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Plenty of the suburbs aren't very bike friendly. A lot of Boston is rather bike friendly, and the neighborhoods aren't that polluted. City schools being worse is a combination of social and governing factors: it's a pattern that's mainly found in the US, not unique to cities or dense urban environments.
I was in NYC the other week, and I was just shocked at the amount of bike lanes/bike traffic since my last vista about 2 years ago. I did go to different parts, but it was like bikes were everywhere. SOHO, downtown, Brooklyn, etc. I was amazed! And jealous!
I was in NYC the other week, and I was just shocked at the amount of bike lanes/bike traffic since my last vista about 2 years ago. I did go to different parts, but it was like bikes were everywhere. SOHO, downtown, Brooklyn, etc. I was amazed! And jealous!
Maybe I should give biking in New York City another try? I went for a bikeride in Boston a few weeks ago and it felt very pleasant in a way that the few rides I've done in NYC (Brooklyn not just Manhattan) couldn't.
There are plenty of "outgoing active families" that would not view such a thing as a positive at all. Festivals usually associated with noise, alcohol, drunks, misdemeanor criminal activity, vendors hawking crap, trash, etc. Sure you can have fun at a festival but there's a difference between going to one when you want to and having more of them than there are weekends at your doorstep regardless of whether you want them or not. No doubt many of your "outgoing" neighbors went "elsewhere".
You seem to have a biased or skewed opinion of these great events - you wouldn't be stereotyping urban living here would you? You should check out our festivals - definitely much more civilized and enjoyable than you must have experienced. No one is noticeably drunk, lots of families, I have never seen one single arrest or altercation at one. My 5 year old loves these things. They are also rarely at your doorstep, and are focused around the commercial squares. PorchFest being an exception, but they zone the city so the music is only played for 2 hours per zone.
Define "community". Are you talking about a local government with voters? Are you talking about a subdivision of real property burdened with restrictive covenants?
Your last clause cuts both ways. The "new residents" tend to get the short shrift because they end up having to pay for the existing infrastructure and the new infrastructure.
At some point it really isn't the decision of the "people that are here now" to make. They don't own the property that is the subject of the development and they have zero rights in that property.
Community in this case would be the people that are already using the means of access. In this specific example it's an incorporated city, but it doesn't have to be. I'm fairly sure that if the developer wanted to put in those homes and not connect them to the existing road network or rely on the city to provide services the "non-owners" wouldn't have been opposed. "put up the homes, just don't connect them to the existing city" would have accomplished the same objective.
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Originally Posted by IC_deLight
Sounds like a little envy and economic protectionism. The way development ordinarily works is local government forces the developer to bear the cost of all the new infrastructure and local government may end up taking over maintenance. In reality there are often other entities used to foist off local government's obligations to the new property owners who end up paying local government for services they don't receive as well as the new layer of public or private government that no one else has to pay for. Suburban homes are not necessarily less expensive - but frequently are valued more to the owner or perhaps even necessary. Sounds like you are trying to perpetuate some kind of entitlement program for economic protection of the existing owners of the old homes who might not have a market for their homes if new homes are "allowed".
Edge suburban homes are much, much less expensive. In some edge areas you can get a new house for $300K, maybe even $200K the further you go. That's about half or less (perhaps 25% in many cases) what you'd pay on average for a new home in a non-edge, urban or semi-urban area. They're cheap because the land is not worth much. The land is cheap because the location is remote and hard to access, and few people are willing to pay to live there (otherwise the land would be worth more - supply/demand etc...) I have no idea where you get the idea that this is an entitlement program. It's planning communities around the obvious issue of egress. Hardly anyone buys those houses without owning a car, so pretending the owners aren't going to drive to and from them is foolish.
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Originally Posted by IC_deLight
Because we aren't communitarians that believe you have the right to dictate how others should live in your view of what's best for everyone else. Plenty of folks don't want to live in the city nor do they subscribe to city-centric thinking.
Same argument could be used to justify removing all zoning and land use rules. There are places for that already. Not every metro area has to go that route just to keep the knee jerk libertarians happy.
...and lots of families aren't interested in living where you have more street festivals than weekends. I doubt many would view that as a positive thing when talking about "taking advantage of the city".
In more "suburban" areas the residents choose whether they want to attend such festivals instead of having all that the festivals foster and attract at their residential doorstep. If the "festival" is walkable to you then your house is certainly walkable for others attending the festival.
