Every working and middle class person you talk to in the northeast, black, white or Latino, says the same thing; once the kids get out of school, I’m ditching this highly taxed house. And I am going to the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida or some other low south or west tax state with comparatively reasonable housing costs and other pleasant circumstances. And the kids cannot afford the buy in in the northeast.Economically there are only so many Williamsburgh types getting bankrolled by mommy and daddy or a trust fund. The internet has homogenized the culture; why overpay for the same things? Yes, the pizza and bagels suck down there, but otherwise most everything else is the same. And if hipsters want to overpay for my paid in full, fully renovated house in a soon to be discovered hot hip neighborhood, I will be here. And if you want to splurge, Delfriscos in Charlotte is no different than the one in Manhattan.

Why didn’t Haitians bother to take Florida’s advice?

All they needed to do was put on homo parades, and then all the creative people would have flocked there to create start-ups.

Detroit too. Just put on a massive homo parade and watch all the talent come.

I can vividly recalling paying $87 to fill up my minivan in mid-2008 and wondering how much worse it would get.

If you’re in the market for cars that need some gas, the best time to buy them is in those kinds of price spikes. We got a badly needed used mini-van at about that time for thousands under blue book. We weren’t planning to commute in it, so it was a great deal.

People are funny about cars. So many of them buy crossover type vehicles that do nothing in particular well, including conserve gas. I still wonder at the luxury lines that offer SUVs. Why in the world would any want a Porche SUV? Why not buy a Ford, get a badge transplant, and save some money? A Porche should go fast, use a ton of gas, and not have any ability to have car seats in it.

We’ve got a base Dodge Caravan to move the family. It turns out it’s best in class for gas mileage because it’s not weighed down by all the power do-hickies found in a base Odyssey. Our other car is a tiny Fit, which we do use for commuting and it’s pretty fun to drive, too. It’s a little under powered because it’s engineered for good mileage, but not bad. Both do what they do well.

I’d read, heard of, and thought of, so many theories on why oil went up so high and then crashed down after summer 2008, but that’s this is the first I have heard on the Peking Olympics theory. Do you have a link to a good article on this?

As far as medium-sized cities, i.e. smaller than NYC or Seattle, I wonder what the big deal is about driving into the inner city is anymore. Most of what people want to do is in the suburbs or exurbs anyway anymore in these places. Even the utility company offices and just places that you used to go downtown to for errands have all moved, along with movie theaters (who needs them?), etc. It’s only near the universities that there are neat places to go.

Of course, work causes the big portion of the driving, but how many people work downtown? Many run around in their big SUVs from home to work to church and kids activites all around the outer ring of the city. That’s just what I see – your (gas) mileage may vary.

The University of Chicago could be a major driver for a South Side renaissance. Lots of early 20th Century brownstones to rehab and plenty of wasted real estate to build New Economy office parks.

Richard Florida is an idiot. Real technological innovations such as a new kind of photonic semiconductors or CRISPR gene therapy do not meet Florida’s definition of creativity. His definition of creativity is limited to the frivolous crap that latte-sipping SWPL types come up with. Hence, his ideas have no validity whatsoever.

Unlike their parents and grandparents, these new urbanites embraced the energy and authenticity — and the ethnic, racial and sexual diversity — that are emblematic of cities.

The ‘grandparents’ and ‘parents’ were not running from energy, ethnic diversity, and bohemianism.

It was BLACK CRIME. Indeed, diversity became codewords for ‘better immigrants than blacks’ and better homomania than Black Power as the new face of prog values.

It was the Clintonite engineering of reduction of black crime by (1) incarceration (2) tougher policing in cooperation with likes of Giuliani and (3) section 8 relocation that made cities livable again.

Granted, another factor was devaluation of family culture. In the past, many people put family at the center of life. So, they wanted the right set and setting to have a family. But in post-family America, many young people think only of the NOW, and so, they were bit more adventurous in where they lived since they only lived for themselves and hookups.

Since the 60s, people became less consequentialist. They didn’t think in terms of “what will be the consequences of actions I take now for short-term pleasure or thrills.” That was a factor in making cities more attractive. La la la la Live for today.

Still, it’s worth asking why so many boomers opted for the suburbs when they were of the Summer of Love generation seeking authenticity and excitement. Wouldn’t boomers have all flocked to cities? Well, libertine policies on crime led to super increase in black urban crime, and no one wanted that kind of excitement.

It’s like Dave Marsh the leftist rock critic was cheering the Detroit mayhem until he realized… they’re coming for my white ass.

I recall a moment in the mid 70s when this hippie-ish hangover from the 60s was passing through where I lived, and a bunch of Negroes jumped him.

EASY RIDER says beware the rednecks, but it was blackfists that ended the 60s dream of ‘authenticity’… along with lots of bad drugs and trips.

Also, how ‘authentic’ are the bobo’s of David Brooks theorizing and Albert Brooks LOST IN AMERICA where ‘hippies’ become yuppity and wanna have the cake and eat it too. Do Easy Rider in a Winnebago with microwave.

Indeed, what I find about urban renewal is how inauthentic its values and culture are. It’s totally elitist and pro-privilege but pretends to be ‘progressive’. It is practically anti-black(understandably so), but yammers about BLM. It promotes ‘gay rights’ as protection for weak minority but uses immense homo tyranny to make everyone worship homos as god. it talks of diversity-and-equality, but diversity has led to more hierarchy, with Jews on top and with Mexicans as helot class.
And when even middle class people get tattoos, it is so much posturing.

