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It's irrelevant what people can do. Have you been to a grocery store and watched people loading up on junk before paying with their food stamps? Those are all people who can afford to eat healthful foods too. They just choose not to. Low-income people as a group make poorer lifestyle choices than high-income people do. Food deserts, for example, are mostly in rural areas although a few exist in urban areas. That can make it more difficult. Similar with exercise, high-income people are more likely to be active. Lower SES areas actually have higher access to facilities for recreational physical activity than higher SES areas.
Americans in general make poor food choices, this isn't something that is just people with food stamps do. Heck, drive by any fast food place and you will see all different types of Americans loading up on bad food choices.
Also, when you walk around following these food stamp people, you should look at the cost of the food they are buying. Junk is always much cheaper than healthy food, junk is also much easier to prepare and has a long shelf life.
And the other stuff, the redlining, the home-buying incentives, and the tying together of school funding and localized property taxes--also probably the long-standing U.S.-Saudi relationship. It's no secret that transit (and walking/biking) work well in dense areas--cities. So the key to understanding America's globally high car dependance is understanding why America departed from denser development to more sparse development--suburbs. The car was invented long before suburbanization. The car existed around the world, including in places that did not sub-urbanize the way America did.
Big shift to suburbs was actually before the automobile became common place. They were just the approved kind of suburbs (railroad, streetcar). What America, Canada, and Australia have in common was abundance of land and affluence and free choice. Russia had the land but not that affluence and the decisions were made for them. Europe generally had the affluence and free choice but not the land.
Americans in general make poor food choices, this isn't something that is just people with food stamps do. Heck, drive by any fast food place and you will see all different types of Americans loading up on bad food choices.
Also, when you walk around following these food stamp people, you should look at the cost of the food they are buying. Junk is always much cheaper than healthy food, junk is also much easier to prepare and has a long shelf life.
Uh, no it's actually more expensive.
Take cereal. A box of fruit loops costs maybe $4, has 21 servings with 110 calories, 577.5 calories per dollar
Oatmeal costs 80 cents a pound, a pound has 1750 calories, 2,187.5 calories per pound.
Take a meat item, a bag of Foster Farms Chicken Strips has 8 servings with 17 grams of protein each for about $5, 27.2 grams of protein per dollar.
A pound of chicken breast (for ease of comparison, thighs are cheaper but have bones), has about 100 grams of protein and costs $3.50/pound. About the same as the Foster Farms Chicken Strips.
Vegetables aren't particularly calorie dense, so if your point is that you can fill up on 1,000 calories of potato chips for less than 1,000 calories of celery... well, yes, this is true. A lack of calories is not a problem for most people in this country as most are overweight or obese.
Junk is easier to prepare, yes. But generally higher-income people work longer hours than lower-income people.
It was not really the invention of the car, but the construction of the interstates, the home-buying incentives, the residential redlining, and the connection of property taxes to school funding that moved our country away from the cities, I would say.
Suburbanization started because people at the time saw it as the only way to modernize quickly. Back in the 1920s the only houses that had electricity and indoor plumbing with any regularity was new construction in the suburbs. In older urban buildings built between the civil war and ~1890 didn't have modern ammenities and those things had to be added later at great expense . . . and a lot of people either didn't have the money for it or had landlords who didn't care.
Planners like Ed Bacon and Robert Moses (who were actually architects/engineers by training), while different, were modernists who despised the old world aspects of the city (lack of plumbing, people hawking food on the street, poorly constructed slum dwellings, etc) and wanted them demolished and replaced with something shiny, new, and air conditioned.
The interstates were part of that modernity but they were a part of getting there, not the other way around. There's nothing wrong with interstates per se, you can see their equivalent all over Europe. Where they went wrong was smashing them through our downtowns and otherwise cutting up the cities.
Redlining didn't last for very long while it was relevant and only really applies to a small subset of federally guaranteed loans so I'm not sure how much of a difference the absence of redlining would've made when it comes to the present state of a lot of our cities.
I think the property tax/school funding system has obvious consequences where it exists but North Carolina - a state where that doesn't exist - has had the same urban problems as every other state.