The pattern here seems to be that "home" does not have the same value to those promoting "urbanism" in this fashion.
Being able to attend a festival within walking distance does not imply that said festival is "festering on your doorstep".
But why don't we just put it out in the open: While you might prefer to shut yourself off from the world in your big massive house, others do not. Hence the appeal of urbanism.
There are plenty of "outgoing active families" that would not view such a thing as a positive at all. Festivals usually associated with noise, alcohol, drunks, misdemeanor criminal activity, vendors hawking crap, trash, etc. Sure you can have fun at a festival but there's a difference between going to one when you want to and having more of them than there are weekends at your doorstep regardless of whether you want them or not. No doubt many of your "outgoing" neighbors went "elsewhere".
You have an utterly disparate and clueless understanding of what urbanism is supposed to value and inherently produce. Furthermore, you are projecting your own values and preferences of what is to be desired or un-desired about urban vs surburban living onto a urban situation where such values and preferences do not actually hold true in the real world.
In other words, you say portray festivals as crime-drawing events that produce more problems that produce pleasure, which is not a fair portrayal of what should be a neutral benefit to increased proximity and access to points of interest.
If you were correct in that a festival were indeed undesirable, than so many posters in this thread would not have attempted to paint for you why they would want INCREASED assesibility to points of congregation rather than DECREASED.
It's about placement of preferences: You seem to believe people are inherently bad and want a wall of separation between where a diverse group of people aggregate and where you are walled off in your own zone of isolation that is penetrable by motor vehicle.
Because we aren't communitarians that believe you have the right to dictate how others should live in your view of what's best for everyone else. Plenty of folks don't want to live in the city nor do they subscribe to city-centric thinking.
Again, inaccurate. As protectors of (their desired) greater good, the community members have every right to restrict the freedom of those wishing to impede on and injure on their own priviledges through suburban development.
Lastly, those in urban areas will subscribe to a city centric thinking whether you like it or not. It's up to you whether you want to join in and share their objectives and intentions.
Wow. So much hate for suburban and rural living... So what should we do with the suburban and rural areas? Clear out all people and raze their dwellings? Then what about farmers and the towns they live in? What about rural states?
And are we to only visit beaches and parks in electric tour buses?
I also note that those who live their whole lives in urban areas tend to have a disconnect towards wildlife. They are so scared of rodents. insects and spiders. Sad and I feel sorry for them.
And maybe suburban life and car ownership wouldn't be so bad for our environment if we could go back to the world population levels of the 1950's. Basically everything human beings do is extremely damaging to our planet.
I see you guys had a fun day while I was out working. I wish I could have a job where I could post on CD on work time. Oh, well. And yet some on this board (none of you, I assume) think nurses are overpaid. Taking it from the top.
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Originally Posted by eschaton
I think I know what she means - basically people who live a "suburban" life even though they are in the suburbs. E.g., people who don't walk around the neighborhood, don't use mass transit, drive everywhere, and just spend a lot of time inside their house. Why live in an urban area if you don't use the urban amenities?
We're not that extreme, but we've sort of realized when looking for a new house that paying the "walkable premium" didn't really work for us any longer. I mean, as parents of small children who work full time, we just can't walk around the neighborhood that much. I get home from work with my daughter on the bike around 5:45, and have to start making dinner (my wife gets home after me). By eight we are putting the kids to bed. We might get 1-2 days per week we get to walk around our local business district if we're lucky. And this is in the warm weather - my wife doesn't like walking around outside in the winter (or even early spring/late fall) because the cold bothers her asthma.
Regardless, sitting down and doing the mental balancing between two options we had, we could have moved to another highly walkable neighborhood and gotten a house which was an upgrade in size, but still had size issues (third bedroom in the attic still, no extra room for "flex" usage like playroom/office). Or for the same price we could get the relatively large house which will suit all our needs, but be a 15-minute walk to the nearest business district. Ultimately, we decided that while we only are out an about in the neighborhood a few times per week, we have to live inside our house every single day.
It's not a real suburb of course - it's a old streetcar suburb. There's no off-street parking. The houses were built between 1900 and 1930. There is literally a bus stop outside the front door, which is important for me, because I'm not going to drive to work (and we plan to go back down to being a one-car family again). And while it will be a longer bike commute, I could still bike to downtown from there. But it's a detached house with a real backyard - a notch or two further in the suburban direction than the 19th century rowhouse neighborhood we live in now. A bit bittersweet, but still probably the logical choice for us at this point in our life.