Foremost is a recent uptick in violent crime.

That’s because Obama targeted police with investigations for disparate impact arrests.

If Trump can stop the anti-police policies and if Hillary voters can understand 2+2 = 4 then that problem can be solved. But, the Democrats will stab him in the back.

The biggest problem is that blacks have taken over so much of the infrastructure. They have crippled DC Metrorail and are filing lawsuits alleging racial discrimination.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr-gridlock/wp/2017/05/02/fired-track-workers-sue-metro-for-discrimination-hostile-work-environment/?tid=a_inl&utm_term=.ab0363d24847

If the Democrats can’t stand up to them the whole mass transit system collapses, and the expense and frustration multiply. But, I don’t see how moving to suburbs is going to improve the congestion either. They’re in a real bind.

These days everyone checks fuel economy of vehicles when purchasing. And it is listed in all reviews.

I can vividly recalling paying $87 to fill up my minivan in mid-2008 and wondering how much worse it would get.

The gas price gyrations in 2008 were spectacular. I paid $4.78 a gallon in July 2008 and then $1.86 a gallon in December 2008.

Move to the suburbs, And the next time gas goes to $4, you too can experience the working class phenomenon of spending your whole paycheck on gas!

Innumeracy, right out the starting gate:

young, affluent professionals began pouring into the cores of big cities, reversing generations of white flight.

How could “young affluent professionals” possibly come close to making up for the earlier white flight of people all up and down the income scale?

OT, discarded banana peel at Ole Miss causes havoc – not Buster Keaton havoc, but Maoist struggle sessions, because of its racist juju:

http://thedmonline.com/greek-life-retreat-ends-abruptly-bias-concerns/

Long term trends are converging toward nuclear weapons being used somewhere on planet earth soon. Rapid de-urbanization is the logical response to the nuclear threat or the bio-terrorism threats of the future.

Lunatic Seoul is the probably the test case. Why let that city balloon in population over the past few decades? WTF.

You gotta wonder what wargaming outcome the pentagon supercomputers are now spitting out re Korean peninsula.

He continues to have a considerable effect on liberal “thought.” I still have friends on FB who go on about how the problem is that our state (CT) lacks bike paths.

The Pacific Surfliner was (at 7 or $8) as cheap as gas (in my truck) between Ventura and Santa Barbara. And they had strong coffee in the cafe.

Joel Kotkin’s been documenting this for some time now. It’s no surprise that the urban revival is petering out due to diminishing political and economic returns, but I think it will come as a shock to people when urban real estate starts to really crater in a few years due to demographic changes in the working age population.

Struggle session is a beautiful way to express it.

Aren’t we just seeing the millenials get into their 30’s, have children, and move to the burbs?

We’re all going to spend the rest of our days on this earth being governed by millenial demographic trends.

Chicago is losing black people and gaining white ones. It is a feature, not a bug.

About three weeks ago I bought a CNG Crown Vic on ebay, cheap enough that I just carry liability insurance on it. It’s a second car that stays in the garage, but it’s there when I need it. Right now it’s not that much cheaper to drive than my other car, but if gas spikes again I’m going to be doing okay.

Apparently, nothing says rusted-out post-apocalyptic America like Spokane. – http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/zombie-tv-series-filming-in-spokane-this-summer/

Downtown vs. Sprawl

MACKLEMORE & RYAN LEWIS – DOWNTOWN (OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO)

The official music video for the song, lasting five minutes and 22 seconds, was uploaded on August 27, 2015 to Ryan Lewis’ own YouTube channel. It was directed by Macklemore, Lewis, and Jason Koenig, and was filmed in Spokane, Washington. Ken Griffey Jr. is featured in the music video.

Arcade Fire presents Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)

Low-density suburban counties are once again the fastest-growing parts of the nation…

Once again?

More like our living spaces take turns leading the parade until the various dysfunctions bring the thing to a halt.

He’s not the sharpest tool in the shed but he is learning, which puts him head and shoulders above his peers.

Feds, bankers, factotums.

“A 2017 Honda Civic (a fairly large compact that’s currently the top selling sedan) with a 1.5 L turbo, for example, averages 31 MPG city, 40 MPG highway, which makes long commutes seem more affordable.”

Great bang for the MPG has been pretty standard for the Civic. Our 1992 Civic DX Hatchback averaged 32 MPG city and about 42 MPG highway. That was back in the day when gas wasn’t much above $1.45-1.55 national. In other words during some yrs of lower than average gas prices, you could fill the DX up for about $10. Ten bucks to fill up a car. Seems like forever now.

Regarding cities becoming more diverse, sounds as if diversity ain’t what it used to be.

The fracking boom seems to have put a lid on the high prices we were seeing a decade ago.

Who works downtown? Lawyers?

Plus baristas, strippers, lunatic beggars and other visionaries, people who attend to the tenants of those special buildings reserved for drug addicts, Chinese grinds and their big fat black lady “administrative assistants”, beat cops, sexy clerks at the really expensive Nordstrom, tons of people who work in fancy hotels and restaurants, motivated career women, city workmen monkeying around manholes in groups of five or six, Mexicans selling tamales or Santa Muerte statuettes, Salvation Army food-ladlers…

A Honda CR-V, a small SUV popular with young mothers, can hit 28 and 34 mpg in the EPA ratings.

