Strong Towns

[pbrower2a]

(12-13-2021, 09:26 AM)Anthony Wrote: But urban sprawl is not the issue.  Urban cost is.

Also tax revenues, costs of maintenance (roads and sewers), law enforcement (cops being sent to the box store to bust shoplifters), fuel consumption, and highway collisions with consequent deaths and lasting disability.

Much of our problem is a commitment to the automobile as the sole means of commuting to work or school and to getting such necessities in life as groceries. I could make the case that the "strongest town" is New York City, where one typically (except perhaps Staten Island) lives in a high-rise apartment above shops, stores, and restaurants. If one wants to go elsewhere not within walking distance, then the subway is a good way to get to another part of town. 

So let's take a look at a city that wasn't much of a city before World War II, but metastasized into a bloated megalopolis that has the nastiness of Detroit of about fifty years ago (the depopulation has yet to take place, but people are already moving out). OK, Detroit has real winters, overcast as a norm, and no palm trees.    





To put it lightly, Los Angeles was a far nicer place when the 1957 Buick convertible that Randy Newman is driving  (the song is spoof) was new. That's when Orange County actually had orange groves instead of mile after mindless mile of decaying tract housing, box stores, and of course rotting freeways with long traffic jams. Many people drive forty-mile one-way commutes. The entertainment culture (Michigan has tried to attract movie production; an aside is that except for palm trees, Michigan's Lake Michigan shoreline is a dead ringer for the California Coast from May to September). The video is dated, but the rot in Ell Ay is already there. Los Angeles is clearly not a Strong City. Note well that Detroit and Ell Ay have something in common: both built their freeway networks at roughly the same time. 

One of the offenders for Big-Box shopping (K-Mart, until recently present throughout America) with its bloated parking lots and locations in otherwise-unattractive places, was from Michigan. Its headquarters were in Troy, a Detroit suburb. (The last K-Mart closed in Michigan last month. I was at its "vulture sale", and one could see why K-Mart had died). It's not surprising that the Motor City developed a car culture for itself, but Ell Ay didn't need to.  Forty-mile one-way commutes are expensive, and they commit people to burn out their cars faster than otherwise. Property-tax collections are inadequate to allow kids to get adequate schooling. Obvious the superficial "Hollywood" culture is something to avoid unless one makes money in it, but that is hard to avoid when one is near it.  

Here's one city that some Ell Ay residents have sought as an alternative.  Houston, and the car culture is even worse:





Houston is rife with violent crime. Its schools are awful. But it is one of the biggest centers for petroleum in the world, so it is sort of a company town. The petroleum industry would wither and die without the private automobile. It is designed so that one can get anywhere by car... and nowhere else by other means.          

Quote:Already, as the first Baby Busters are becoming eligible for Social Security, they do not feel "entitled" to remain in hyperexpensive cities like New York and San Francisco, where "aging '60s progressives" (the term that the local media in San Francisco actually uses to denote them) are largely staying put.

The '60's progressives are now in their 70's. I would not count on them being around in San Francisco (some sort of afterlife is more likely, and for the Hard Right, that sort of afterlife for '60's liberals likely resembles Norilsk, Russia) in large numbers in thirty years. OK, Rockford, Illinois, from what I hear.

Quote:Instead, they are turning up in such places as Fargo and even Wahpeton, both in North Dakota, and Yankton, South Dakota (home of the now defunct Yankton College, where the late Lyle Alzado played football).  Those with more conservative cultural tastes are gravitating toward such locales as Joplin, Missouri.

Do avoid Springfield, Missouri. Know well that running away from problems without solving them where one goes is one way in which to get no more than a short-term respite.

What about it? Those Dutch cities look far more livable, in part because the Dutch have subordinated the automobile to life instead of life to the automobile.