suburbs

The architect built a city no one wanted, so they made suburbs. So what?

I'm not saying suburbs are perfect, but you've basically thrown up a stack of strawmen here.

The house in the suburbs doesn't really make sense. Kids don't need their own yard if they can go to a park that's the size of a 100 yards and filled with 100 kids for them to play with, instead of 1 yard where they play by themselves.

We have food deserts, and suburbs actively designed to discourage walking. Our government doesn't care about us.

, is caused by all these communities wanting to be LA-style suburbs with no dense housing, and enacting laws accordingly.

He leased out cheap and nasty office space down in the suburbs outside of San Jose. He spent two weeks writing a software specification for a new enterprise product that would be entirely web based.

As a result, you can tax them only so much before they just move out to the suburbs. State and federal funding keeps these school districts in existence, and with state budgets strapped as they are, the DoE is the lynchpin that keeps the whole thing from collapsing.

Gas leaf blowers emit one of the most stressful drone sounds out in the suburbs, causing stress to dozens of neighbors, so one man can clear a pavement of dead leaves quicker. And just this morning over Manhattan, a helicopter hovered at 6AM for at least an hour.

A utopia for software engineers - especially if you have to be in the suburbs like Mountain View. The size would never have worked for me, but seeing something similar implemented at a startup level would have been my dream.

Inland suburbs in Broward like Sunrise are then selling their water to the other municipalities for a killing but at some point even they will have issues as the aquifer becomes squeezed. As far as development and the housing market, a big driver of change for the middle class housing market I believe is going to be insurance.

I have a crappy apartment in a perfect location; most of my coworkers have beautiful, new houses in distant, desolate suburbs; and a few blocks away from me there are beautiful high-rise condos that are nicer than my coworkers' houses and more centrally located than my crappy apartment. I could afford one of those condos if I stopped contributing to my 401k and stopped saving for a down payment on a house.

People wanted to get away from cities generally, wanted to live in the suburbs that were growing rapidly at the time, and wanted the freedom to use cars to get around whenever and wherever they wanted with limited restrictions other than having to obey the rules of the road. Yes, individual cities deployed mass transit with varying degrees of widespread use but these were limited to a few highly localized areas.

Quote: "A half-century ago, Afghan women pursued careers in medicine; men and women mingled casually at movie theaters and university campuses in Kabul; factories in the suburbs churned out textiles and other goods. There was a tradition of law and order, and a government capable of undertaking large national infrastructure projects, like building hydropower stations and roads, albeit with outside help.

> I found myself spending most of my time prosecuting people of color for things we white kids did with impunity growing up in the suburbs. As our office handed down arrest records and probation terms for riding dirt bikes in the street, cutting through a neighbor’s yard, hosting loud parties, fighting, or smoking weed – shenanigans that had rarely earned my own classmates anything more than raised eyebrows and scoldings Whether these crimes deserve any police attention is something that could be discussed, but surely we can agree that prosecuting black kids but not white kids is something that drives inequality in society?

If not for the artificial segregation of residential and commercial uses and for equally artificial restrictions on density of development, modern suburbs would likely be smaller satellite towns, each with its own coherent walkable core, instead of megatowns with purely residential sprawl extending great distances away from the only urban core permitted to be developed.

That which is shallow but useful can have its legitimate place in life, though it lacks character: a daily commute on the freeway might suck, and might not match the joy and invigoration of a brisk walk on a beautiful day, but it has its place if you need to get to work miles away and if your area lacks public transportation to get you there efficiently; living in the suburbs might suck compared to the excitement of an upscale urban environment but millions of people manage just fine with the tradeoffs that suburban living entails and get by just fine without the excitement; so too social networking sucks when compared to any one of countless ways of interacting that are intimate, personal, intellectually stimulating, or whatever, and for which the strictures of the social network have no room, but all sorts of people nonetheless get by very well interacting at the social networking level for the utilitarian goals for which they use such services, not caring one whit about intimacy or other elements that make the experience a fundamentally shallow one. Social may be shallow but it has its place and, as long as we have freedom, you can use it or not according to taste.

You end up with a bunch of kids from the same upper middle class suburbs. They might not all have the same skin color, but they will have the same accent, culture, and their version of a summer job in high school was at a shopping mall. I felt like an alien at school. Rural communities have a much lower cost of living, but also a much lower income. A rural kid who makes it to a university will almost certainly have to work an almost full-time job just to cover their living expenses, books, tuition, rent... etc. This divide was apparent to me as a student at Virginia Tech. 80% of VT's students come from the wealth DC suburbs.

As an aside, it's curious that this entry talks about "suburbs" a number of times. Most condo and apartment rooms have the same 8' ceilings, the same muted palette, and virtually identical construction. But... you know... suburbs and temporary workers, or something.