Yeah, women seem to love these small SUV “crossover” things. You see a lot of women driving the CR-V, the Toyota Rav4, Ford Escape, etc. I wonder if it’s because they’re “sexier” than traditional family cars like minivans, sedans, station wagons.

The sign of the times when now Latino is normal everywhere….With a capital L

“Every working and middle class person you talk to in the northeast, black, white or Latino,”

This weekend, leaders from Ole Miss Greek life convened upon Camp Hopewell in Lafayette County for a three-day retreat designed to build leaders and bring campus closer together. The retreat was cut short Saturday night, however, after three black students found a banana peel in a tree in front of one of the camp’s cabins.

A three day retreat in the woods? I thought that was code for hunt/fish/hike/party/etc.

Things are worse than I thought.

Yes, that gentrification has been attempted before. And it failed miserably while also turning many speculators poor. Granted, UC is pushing south and west and Obama’s Library is another big draw. Tiger Woods is also redeveloping Jackson Park. But the elephant in the room is still the inherently awful population.

Why gentrify the south side when there are plenty of substantially safer Latin neighborhoods?

Qualifier is working and middle class. Which excludes the exact people our parents and grandparents fled the inner city to avoid the crime and dysfunction. Might be a small part of the Venn Diagrams but it exists.

Beijing Olympics? That’s a new one. Although it was popular to diversify out of financial assets at that time. It also became easier to speculate on oil. All commodities were popular — Jim Rogers was always touting them. In fact, China was the mother of all emerging economies and did drive up prices in basic materials and commodities. The Olympics were as good as any other explanation and once speculation got traction, it took on a life of its own.

I don’t expect to see oil much out of the range of $40/$60 bbl in the next year. US unconventional oil production appears to have permanently altered pricing dynamics. North America is roughly self sufficient in terms of total petroleum usage (including liquids and natural gas).

As far as the economics of the suburbs, mortgage rates have been ‘lower for longer’ than anyone expected and a 4% mortgage makes owning in the suburbs a value proposition. And for taxpayers, both the mortgage and property taxes are deductible.

I played golf 2 weeks ago in Sonoma County with an architect who works in downtown SF. He’s designing a campus for Google. Had 3 birdies on the opening nine.

Richard Florida is very smart in a Machiavellian sense: he knows how to tell people exactly what they want to hear, and how to make them pay him to say it.

Include Noam Chomski in that

I don’t see anything of the kind in SF/Marin County. The women drive GX470’s, RX-350’s, Cayennes. Today I saw a 4’10″/90 lb. Asian woman driving the largest Mazda, the CX-9. Men drive the smaller SUV’s like the Escape.

Some of this suburbanization could be ferguson effect, with Negroes going wild again.

Also, cities are becoming more elitish and helotish.

It has the rich who can afford to live in nice parts.
It has the poor(often immigrants) who are willing to live in run-down areas and do anything for a buck.
So, it has place for the high and the low. Not very amenable to the middle or working class. Mexicans are more like the Servant Class.

Also, it’s been some time, and urbanites will grow older and find city life not that exciting anymore. If you’re out of college, it’s great to live in the city and see all the buzz and lights. But once you reach mid 30s, it gets a bit stale and you want something steady. Besides, it’s not a far drive from suburb to the city.

And, of course, the most desirable cities have become incredibly expensive places to live.

If progs are egalitarians, why do speak of ‘desirable’ cities? That is so elitist, selective, exclusive, and hierarchical. Why should cities with certain demographics be more ‘desirable’ if all people are the same?

I can vividly recalling paying $87 to fill up my minivan in mid-2008 and wondering how much worse it would get. But, since then, it hasn’t gotten that bad again, which slowly changes psychology.

Speaking of psychology, I’m wondering if that’s what’s behind a kind of inverted pricing pattern I’ve noticed.

One thing that I see now that I never used to see prior to 2008 is that gas prices will actually go down during holiday weekends. When I was a kid, gas prices went up prior to 4th of July or Thanksgiving weekends like clockwork. Most other holidays, too. Can’t remember a time prior to 2008 when they didn’t. Now I see lower prices around the holidays all the time.

Maybe there’s some market explanation, or it’s specific to my area. Or maybe it’s the oil companies trying to undo the “price gouging” image they gained during the great recession.

The currency fluctuations were crazy too. The Euro was 1.6 for the dollar in Spring 2008.

I think Mencius Moldbug had a post back then about some financial forum where a guy in the know, thought this situation was completely crazy.

Most countries with nuclear weapons still subscribe to Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) doctrine; i.e. they don’t intend to use it except during an Armageddon. Thus, NK believes it can twist the tail of U.S. with the knowledge that if U.S. attacks, they can finish off Seoul which would lead to U.S. nuking NK that would draw China (and may be Russia) into ending U.S. This is not new; Pakistan has been killing U.S. servicemen using proxies and is still getting U.S. funds. If Pakis were not a nuclear power, it would have been Iraq’d or Libya’d long ago. This unstable equilibrium has somehow held on for 70 years; if it is subjected to even the slightest disturbance, the whole house of cards will collapse.

If you want to see something truly hideous, check out this monstrosity in my home town of Westminster, Colorado: The Bradburn Village.

