Deep thought of the day 15

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1. 

   Gar Lipow Posted 9:06 am
   21 Feb 2008

   ContextBeen the pattern in a lot of the Global South for at lest the past 100 years.
   In the U.S. I think  Pittsburgh has a rich city center surrounded by poor suburbs. Is that just since the collapse of the rust belt? Or is that a long term historical pattern for that city?

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2. 

   sunflower Posted 9:07 am
   21 Feb 2008

   Gotta love that optimism.We already have a lot of empty houses out here, so if you get crowed by the unwashed homeless masses come on out and grow a garden.

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3. 

   odograph Posted 12:18 am
   22 Feb 2008

   too soonthe cost of a prius commute, even with double today's gasoline prices, is workable for a median family.  (roughly the first 15 minutes of an 8 hour day pays for a median commute at median income)
   but beyond that sure, rural counties face the meth explosion even today

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4. 

   Laurence Aurbach Posted 1:30 am
   22 Feb 2008

   Already happenedEyal Press wrote in The New Suburban Poverty (April 13, 2007):
   For the first time ever, more poor Americans live in the suburbs than in all our cities combined.
   Chris Dovi and Scott Bass' article Rethinking Suburbia (February 7-14, 2007) looks at the details of that pattern in Richmond, VA:
   Neighborhoods that once held the suburban dreams of many have become havens for crime and the all-too-familiar problems of the inner city.
   
   Ped Shed Blog

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5. 

   Jon Rynn Posted 2:26 am
   22 Feb 2008

   Paris certainly that way....the recent waves of riots occurred in the suburbs surrounding the city, filled with poor Arabs who have few opportunities in the mainstream of society.  Meanwhile the center of Paris is very expensive -- the same occurs in Manhattan, of course.  Central Chicago seems to be a little different, because there hasn't been much residential in the center, but that is changing, as many rather expensive condo buildings are going up.

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6. 

   amazingdrx Posted 2:35 am
   22 Feb 2008

   Gated communitiesThey pay off duty cops to sleep in their cars within the gates.  Look to Georgia and Texas for the wave of the dark (bushco revolution, evolving out of the raygun revolution) future.
   The poor will tend to creep at night, but the cops will be dreaming about stopping them, hehey.
   The working poor will still have to be let into the corporate feudal walled court yard to do the dirty work.  Come to think of it corporate offices are moving out to gated community land too.
   Watch for automatic gates with special cards soon!  Just like in Bagdad, bushco is the Iraqification of the USA!  It's patritotic and idiotic all at once.
   I wanna live in the green zone!  All the best people live there.  I bet if I make VP I'll get in.
   
   http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

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7. 

   justlou Posted 3:37 am
   22 Feb 2008

   A Blessing for LocalismSlumlord tenements built in the devalued McMansions.  Maybe the Mexicans living in the outer ring can grow veggies for the inner city gringos and fulfill the dreams of the local food movers who can middle man the profits in their farmers' market stalls.  If shit was gold, the poor would be born without assholes.  

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8. 

   odograph Posted 3:52 am
   22 Feb 2008

   sliding and conflatingYou guys are using a sliding definition for "suburb" above.  The suburbs of Paris are certainly of a different density (and with a different system of public transportation) than the suburbs of Dallas.
   I gather, actually, that when suburbs work, people just reclassify them 'city lots'.  Never-mind that such a city lot is bigger than many in the new suburbs.
   And when people don't have jobs ... what makes their home a suburban or city lot?  Are you using a sq. footage cutoff here or just painting the image you want?
   (There have certainly been poor in "single family dwellings" surrounding cities for thousands of years.)

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9. 

   AndyFrankGO Posted 1:25 pm
   24 Feb 2008

   This thought was in The Atlantichttp://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/subprime  Very good article...

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10. 

    bookerly Posted 6:58 pm
    24 Feb 2008

    Wow, I really missed the point on this one...
    
