about where you may have immigrated from.


Nita

[Huckleberry3911948]

they are only ugly if you dont own them once you do they become beautiful.

[Wayneb]

The house I lived inin Glyfada was very nice, lots of verandas and all but I wouldn't want to be inside that house if it were in So. California during some of the big earthquakes we have had in the last 20 years.

[nmnita]

Originally Posted by Huckleberry3911948

they are only ugly if you dont own them once you do they become beautiful.

just like our new born babies I guess..