The affected hipsterism of this place is over the top, but it gets worse. The pastel colors, the deliberate archaisms, and the on-the-nose friendliness of the decor all combine to give it an especially creepy vibe, something like a cross between The Prisoner and The Wiggles. It should come as no surprise that current Colorado Governer and former Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper was an early and outspoken proponent of Richard Florida.

I’ve been reacting almost allergically to this whole attitude ever since I noticed it creeping into corporate culture in the early 2000s. Its effect on grocery stores has been particularly irksome to me. I greatly miss the unpretentious, utilitarian architecture of the box stores of old. It seems like every trip to a supermarket now is like taking a mandatory tour of some hipsterite theme park. The mood seems about 10 years dated to me, and yet it keeps lumbering along like a bad hangover. I welcome any signs of its demise.

You have a point with all that.

Will say that despite the childish idealism, the unconscious narcissism…

That is a hell of a song. Maybe an illusion, but a pretty one.

All these millennial’s that moved into the city 15 years ago and have had kids now realize that it’s 15,000 a year for private school or out to the suburbs. Thus the cycle begins again. Look for another urban revival in 15 years or so.

They love the diversity inner cities offer, coffee shops and a different restaurant every week, but they are damn sure not going to send their children to a majority black school.

price of gas…groceries…rent…. unexpected for your car….yawn…figure it out. Sleep eprieved, oh well.

What is funny about Anon’s post, AndrewR?

What is the over/under on when we get an admission that constant micro-aggression hunting isn’t sound science or good social policy? I say 2029.

Who works downtown? Lawyers?

Land prices in city centers are heavily propped up by government offices. There is absolutely no need to put every county, state, and federal government office in expensive downtown locations, but that’s what they tend to do. You’d be surprised at what % of office space in even healthy urban centers is occupied by government.

“If progs are egalitarians, why do speak of ‘desirable’ cities? That is so elitist, selective, exclusive, and hierarchical. Why should cities with certain demographics be more ‘desirable’ if all people are the same?”

White progressive superliberals simply hate hate hate having to live next to all the stale, boring Republicans in Detroit, St. Louis, and Memphis. Their preferences have nothing at all to do with race.

“Joel Kotkin’s been documenting this for some time now. It’s no surprise that the urban revival is petering out due to diminishing political and economic returns, but I think it will come as a shock to people when urban real estate starts to really crater in a few years due to demographic changes in the working age population.”

Seems totally rational to me that real estate prices would drop as boomers age and exit the work force. Hasn’t happened yet.

And there are only so many loaded chinese around to buy these houses at the price people expect.

Pretty obvious that the total change in lending standards today as opposed to even 30 years ago is a large part of it. One day stuff like that won’t be possible. Then what?

As an aside, here is a thought experiment. Let’s say there was no black crime. Let’s say that cities like NY, Boston, all the others didn’t have insane tax schemes.

Where exactly would people really want to live? Amid the skyscrapers is an acquired taste, but a lot of people aren’t very keen on suburbia, at least extreme suburbia like you have in Colorado or something. You know, you get up and make a 30 or 40 mile commute to your job.

And who really and truly wants to drive 5 or 10 miles to go to the grocery store? Really think that most people would prefer something like you see in an old movie like Bedford Falls in It’s A Wonderful Life to the suburbs and cul-de-sacs. I guess you still have stuff like that in Vermont and New Hampshire, but it got killed other places.

From Carlos Slim’s Blog:

If You Want to MAGA, Save DACA

Bret Stephens SEPT. 1, 2017

What is it, really, that makes a country great?

Surely not size. Russia has 56 times the territory and more than twice the population of Italy. Yet Italy’s economy, troubled as it is, is 44 percent larger than Russia’s. …

Raw military power? Vladimir Putin controls what is probably the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, capable of blowing up the world many times over. But the Russian Navy can barely operate a single aircraft carrier far from its shore.

A better measure of national greatness is the ability of nations to cultivate, attract and retain human capital. People tend to vote with their feet. …

Take Hungary. Since 1960, seven Hungarians have won the Nobel Prize. Not bad for a small country — except that all of them left Hungary to make their lives and careers elsewhere. …

Now you know, and I know, and Bret Stephens knows that there’s an angle to this anecdote that’s not being mentioned…

As for Nobelists, a report by George Mason’s Institute for Immigration Research found that Americans have won 40 percent of all Nobel Prizes ever awarded — and immigrants accounted for 35 percent of those winners. Last year, the only native-born American to win the prize was Bob Dylan, for literature. The rest of the American winners — economist Oliver Hart, physicist J. Michael Kosterlitz, chemist Fraser Stoddart — are immigrants.

I’m assuming Hart, Kosteritz, and Stoddart snuck over the Rio Grande from Mexico, no?

A common American conceit is that we attract brilliant foreigners because we have brilliant things: great universities, vast financial resources, a dynamic economy, high-tech. That gets things mostly backward. It’s because we have brilliant foreigners that we have those things in the first place. Google. Comcast. eBay. Kraft. Pfizer. AT&T. They all had immigrants as founders. …

How many from Mexico?

Restrictionists also argue that we need to favor newcomers with “skills” and educational credentials. More rubbish. Jan Koum arrived in the U.S. from Ukraine in 1992 as a 16-year-old boy with his mother, living off food stamps. She worked as a babysitter. He later dropped out of college. In 2009 he came up with an idea for a mobile messaging app. Five years later Facebook purchased WhatsApp for $22 billion.