To be fair, half of New Zealand lives in Auckland, which is a relatively small city with a concentrated employment base that is easy to serve with transit. The other "cities" are small enough that most people simply walk to work. We have lots of examples of similar cities and towns in the US but then we also have lots of Atlantas and Houstons and LAs.
Take cereal. A box of fruit loops costs maybe $4, has 21 servings with 110 calories, 577.5 calories per dollar
Oatmeal costs 80 cents a pound, a pound has 1750 calories, 2,187.5 calories per pound.
Take a meat item, a bag of Foster Farms Chicken Strips has 8 servings with 17 grams of protein each for about $5, 27.2 grams of protein per dollar.
A pound of chicken breast (for ease of comparison, thighs are cheaper but have bones), has about 100 grams of protein and costs $3.50/pound. About the same as the Foster Farms Chicken Strips.
Vegetables aren't particularly calorie dense, so if your point is that you can fill up on 1,000 calories of potato chips for less than 1,000 calories of celery... well, yes, this is true. A lack of calories is not a problem for most people in this country as most are overweight or obese.
Junk is easier to prepare, yes. But generally higher-income people work longer hours than lower-income people.
Not really, I can go to the grocery store and by way more junk with $100 than I can healthy food choices.
Also your last statement is more of a myth. High income people do not work more hours than lower income people. And were you just trying to say why high income people eat more junk because they work more hours? I am really not sure what the point of that last sentence was.
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
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Originally Posted by TheCityTheBridge
We also wouldn't have stop lights if we didn't have cars, but attributing the suburbanization of America to the invention of cars fails to acknowledge that that same suburbanization did not happen over the whole world (where cars also exist).
That's because old-world countries such as in Europe didn't have 3.8 million square miles to build upon when the car came out like we did. Getting from one part of the country to another, from one state to another was far more effective by car even in the early years than walking or horseback once there were places to fuel them up, and commercial air travel didn't really take off until the late 1940s. Let's face it, highways are here to stay, as are suburbs. Those teens-20s not opting for cars now will change their minds when they have kids about to start school and move to the suburbs.
That's because old-world countries such as in Europe didn't have 3.8 million square miles to build upon when the car came out like we did. Getting from one part of the country to another, from one state to another was far more effective by car even in the early years than walking or horseback once there were places to fuel them up, and commercial air travel didn't really take off until the late 1940s. Let's face it, highways are here to stay, as are suburbs. Those teens-20s not opting for cars now will change their minds when they have kids about to start school and move to the suburbs.
Or they will help strengthen those inner city neighborhoods and streetcar suburbs and make them great areas to raise a child without needing to move out to the suburbs. I always find it funny when people think that it is only young people without children that would want to live in the city and then once they want kids they move to the suburbs, buy three cars, and never step foot on a public transportation vehicle ever again.
Not really, I can go to the grocery store and by way more junk with $100 than I can healthy food choices.
Also your last statement is more of a myth. High income people do not work more hours than lower income people. And were you just trying to say why high income people eat more junk because they work more hours? I am really not sure what the point of that last sentence was.
That's because you don't know how to shop not because healthful food is more expensive per say. It can be depending on what you buy. I don't buy a lot of fancy steaks or $4.99/pound asparagus. Stick with your basics (oatmeal, rice, pastas, legumes) for your empty calories is cheaper than junk food. What Does 200 Calories Cost? The Economics of Obesity
Suburbanization started because people at the time saw it as the only way to modernize quickly. Back in the 1920s the only houses that had electricity and indoor plumbing with any regularity was new construction in the suburbs. In older urban buildings built between the civil war and ~1890 didn't have modern ammenities and those things had to be added later at great expense . . . and a lot of people either didn't have the money for it or had landlords who didn't care.
Planners like Ed Bacon and Robert Moses (who were actually architects/engineers by training), while different, were modernists who despised the old world aspects of the city (lack of plumbing, people hawking food on the street, poorly constructed slum dwellings, etc) and wanted them demolished and replaced with something shiny, new, and air conditioned.
