People Who Live In Suburbs: Classy, Icky, or Dudes?

there was also an awful lot of "people who live in suburbs are like THIS" style argumentation that seems to be given a pass because of some handwaving about all the supposed hard facts cited up there which like i mentioned are kind of few and and far between if you read the thread again.

xxpost: dude come on, if youd come off like that this thread would be like 70 posts long

I mean, my personal stance is "srsly fuck living in a suburb unless it's in the mold of Cambridge/Somerville - > Boston, ie practically indistinguishable from its parent city" but I recognize that's pretty much just me and mostly born from growing up in a super rural area with decidedly urban interests; making up specious arguments to make me feel better about my prejudices isn't something I'm particularly into.

.. "mould"? argh stupid britishisms ruining language for me

Yeah, see, I see suburbs w/local plants that are suited to the environment and better bus systems and bike lanes and tax incentives for solar panels and whatnot and think there may be real hope and I don't hate suburbs or tract housing as much as I want new developments to be much, much more rational.

if suburuban regs were relaxed they would become more dense and more city-like in the aggregate. it's not about people "moving back into the city" proper, it's about the whole urban area (urb + suburbs) being allowed to build up instead of being forced to build only out

― goole, Thursday, June 10, 2010 11:02 AM (5 days ago) Bookmark

I don't if relaxed is the word I'd use, goole, 'cause the regs have to be there, just changed or adapted.

MW, in most cities the existing racism a century ago in most of america was pointed at germans, irish, and italians, who were then replaced by eastern europeans. tbh, actual non-white minorities were considered kind of beneath racism, if you understand what im saying.

WAHT

"considered kind of beneath racism" = even stronger racism, yeah?

Yeah, see, I see suburbs w/local plants that are suited to the environment and better bus systems and bike lanes and tax incentives for solar panels and whatnot and think there may be real hope and I don't hate suburbs or tract housing as much as I want new developments to be much, much more rational.

― If the US had a dictator we'd call him coach (Michael White)

this is where being california-centric might make you a little too optimistic

rev, I believe that's what he was suggesting.

He is saying that non-white people weren't even really considered to be people and had a shitload of codified-into-law institutionalized discrimination built in against them, putting them beneath notice and reserving the behavior we consider to be "racism" today for white ethnicities that received the stamp of disapproval (ie, the ones he listed).

It's kind of a horseshit point because no matter how badly the white people were treated, the non-white people were treated worse* but there was a lot of white-on-white discrimination too.

Go USA.

* obv I am speaking of the US here as I can't think of anything globally that compares to the Holocaust or various African genocides

uh obv I meant "locally" there

Uh, I wouldn't make that point w/Native Americans, Dan.

Keeping up with this thread would be a full-time job & so I've not done it but I wonder if you've already discussed what people who would be priced out of the suburbs if they were to be priced "appropriately", are supposed to do. And especially what families are supposed to do. (I suspect I know the answer.)

Yeah, I understood, but was trying to get at the horseshitness of the point. Dan being way more lucid than me.

(I mean, it's a valid academic point but one that is very difficult for me to take seriously when my own family history has as a significant incident in it as recent as my father's family fleeing Alabama in 1948 to prevent one of his cousins from getting lynched.)

xp: I am not downplaying the genocide of Native Americans, I'm saying I have no idea how many of them there were and therefore have no idea if the sheer numbers matches what happened in the Holocaust.

And really, I should have remembered it regardless of my personal lack of data re: body counts

basically the entirety of human experience/progress is built off of someone else's blood

euler: the "pricing" goes for builders as well as for home buyers. there could be more apartment buildings (not nec. huge ones either) and fewer big-ass houses. in a lot of places it's a huge legal hurdle to build multi-family housing, or even anything over 2 stories

right, goole---I'm just wondering why the pricing isn't just going to be passed onto renters/leasers/buyers, and why the result won't just be that lower-income people & families will be forced to move even further away from cities. You have to live somewhere, & it's not clear that "the market" is going to price suburbia in a way that's doable for those people.

basically the entirety of human experience/progress is built off of someone else's blood

Depressing but basically true.

The real crux of Euler's post is that, if iatee and I are right, how do you make the switch to a more expensive and more sustainable model w/o seriously fucking the people Euler is talking about? There lies the rub, because the more stridently you talk about protecting resources and sustainability, the more those people will vote Republican.

Uh wait, I reread what I wrote and afaik Native Americans qualify as "non-white" so why am I apologizing for saying that, like black people, they were treated worse than white people from "undesirable ethnicities"?

The examples I chose were specifically BECAUSE they were an example where you could argue that, to an outsider, the people being persecuted are ethnically and arguably culturally more similar to their persecutors than dissimilar, and that was to highlight the point of it is harder to find instances of (for lack of better terminology) instances of gross abuse of "like" on "like" than it is to find instances of gross abuse of "like" on "unlike", where that gross abuse is not on the level of "can't get a loan" or "can't get a job" but is more on the level of "genocide" and "slavery".