Once again, I think there’s a common strand tying this story and a lot of the success stories of immigrants together, that is worth mentioning.

The nativist wing of the right thinks DACA is unconstitutional. … In the meantime, allowing these young dreamers to stay is ordinary humanity and enlightened policy. If just 10 of those 800,000 turn into future Jan Koums, the program will have more than paid for itself.

Wow! By that logic if we let in 800,000,000 immigrants we should have 10,000 billionaire entrepreneurs. Don’t you understand economics?

It isn’t the whole truth to say that immigrants come to our shores because of our wealth. They also come in hope of being welcomed by a country whose astounding faith in human possibility includes a faith in them, however poor, unkempt — or even undocumented — they may sometimes be.

Lose that faith, and lose what’s best about America, too.

Now apply that logic to Israel.

Could you please elaborate on what these demographic changes are and what the diminishing returns consist of?

In New York, it’s mostly lawyers, government workers (city hall and the federal building are downtown), and finance. The Wall Street Journal used to be downtown too, near the old World Trade Center on Liberty Street. Now they’re in midtown.

The CR-V, Rav4, Escape etc are basically mini-minvans, although without the sliding doors that are a big advantage of an actual minivan.

Crossovers are roomier and carry more cargo than cars, get better gas mileage than full-sized SUVs, and most if not all of them have all wheel drive versions. That’s a huge consideration anywhere there is snow.

I never understood these frauds like Florida and learned early in life to stay away as they always ruin the lives of everyone they befriend and ultimately destroy themselves. I used to that think their manipulation skills and charm were a form of compensation for their jealous lack of IQ among their peers as most Machiavellians are actually very useful tools for high IQ psychopaths.

“[W]omen seem to love these small SUV ‘crossover’ things. You see a lot of women driving the CR-V, the Toyota Rav4, Ford Escape, etc. I wonder if it’s because they’re “sexier” than traditional family cars like minivans, sedans, station wagons.”

Women seem to like crossover SUV’s because

– they’re not massive full-size SUV’s (that also guzzle gas), yet crossover SUV’s give the impression that their larger-than-car mass makes them safer, more accident-survivable than cars, and even safer than the almost over the front grille seating of minivans

– CSUV’s have ample cargo capacity for shopping purchases, and most have hatchbacks that offer the same easy cargo access as the sliding side doors of minivans

– CSUV mileage is affordable, it’s not all that much lower than for ordinary sedans

– boyfriends and potential boyfriends like women’s CSUV’s better than they like tiny hatchbacks, so appeal to guys is also a factor for young women preferring CSUV’s

– most of all, women are shorter than men and CSUV’s seat women higher than in an ordinary car, thus affording women a better view of the road, traffic, &c. I’ve known several women who bought crossovers for that very reason – once they sit up higher in a CSUV than in a car, they fall in love with being able to see better out their windshield and all around their CSUV (several women I’d known also said the same thing about their minivans’ higher seat elevation opening a whole new view of the road to them). Also, before CSUV’s became popular, young single women had become a large portion of the market for mini-sized pickups, which also feature a higher seating/vision plane.

Yes, I can cynically look at it that way. The most successful consultants are those who tell their clients what they want to hear, not what they need to hear.

Interesting post.

Let’s say that cities like NY, Boston, all the others didn’t have insane tax schemes.

What tax schemes are you referring to?

In other fraternity news, the Great White Defendants of Penn State had the most serious charges dropped. I think I’ve seen more coverage of this drinking death than the pederast Sandusky.

I have to disagree with you on this one.

The new urbanism trend has built a lot of developments that at first look ridiculously fake but are delightful to shop and live in. They look fake because they are mimicking a village built over a hundred years while they are clearly all new. But they function like an old, organic village because they jam people together and give a sense of community.

Hmmmph. Funny. I cannot imagine observations in the most expensive place in the nation don’t match the general trend. Next thing you know you’ll point out the houses in Malibu are fancier and larger than the average house….

Urban areas before 1970s environmentalism were also much more polluted, the suburbanization trend began as far back as the turn-of-the century with the “streetcar suburbs”.

I live a stone’s throw from Google NYC. Public order has been dropping precipotpusly in the last year. Earlier this summer, there were a couple of shootings, i saw a guy shoot up right in front of me, a surge in beggars, and street people.

Tonight, the Chonese lady from the laundry toöd me that last night there were four böack guys camped out on the stoop öast night (loitering blacks were just something you did not see in lower Manhattan in the Giuliani/Bloomberg years). These guys had triey to steal my bike, she said. Her concluging remark was; ‘Too many black people’

Every area has at least one of these abominations nowadays; San José calls theirs “Santana Row.”

The answer to this question is easy. My female friends had all read “The Feminine Mystique” by Betty Friedan when I was in college. Many of them often paraphrased the following passage from the book when they told me in no uncertain terms that they did not want to drive children around in a station wagon.

Millions of women lived their lives in the image of those pretty pictures of the American suburban housewife, kissing their husbands goodbye in front of the picture window, depositing their stationwagonsful of children at school, and smiling as they ran the new electric waxer over the spotless kitchen floor.

The demise of the station wagon was an unintentional casualty of the feminists war on motherhood via Betty Friedan. I believe this meme thrived primarily among women. Just ask your wife about it.