Well put! So many are so concerned about what's outside in their immediate neighborhood-is there a bar, a coffeeshop, an indie movie theater, etc?
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Originally Posted by semiurbanite
I guess if my previous posts over the last year don't convince you that it is different, then perhaps it's not all that different from your perspective. Personally when I look at the day today lives of kids in our neighborhood compared to kids in more suburban areas, it is quite different as far as exposure to new things, different people, and much less time spent driving. My kids also can't play a full soccer game in our small yard like they can. You also have to realize we are the anti-homebody type of household. We are constantly on the go, looking for things to do and see even with three children. An urban neighborhood caters to that lifestyle quite well. As I posted, there were 3 street festivals in the last 2 weekend, all walkable from our home. Also, the fact that so many classmates are within a 0.25 mile walking radius is a big bonus for us.
How do you know that? Exposure to what new things? Suburbanites aren't living out in the middle of the cornfields. We have museums, movie theaters, theater companies, community bands and orchestras (my son-in-law is in one that plays locally) all sorts of things here. You have a big enough mass of people, you'll have these things. As far as street festivals, my town has one every Friday night in the summer. It's gotten so popular that we have quit going downtown on Friday nights. The neighbors have complained to the city that people park in front of their driveways (yeah, people drive in from uber-environmental Boulder), vomit and urinate in their yards, strew trash everywhere, etc. Louisville: A victim of its own success? - Colorado Hometown Weekly And really, if you've been to one street fair, you've been to all of them.
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Originally Posted by semiurbanite
You seem to have a biased or skewed opinion of these great events - you wouldn't be stereotyping urban living here would you? You should check out our festivals - definitely much more civilized and enjoyable than you must have experienced. No one is noticeably drunk, lots of families, I have never seen one single arrest or altercation at one. My 5 year old loves these things. They are also rarely at your doorstep, and are focused around the commercial squares. PorchFest being an exception, but they zone the city so the music is only played for 2 hours per zone.
You have an utterly disparate and clueless understanding of what urbanism is supposed to value and inherently produce. Furthermore, you are projecting your own values and preferences of what is to be desired or un-desired about urban vs surburban living onto a urban situation where such values and preferences do not actually hold true in the real world.
In other words, you say portray festivals as crime-drawing events that produce more problems that produce pleasure, which is not a fair portrayal of what should be a neutral benefit to increased proximity and access to points of interest.
If you were correct in that a festival were indeed undesirable, than so many posters in this thread would not have attempted to paint for you why they would want INCREASED assesibility to points of congregation rather than DECREASED.
It's about placement of preferences: You seem to believe people are inherently bad and want a wall of separation between where a diverse group of people aggregate and where you are walled off in your own zone of isolation that is penetrable by motor vehicle.
So tell us.
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Originally Posted by wingz33r0
Again, inaccurate. As protectors of (their desired) greater good, the community members have every right to restrict the freedom of those wishing to impede on and injure on their own priviledges through suburban development.
Lastly, those in urban areas will subscribe to a city centric thinking whether you like it or not. It's up to you whether you want to join in and share their objectives and intentions.
Ha, ha, ha, ha, Ha! Sounds like the pre-civil rights south! "We have a right to keep 'these people' out of our neighborhoods.
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Originally Posted by mkarch
I don't see it as restricting people's choice so much as not allowing them to make that choice at the expense of others.
There was a good local example last year where a rural/suburban edge community (Black Diamond) voted NOT to allow expansion of the suburbs in their jurisdiction. Clearly the people living there aren't "anti-suburb", they just saw the writing on the wall. Any expansion "further out" was only going to strain their infrastructure and make their existing homes even more inaccessible due to increased traffic while also making them more expensive to own since the new residents wouldn't be solely responsible for paying for the new infrastructure needed to support them.
Transportation is the main problem with creeping edge development. At some point the existing roads hit full capacity and they can't be expanded to hold the increased traffic. At the same time, the new low density development can't support or be easily tied in to a mass transit system. Everyone is forced to pay the price of increased congestion so a few people can get their cheap shiny new suburban homes. If the new residents were forced to pay their fair share of expanding infrastructure, the houses would no longer be cheap and affordable.
When you put this in context of all of the decayed inner ring suburbs that *could* be reconfigured for greater density, you really have to ask why it makes sense to keep building out at the edge just so a (relatively few) people get the luxury of a cheap new house.
No, they're NIMBYs. This is very common in Boulder, CO.
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