I'm tired.

btw dudes i was specifically speaking of a century ago, so yeah, 1910. def not downplaying what was happening to non-whites (good god no, was actually trying to emphasize just how dehumanized the situation was) at the same time, but trying to get at the fact that peeps get sloppy about connoting modern defs of racism to historical trends. in 1910 most cities were trying to marginalize the bad whites from the good ones, the idea of planning for/against non-white integration was like planning for how to fight the unicorn army if you get what im saying.

v v sorry if anyone took offense, was not my intention at all.

tons of xposts

it's not clear that "the market" is going to price suburbia in a way that's doable for those people.

Isn't that largely true already? I know people who work in my building who live over an hour away, some even further than that.

lol dude I absolutely got your point, just saying that as someone who, if dropped back a century in time would probably be regarded as like the easily-whippable general of the unicorn army, it's not one that speaks to me outside of strict academic context

easily-whippable general of the unicorn army

Hate to derail but where else am I ever going to come across this phrase?

THISCLOSE to yoinking for display name btw.

personally I am waiting for the first self-aware machine, as that is likely going to be the event that stops racism

euler - we would need to at the same time make urban life cheaper. anyone who can afford a relatively suburban life today *should* be able to afford a relatively urban life. they might have to downsize some things, yes. but the 'costs' of urban life are inherently lower than the 'costs' of suburban life and - limited urban housing stock and transit is where the problem comes in. but when you're the richest society on the planet, a lot of problems can be solved if you're willing to spend your resources on em. mass transit is insanely cheap when you consider the vast amounts of money we spend on cars. likewise, densifying inner ring suburbs is cheap in comparison to creating infrastructure for cities in the middle of the desert. it's not a money problem and it never has been.

extra '-' in there

and I mean obv on an individual level it's always a money problem. but on a social level this is a problem that we could solve w/ resources we already have.

I mentioned health care reform earlier, and I think that's a decent parallel.

and euler, you live in paris at the moment iirc? cause a plan like 'grand paris' is basically what I'm advocating, at least when it comes to growth and transit.

have you been to paris recently iatee

it kinda used to be a v. cool model of how a city can work nice and now it's kind of a fucking overcrowded nightmare

the paris suburbs are not very nice to be in either

i'm less in favor of a "grand plan" for a given city, as i am in favor of scrapping all the incentives and rules that have led to people living & working really far apart from each other

yes, I lived there. it's a place doing amazing things when it comes to urban planning. xp

personally I am waiting for the first self-aware machine, as that is likely going to be the event that stops racism

it will not actually happen until the self-aware machine tearfully watches a video montage of all of mankind's atrocities, and blames his creator for bringing him into a world of hatred and suffering

and superfluous commas

yeah, I live in Paris (for a little while longer & hopefully again soon enough), in a suburb no less! It's nice! & it's doable for people of limited means---but there are a lot of subsidies for housing & transportation by both employers & the government.

goole I agree w/ you w/ the incentive stuff, but public transit requires 'grand plans' and that's mostly what this particular one deals with.

ha in my limited reading exp i've learned it's basically useless to compare french policy to anything else

xp

but I, and everyone else I know here, spends like half of their income on housing still---I gather people don't save much, at least not young-ish people & people with families. But you don't really need to b/c of French social security and universities being basically free. So it's hard to generalize lessons about France to the USA.

xp yeah

but france has a higher savings rate than america? and I don't know off hand, but I'd be surprised if we do much if any better on '% of income spent on housing'

(again, pretty ig'nant here but) isn't a huge chunk of french energy provided by nuclear power run by the state? i mean, that throws a lot of comparison out of whack.

I mean, there are a million things that make france france. I was mostly using paris as an example because it's a city that's realized that it has urban/transit problems (esp when it comes to inner-ring suburbs) and is making attempts to solve them that put any american city's to shame. obv france has its own political process and greater paris as an urban region doesn't compare super well to any american city, and like I said this is a transit and density project not one that (directly) attacks the incentive structure.

As a transit model Paris is fucking amazing; but also it's a much more "localist" city than I'm familiar with in the USA: like people don't tend to go far from where they live to shop, even if they've heard that there are "better" shops elsewhere; it just doesn't seem to make sense to people that you'd spend all day traveling around to shop, when you can shop near where you live. And by near I mean: within a ten minute walk, tops. (transit to work is a different story.)

right, goole---I'm just wondering why the pricing isn't just going to be passed onto renters/leasers/buyers, and why the result won't just be that lower-income people & families will be forced to move even further away from cities. You have to live somewhere, & it's not clear that "the market" is going to price suburbia in a way that's doable for those people.

― Euler, Tuesday, June 15, 2010 1:21 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

i may have mentioned this upthread, but the first step is removing barriers that limit the supply of urban housing (which artificially inflate urban housing costs)

there was that graphic circulating a while ago that pointed out the entire population of the US could move into an area about the size of new hampshire at a density level like what we have in brooklyn which imo is v pleasant

http://strangemaps.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/neighbourhood.gif

um yeah, most ppl do not want to live in that population density

I wouldn't mind but, you know, some people like having yards

i just don't wanna pay that kind of rent

amirite