Indeed; the cycle always repeats itself.

I posted about this on another site recently, but when I’m confronted with “thought leaders” like Mr. Florida on the subject of municipal rejuvenation through the (atomistic, alienated, childless, and fleeting) “creative class,” I always think of the Cameron Crowe movie Singles. Which isn’t very memorable to me, except for some reason I always remember a scene between George C. Scott Jr., playing a traffic analyst for the city of Seattle or something, and Tom Skerritt playing the mayor, I think.

Scott wants to implement some sort of mass transit system, because he doesn’t like cars. It’s a train, or “supertrain,” or streetcars, or something. But not just any train, a train where hipsters can go be hipstery and come together and foster community, or some crap. The character builds the plan up in his head, but in his pitch to the mayor it’s terribly vague.

Skerritt says, “People love their cars.” He stutters, hems and haws, and all he can say in reply is, “Yes, but if you give them great coffee…and great music…”

That’s the “creative class” ploy in a nutshell: your boring, old city, plus Coffee…and Music!

My guess would be the political costs of gentrification and its associated backlash. The gentrification of NYC under Giuliani and Bloomberg led to the DeBlasio backlash, and Red Billy campaigned on restraining the police (so his base could commit more crimes).

Many new development projects can be stonewalled unless enough payoffs are made and the buildings are made “mixed income”.

The bicoastal municipal pols face the choice between going full-dope on gentrification, which means the abandonment of their core egalitarian ideology. Or, they can resist it, but at the risk of becoming like Baltimore. For how long will the Silicon Dons tolerate open defecation on the streets of San Francisco?

Our bicoastal elite cities are based on exclusivity, not broad based prosperity. But, they need a monolithic underclass voting bloc to outvote the rural Republican hinterlands. That is the core contradiction that will define the politics of the next several decades.

Could you please elaborate on what these demographic changes are and what the diminishing returns consist of?

Demographic changes are higher ratio of retirees to workers, lower average income for younger worker cohort that is likely to persist, younger workers will have on average less “human capital” as a higher proportion of them is from underclass and functionally illiterate immigrant communities, and of course economic inequality will likely exacerbate all these trends.

The diminishing political returns are already clear. Aggressive policing and mass incarceration that made cities liveable again has already run up against a lot of opposition in the very cities it benefited the most. Also the payoffs in the form of unsustainable pensions and salaries for city and county workers cannot continue with their current largesse for much longer. Eventually city people will stop supporting the taxes that make them possible.

As for diminishing economic returns, rent extraction has its limits; desirability of jobs can and will be affected by cost of living, quality of life, etc. If Amazon is paying a 29yo programmer 110k/year and he’s blowing a quarter of that on rent, a third on taxes and perhaps 15% on transportation he’s got to be asking himself why he’s working 60 hours a week for a lifestyle he could have for half the money and two thirds the work somewhere else.

Medical Centers, Hospitals and the like.

You have your University Hospitals located in central cities. Johns Hopkins is the largest non governmental employer in Baltimore.

It is also surprising how few large corporations have large home office operations in cities as opposed to the suburban metro area.

Healthcare is one of the largest and fastest growing sectors of the US economy.

Here is a list for Baltimore. http://commerce.maryland.gov/Documents/ResearchDocument/MajorEmployersInBaltimoreCity.pdf

Most lists include metro areas and include government employees. Naturally, the single largest employer will be the city government, city schools, etc.

Gas prices have a lot to do with it. Also though, large numbers of Millennials and late Gen-Xers had their life plans (i.e., get married and have babies) delayed by the recession. Some of that cohort has caught up now. Children (and space to raise them) drives the demand for housing space more than anything.

The RX350 and Cayenne are luxury crossover SUVs. The women in Marin County don’t drive ordinary crossovers because they have husbands that can buy them luxury crossovers.

Women as a group love SUVs for two reasons: one, the SUV raises the woman’s sight line so that she can see down the road better, giving her better situational awareness than she would have in a typical sedan; and two, the wasteful bulk of the SUV compared to something like a minivan makes her feel more secure. This all stems from women being several inches shorter than men on average.

You can see the same dynamic working with men too; at least, it seems to me that the bigger the pickup, the shorter the man who gets out of it 🙂

That “frivolous crap” is in fact a big draw for educated young adults with interests beyond schlepping kids between school and soccer practice. Tech companies do indeed rent offices in cities because they have accessible amenities their workers can dump their inflated engineering salaries on.

Oh, and a latte is just a coffee with steamed milk in (it’s pretty good).

If the Chinese had that buying power in 2008, imagine what they have now.

Station wagons were the worst vehicle invented. I remember being lugged around as a kid, to sporting events, in the back of station wagons. To this day I can recall how uncomfortable and unpleasant the rides were. And so many people had station wagons in the 60s and 70s. Praise the heavens for Lee Iacocca. He killed the station wagon with the first Chrysler minivan in the early 80s.

He’s the new David Brooks

http://exiledonline.com/david-brooks-blows-bobos-an-exile-classic/

We just moved up from a Nissan Juke to a Kia Sorento for the wife and the newborn twins. We’d have liked a station wagon, but the only option is a Subaru, and it has the same problem as a sedan: it’s too much of a pain getting the kids in and out of the car seats now mandatory until like age 15. You need something that sits up higher.

CRVs and the like just aren’t big enough for car seat, stroller, plus whatever else.