       I thought David was joking!  Here I thought the existing suburbs were the place where "Soon, we'll see blight, crime, the drug trade, and other social pathologies where we have been accustomed to seeing the American Dream".
       I mean, if suburban sprawl isn't blight, then I don't know what is.  Crime?  Plenty of that.  Drug trade, all over the place (the methamphetamine craze has been largely suburban, I believe).  Cocaine is used by plenty of suburbanites, but the powder form beloved of well off white folks doesn't lead to as much jail time (and the police don't patrol the streets in quite the same manner).
       I spent two years in the suburbs once, I didn't see no American Dream!!!
    patrick in Beijing

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11. 

    spaceshaper Posted 11:32 pm
    24 Feb 2008

    A house of (credit) cardsthat perhaps has started to fall. Personally, I think it's amazing the exurban trope has lasted this long. I first encountered these new-style suburbs on a visit to the US in 1990 when I was getting ready to move here. A brief taste, visiting cousins in a NJ-side far-out suburb of Philadelphia was shocking: a twenty minute drive to school, grocery, restaurant, movie theatre, anything, a two-hour commute to work - what the hell was that about? Are these people insane? How long can they keep this sh*t up?
    Longer than I'd have guessed, apparently. Even now the death announcement of the exurban fantasy may be premature. A sidebar in the Atlantic Monthly article referenced above linked to a somewhat similar piece about the suburb's decline - dated 1988. Since then as we all know, the rate of growth of these collective inanities has skyrocketed.
    It's of course important to distinguish between the different suburban styles that have emerged over the years. The older, tighter suburbs (right up through the 1960's or so) that took for granted no more than one car in the family, so that essential resources had to be close enough at hand that kids could bike to school or to their grocery-bagging jobs, may well prove redeemable. The newer stuff, based not on a car in every garage but on four or five cars in every driveway, while the garage itself is bursting with barely used imported consumer crap, will probably not.
    As the Atlantic article put it, "Once large-lot, suburban residential landscapes are built, they are hard to unbuild." Sadly, as with carbon emissions, there still seems to be barely a slowdown in our folly.
    
    The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

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12. 

    Jon Rynn Posted 12:15 am
    25 Feb 2008

    Leinberger is great......he being the author of the article.  His other writings are excellent too, see his website.  I liked this from his article (fast skimming):if New York City were its own state, it would be the most energy-efficient state in the union; most Manhattanites not only walk or take public transit to get around, they unintentionally share heat with their upstairs neighbors.
    My vestigial NYC boosterism at work, but note that a compact city is more energy efficient.
    Question: Does anyone know if you can deconstruct a suburb?  Is the soil still good?  Has it ever been done?

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13. 

    spaceshaper Posted 12:57 am
    25 Feb 2008

    Deconstructionism?Waste is waste - like it or not, there's a lot of environmental capital tied up in them thar rolling hills of ticky tacky. Rather than tear up all that sewer, water, and blacktop infrastructure it's probably better to look at REconstruction first - adaptive re-use and re-purposing. McMansions can become professional offices or even neighborhood stores, restaurants, kindergartens and workshops. Houses sitting on larger lots can combine their backyards for micro-ag. Backfill and infill to gain density, bring the missing resources to the neighborhood.
    We already made the comprehensive redevelopment mistake with the inner cities. Let's not repeat it with the suburbs just because the fashion has changed. At some point the wasteful American habit of just tearing it all out and starting again from scratch has to end. Why not now?
    
    The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

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14. 

    Jon Rynn Posted 1:49 am
    25 Feb 2008

    Spaceshaper,In the Atlantic article Leinberger does indeed project that there will be a lot of "infilling" -- which might become quite the buzzword -- to do exactly as you have said.  The other option for many of the exurbs is, according to Leinberger, that they might become low-income slums.  However, I doubt it -- poor people won't be able to afford to drive long distances, particularly as gasoline becomes more, and then very, expensive -- a point he doesn't address.
    So I predict that at some point, some of those places will be abandoned, and they could be candidates for farm belts of organic agriculture around cities.  As Leinberger points out, though, if people are still there, it'll be very hard to buy everybody out, and also hard to use eminent domain (pity).  
    On the other hand, looking further into my crystal ball, if oil starts to run out, a much bigger slice of suburbia will start to collapse, because of the complete dependence on the car -- unless and until electric cars become dominant, and then the range of said cars will determine which suburbs survive.
    So unless agriculture becomes a real problem and the cities just kick people out of suburbs to use for farming, the "market" will handle much of the desuburbanization process.

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15. 

    spaceshaper Posted 8:18 am
    25 Feb 2008

    The slum potentialis sadly evident and it's extremely likely to be a widespread phenomenon. As is the ghost town.
    The problem with reclaiming the land for agricultural purposes is going to be the high cost in financial, material and energy resources. Finding finance for reclaiming brownfield sites for high-return uses is difficult enough: pulling out all that asphalt, concrete and other pollutants to plant cabbages is going to be a real stretch - unless cabbages get very, very expensive, which I suppose is a possibility. This is why in most cases we should be trying every other option first.
    But we probably won't.
    I was trying to be upbeat, dammit!
    
    The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

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