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Yes, urbanlife, there are wonderful towns in NC, but also great towns in VA. Staunton, Cville and Roanoake are my favorites. I think I'd like Richmond if I ever visited there.
NO. They are completely wrong. Our family moved to an urban/very walkable neighborhood. It has been awful. We have learned all the 100 reasons why people moved out to the suburbs and STAYED THERE. The city/urban landscape is noisy, dirty, congested, and litered with visitors who use the streets and people's porch's as their trash can. There are also no garages. For the records, we live in a very nice urban neighborhood where the house value are over half a million for a 4-bedroom house. So it's pretty upscale, and still we found that people today, and life in general today, is a lot louder, more messy, and more intrusive than it has ever been. Bottom line...people don't know (and may never again learn) how to live in very close proximity to other people. Even nice old retired couples have no respect for how loud they talk, where their pets poop, or where they throw their cigarettes. We also find ourselves being "crusaders for neighborhood programs" like clean-ups and noise reduction issues, which we have no time for in our busy lives. We will never ever ever again move to a place where the house walls are near the property line or where we have to share walls with someone else. It is just such a darn hassle. Again, we learned a ton of reasons why people moved out to the suburbs and didn't come back. Stay in the suburbs. This whole urban trend is short-lived. People will have the same experiences we did and the whole urban thing will die out as quickly as it has come up. Trust me, there are only a few place in the country where urban is done well--and they all are very expensive (Washington DC, New York/Soho, San Fran, Seattle, LA).
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
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Seattle is now into the Apodments, where 8 tenants in a small studio share a kitchen, and the row houses with 4 units on a small lot where a house used to be. If you talk to the people buying/renting them, it's not the walkability or urban feel, it's affordability and shorter commute.On the other hand, here where I am just 23 miles east, the new developments are typically 2,800-3,500 sf two story homes on 10,000-12,000 sf lots and are selling like hotcakes for $800k and up. Such as this one just started:
Typically once people have kids they want the safety and good schools found in the suburbs and are willing to sacrifice the time for the commute.
Families here are moving back in around here. The commute times were too ridiculous. I find that many parents would prefer a really short commute in case something comes up for the kid at school or day care. One parent needs to be within a 15-20 minute jaunt to the kid. Those further out suburbs with big cheap homes have commutes of 90 minutes and up each way.
NO. They are completely wrong. Our family moved to an urban/very walkable neighborhood. It has been awful. We have learned all the 100 reasons why people moved out to the suburbs and STAYED THERE. The city/urban landscape is noisy, dirty, congested, and litered with visitors who use the streets and people's porch's as their trash can. There are also no garages. For the records, we live in a very nice urban neighborhood where the house value are over half a million for a 4-bedroom house. So it's pretty upscale, and still we found that people today, and life in general today, is a lot louder, more messy, and more intrusive than it has ever been. Bottom line...people don't know (and may never again learn) how to live in very close proximity to other people. Even nice old retired couples have no respect for how loud they talk, where their pets poop, or where they throw their cigarettes. We also find ourselves being "crusaders for neighborhood programs" like clean-ups and noise reduction issues, which we have no time for in our busy lives. We will never ever ever again move to a place where the house walls are near the property line or where we have to share walls with someone else. It is just such a darn hassle. Again, we learned a ton of reasons why people moved out to the suburbs and didn't come back. Stay in the suburbs. This whole urban trend is short-lived. People will have the same experiences we did and the whole urban thing will die out as quickly as it has come up. Trust me, there are only a few place in the country where urban is done well--and they all are very expensive (Washington DC, New York/Soho, San Fran, Seattle, LA).
Which very walkable urban area did your family move to? Not every place is equal and it is possible you picked a bad place to move to.
I 100% concur with this. This is why I'm skeptical of large, expensive transit projects in many cities. It's almost like urbanists are standing at the border of their city limits looking at the suburbs saying, "Here it comes. Here it comes. Oh boy, here it comes. Here comes the wave!" Some may not see a wave right now, but believe that a $100 million trolley will eventually bring that wave. What's a tidal wave to them is to me a steady drip at best.