All five of the new moms in my extended family now have Sorentos.

All those Korean Presbyterians make good cars.

Fuentes on Reaganism. Young kid must be a reader.

This commercial, airing in the Bay Area, advertises the services of a real estate company trying to coax professionals to leave San Francisco and move back to the East Bay suburbs where they grew up.

The suburbs mentioned in the ad — “Lamorinda” is Lafayette, Moraga, and Orinda — have median home prices ranging between 1.2 and 1.4 million dollars.

Those old station wagons were awesome. They were massive, especially by today’s standards.

Kill All Normies

Yes, once the children come then schooling and cars to shuttle them around in are needed. Straight out of uni and a car is a massive expensive and it is harder to share a flat in the suburbs than the city. Plus the need for jobs, which a greater possible commute radius helps with. Really not complicated, just sensible lifestyle choices, young people without children will always gravitate to city centres.

DC metro can seem kinda cool the first few times you ride it, and it has its times of usefulnesss. For every day, medium to longer haul commuting though, it sucks. Unreliable, slow/LOTS of random stops and starts, crowded, and sub-par clientele. Not free either

Sure, but wouldn’t there be a new group of people graduating from college taking over these apartments in the city?

The drop in gas prices from “fracking” was the only pay raise the American worker got in 8 years of obozonomics. Very much despite and not b\c of obozo.

Yes, I would have written this, but I can’t stay on-line 24/7/365/85! That is just it. Don’t try telling a vehicle buyer that the thing you are selling is a station wagon. It must be some kind of rebellion against the older-generation thing, but people (besides me) HATE HATE HATE (TM-Whiskey) that word station wagon. Most of the “crossovers” are just slightly taller, glorified station wagons. Some of them are not even taller.

In fact, some new vehicles I’ve seen are not crossovers at all but are just exactly station wagons, but you will never hear that term. I wish I could name a model, but I just don’t care enough about modern vehicles. About the only thing about them style-wise that differs from the older wagons is that visibility is way, way worse! I believe this is due to all the airbags, and need for more structure for safety, but the windows are near 1/2 as tall as an 1970’s big wagon, like a Plymouth Fury.

More on the safety aspect in a reply I’ll make in a minute to another commenter.

Yes, Muse, I missed your comment as I was skipping around and replied to Steve’s first. My wife would have never heard of Betty or any other Friedan, and she doesn’t personally have this hatred for the term station wagon.

However, I think you are right in general. The term has become associated with the suburban “Pleasant Valley Sunday” culture that has been unfairly bad-mouthed for well-nigh 5 decades now. Don’t tell them that what they are driving is a station wagon, or prepare to pay hell! (either as a husband who will be pestered to do a trade-in or as the car dealer who will lose a big commission).

“The local rock group down the street is tryiin’ hard to learn this song …”

Pretty good for a band that came together from answering a newspaper ad, and again, the drummer is singing. How do you do that? Don Henley? Phil Collins? Karen Carpenter? Bueller?

Here’s another factor that I didn’t see you mention, Auntie, but part of the safety aspect. It’s not just the higher seat height, hence better visibility out the front. Also, if you drive one of the smaller sedans, your safety in a collision, especially from your rear, with a larger SUV is compromised. The large wheels of one of those things could come right over the rear of your car were someone to do something like stare at a phone doing 40 mph and not see the red light or your car until 50 ft. away. I can be scary if you are in the small sedan.

Even the smaller crossovers are somewhat taller, to where a rear end collision would get the back crushed, but there’s some space there to absorb energy. At least, a big vehicle cannot end up on top of the whole rear of the car.

I don’t agree with your “better visibility all around CSUV” part though. The front view is much better than in a sedan or sports car, especially for seeing a number of cars ahead. As, I wrote to Steve, the other views, well at least toward the blind spot and out the back, suck anymore compared to anything from the 1980’s. The windows are teeny and the posts are wider. They need those back-up cameras for a reason – you can’t see squat out of the back of any new vehicle (at least stuff that’s within 20 ft.)

Back again to the safety thing, it is a game of one-up-manship in regards to multi-car wrecks. If most vehicles out there are taller and bigger, your sedan is a sitting duck. For single-car, falling asleep and hitting the oak tree (nowadays checking facebook and hitting the Red-Box machine) type collisions, safety features have saved many in all types of vehicles.

Hey, go read Zerohedge sometime, Mr. Withheld. Everyone on there thinks this financial situation is pretty crazy, and you know what? They’re all right.

Part of this is just being a curmudgeon, ID, but I also never liked the fakeness and pretention. The demise of all this fakeness is fairly imminent, which sounds good, but it’s only because things can not help but get real when the SHTF (financially, at first).

I remember being lugged around as a kid, to sporting events, in the back of station wagons. To this day I can recall how uncomfortable and unpleasant the rides were. And so many people had station wagons in the 60s and 70s. Praise the heavens for Lee Iacocca …

… all hail the K-cars!

Anyway, what you may have forgotten is that in those huge station wagons, you didn’t have to STAY in the back. You just spent a half-hour back there fighting with your brothers, then you crawled 2 rows forward to hang out with the parents for a while, then went to the regular* back seat to lie down and wait for the break at Krispy Kreme donuts off the exit.