The interstates were part of that modernity but they were a part of getting there, not the other way around. There's nothing wrong with interstates per se, you can see their equivalent all over Europe. Where they went wrong was smashing them through our downtowns and otherwise cutting up the cities.
Redlining didn't last for very long while it was relevant and only really applies to a small subset of federally guaranteed loans so I'm not sure how much of a difference the absence of redlining would've made when it comes to the present state of a lot of our cities.
I think the property tax/school funding system has obvious consequences where it exists but North Carolina - a state where that doesn't exist - has had the same urban problems as every other state.
To be fair, half of New Zealand lives in Auckland, which is a relatively small city with a concentrated employment base that is easy to serve with transit. The other "cities" are small enough that most people simply walk to work. We have lots of examples of similar cities and towns in the US but then we also have lots of Atlantas and Houstons and LAs.
Suburbanization did not occur in the 1890s, but the 1940s and 1950s. While the earliest "street car" suburbs appeared earlier, the mass suburb migration was after WWII. http://www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/censr-4.pdf
"From 1910 to 1960, the population of central cities accounted for a larger proportion of the total population than the population living in suburbs. . . .
. . . .
. . . From 1940 onward, suburbs accounted for more population growht than central cities and, by 1960, the proportion of the total U.S. population living in the suburbs (31 percent) was almost equal to the proportion of the population living in the central cities (32 percent).
. . . By 2000, half of the entire U.S. population lived in the suburbs of metropolitan areas."
The interstates allowed people to live away from job centers (which allowed for "white flight") while commuting in by car.
Redlining started just before the crucial suburban period--in 1935 with the FHA--and lasted as a legal practice until 1968, when racially restrictive covenants were struck down by the US Supreme Court. There is extensive research on the impact of redlining on the development of American cities and suburbs, and on its post-1968 impact on American development patterns.
It is probably significant to note that the great increases in suburbanization occurred in the midst of the Great Migration, as blacks left the South for opportunities in the North and West.
In North Carolina, while school funding was not so locally controlled, schools were simply legally segregated until 1954. North Carolina continued trying to figure out how to segregate its schools after Brown. http://www.ncdcr.gov/Portals/7/Colla...rate.speed.pdf
In short, I think you have to look at America's residential segregation history to explain the rise of the suburb in the mid-20th century.
And on New Zealand, Auckland (1.5 million) accounts for 1/3 of the country's population. But that population is for Auckland's "Urban Area," which probably compares best to our MSA (425 sq. miles to meet that population). Auckland City has only 450,000 people, or about 10% of the country's population. I think that Auckland compares pretty nicely to Denver's place in Colorado.
Auckland is a spread out city with a small and dense center (where the 450,000 live). Other cities in New Zealand follow similar patterns. But people there commute by car at a far lower rate than Americans. It is not just Houston, Atlanta, and L.A.--it is Des Moines, Youngstown, Augusta, Austin, San Mateo, Eugene, Olympia, etc.
Big shift to suburbs was actually before the automobile became common place. They were just the approved kind of suburbs (railroad, streetcar). What America, Canada, and Australia have in common was abundance of land and affluence and free choice. Russia had the land but not that affluence and the decisions were made for them. Europe generally had the affluence and free choice but not the land.
See above. The big shift was after WWII. Australia and Canada still have better transit access than the U.S., and a lower percentage of car commuters.
Europe actually has more land area than the United States, but it is very close (and it does have far more people). I don't buy a lack of land as the reason Europe did not develop U.S.-style suburbs. And in the 1940s and 1950s, I don't buy lack of affluence as the reason the Soviets did not develop them.
That's because old-world countries such as in Europe didn't have 3.8 million square miles to build upon when the car came out like we did. Getting from one part of the country to another, from one state to another was far more effective by car even in the early years than walking or horseback once there were places to fuel them up, and commercial air travel didn't really take off until the late 1940s. Let's face it, highways are here to stay, as are suburbs. Those teens-20s not opting for cars now will change their minds when they have kids about to start school and move to the suburbs.
Right, they had 3.9 million square miles .
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