A fantasy based on what they would like to believe?
I once came across (sorry, don't recall title or author) an estimate for the proportion of urban-philes in the general population…around 10%. Just a fraction of the size listed earlier, "30-40% of people wanted walkable urbanism".
One glaring omission….
What percentage of the population wants a rural setting? How many people want to be farmers, or ranchers, or even forest rangers?
Last edited by Tim Randal Walker; 05-31-2015 at 11:50 AM..
I believe that for most issues like these, (i.e. people who prefer to drive vs. those who prefer not to drive, or urban living vs. suburban living) society falls on a bell curve. You have a few die-hard radicals on either end of the spectrum, and a lot of people who don't care either way, in the middle.
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I recall a comment on another forum-that those who prefer a suburban lifestyle dwarf the number of urban-philes. A plurality, if not a majority.
If you conducted a poll, and then drew a curve, I doubt it would be a classic bell curve. More likely, it would be quite skewed.
This is getting way off base. My point was that urbanism, and all that comes with it, runs strongly along class lines (and to some extent along political lines too). And this preference for the urban lifestyle is to a great degree bound up in class.
Urbanists may want to believe that there are millions of people in the suburbs just aching for walkable suburbs with Post WWII construction, but believe it or not, a lot of people don't give a flying flip about that. You just can't assume that someone bought a McMansion because they had no other choice. A lot of people enjoy that lifestyle. They enjoy the Chevy Suburban. They enjoy the 5,900 square feet. They enjoy driving. They enjoy domestic beer, and bowling, and Wal-Mart. They don't have to be forced into that lifestyle. They wanted it.
Now are there people who don't want that? Sure. That's nearly all of the people in this thread. My point is that if we're going to be honest and examine the broader trend at play, it's exurbs and outer suburbs that are fueling the growth in many metros. And if we're to be even more honest, it's a narrow segment of American society that's demanding the lifestyle (but it seems to believe it's a silent majority), and that population tends to be very uniform in both taste and political outlook.
Actually there are a lot of people in the suburbs aching for walking suburbs. Usually those are the older railroad suburbs, that offer walkabiliity but also feature good schools and more space.
Of course what is walkable is subjective. I feel walkable is up to a mile. But some won't walk more than two blocks.
NO. They are completely wrong. Our family moved to an urban/very walkable neighborhood. It has been awful. We have learned all the 100 reasons why people moved out to the suburbs and STAYED THERE. The city/urban landscape is noisy, dirty, congested, and litered with visitors who use the streets and people's porch's as their trash can. There are also no garages. For the records, we live in a very nice urban neighborhood where the house value are over half a million for a 4-bedroom house. So it's pretty upscale, and still we found that people today, and life in general today, is a lot louder, more messy, and more intrusive than it has ever been. Bottom line...people don't know (and may never again learn) how to live in very close proximity to other people. Even nice old retired couples have no respect for how loud they talk, where their pets poop, or where they throw their cigarettes. We also find ourselves being "crusaders for neighborhood programs" like clean-ups and noise reduction issues, which we have no time for in our busy lives. We will never ever ever again move to a place where the house walls are near the property line or where we have to share walls with someone else. It is just such a darn hassle. Again, we learned a ton of reasons why people moved out to the suburbs and didn't come back. Stay in the suburbs. This whole urban trend is short-lived. People will have the same experiences we did and the whole urban thing will die out as quickly as it has come up. Trust me, there are only a few place in the country where urban is done well--and they all are very expensive (Washington DC, New York/Soho, San Fran, Seattle, LA).
I hope you haven't forgotten that there are quiet, clean, not congested, walkable suburbs, if that's what you mean by suburb. Also, humans have lived in cities for thousands of years. If cities were as bad as you say, why would people have moved to them in the first place? Suburbanization was an extremely short-lived trend that has lasted maybe 50 years. Without cities, civilization as it is today may not have developed.
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