Try riding in that back little baggage compartment INSIDE the VW Beetle in the hot summer sun – of course no A/C – the parents didn’t even spring for the AM radio option! “It’ll get cooler once we get going”, they always shouted from the front, as they opened those little triangular vent windows (those were pretty good, BTW). You’d be BEGGING for a station wagon, or even a Chrysler K-Car.
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* It was always “the back” and “the way back”. Haha, memories.

“Land prices in city centers are heavily propped up by government offices.”

Exactly. The downtown revival here is mostly government money, including a truly odious scheme whereby water department moneys have been tapped to provide sweetheart grants and loans to a favored developer for upmarket housing. Several local worthies signed off on the legality of that scheme, which is currently under investigation by the state AG. Even the faux hipsterish latte-and-biscotti joints are mostly politicians’ family and cronies whose start-up moneys are enriched by business development grants and loans.

while automakers have been improving MPG ratings pretty steadily through a long series of innovations and tricks.

This always bothered me. I assume US companies are in a tacit agreement to only increase efficiency at a certain pace, because they all build/export cars in/to Europe with much higher standards. I assume it is more costly to manufacture such engines and without a legal obligation they won’t put them in US cars.

Blame very different emissions standards.

The frackers also have a new business model. Like the low-budget, low-cost airlines, almost everything is outsourced on a subcontract basis. This allows them to ride the highs and lows of the oil industry with amazing flexibility and cost control. The scene: Oil goes below $45/barrell, send everybody home and let the office staff run the company … backed up by whatever minimal crew are required to keep the wells functioning. Oil reaches $100/barrell, subcontract and pump like crazy.

The major oil companies (like the major airlines) do not have this flexibility. Their relatively high overhead severely restricts their options, which is why the major oil companies avoided fracking in the early years for more traditional approaches for finding and extracting oil.

We do know what’s going on. The usual.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/10/germanys-bundesrat-votes-to-ban-the-internal-combustion-engine-by-2030/

http://money.cnn.com/2017/07/26/news/uk-bans-gasoline-diesel-engines-2040/index.html

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jul/06/france-ban-petrol-diesel-cars-2040-emmanuel-macron-volvo

>We’re all going to spend the rest of our days on this earth being governed by millenial demographic trends.

As opposed to what? Continuing to let the baby boomers dictate everything?

US Domestic Fracking industry has put a ceiling on oil at about $65/bbl. Any higher, it becomes profitable for just about all of them.

Until it doesn’t. The kind of oil available via fracking isn’t limitless, either. I don’t know if the oil age has 10 years left in it or a 100, but at the rate we burn the stuff, there will eventually be an alternative. It might be electric vehicles or it might be mule-drawn carts.

The eldest millennials are turning 36 this year…more millennials live with their parents than with a spouse or partner…

In 1980 when Boomers were the same age as millennials are today, the marriage rate was 100% higher as was their fertility rate. In 1980 70% of boomers over the age of 29 had children, today just 30% of millennials over the age of 30 have children.

Mr. Florida affected more than just gullible city fathers. Chase Bank informed managers that gays were the MOSTEST, BESTEST CUSTOMERS EVER. Why their market research showed that any bank that didn’t get on that particular train was doomed. At the same time, operations people told me the dirty secret of banking, the stupid poor provide the income, NSF fees and all that.

The most popular car with the moms in my town is the Range Rover HSE. It is an enormous pile of metal that typically costs between $100k and $125k loaded. It is the brass ring for today’s socially ambitious mother. Functionally it is a wagon.

No doubt the lovely ladies in their Lululemon yoga pants feel secure sitting on their glorious plinth of an automobile. Driving around town, they are a hairball of social signaling and distracted driving, with their screaming kids and frantic texting to their girlfriends to schedule their next paddle tennis match or pilates class.

They are inefficient, unreliable and very expensive to repair, but they are by far the most comfortable car I have ever ridden in.

When my second child was on the way, it became apparent that it was time to get my wife out of her Civic and into something bigger. We poked around the local Ford dealer’s lot.
She was pushing hard for an Escape (Compact SUV), I was going for the Windstar minivan. I spied a Taurus station wagon that was heavily discounted and began to talk with the salesman about it. When she saw I was serious she capitulated immediately and we got the minivan.
It wasn’t a great car, but it lasted 10 years and 140k miles.
She’s on her second and probably last minivan now. She can’t wait to get something a little sportier.

Interesting. Americans are stuck using Miles Per Gallon, so we don’t really know what’s going on in Europe.

Let’s see, 1 mile/G x 1.61 km/mile x 1 G/3.78 l = 0.426 km/l (units arithmetic, bitchez!)

So, 1 mpg (of gasoline) = .43 km per liter (of petrol)
Take our sticker values and multiply by .43 to see how it compares to European cars.
Or, take the Euro sticker value and multiply by 2.35 to see how it compares to an American car.

I get 27 mpg on the highway doing 78-82 mph steady with a 25 y/o American V-6 3.8l, while the car (with a stick) gets only 16 mph in the city. It’s purely a highway car, but it’s semi-sporty, with still 4 decent seats – the streamlining helps at the highway speeds. No, it’s too old for me to get pulled by Johnny Law [knock on liquid crystals].

Ridership has declined since 2012:

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/lets-face-it-washington-dcs-metro-is-the-worst-in-the-world/article/2626197?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Examiner+Today&utm_source=StructureCMS

They have to fire the blacks or figure out a way to outsource to non-black companies. They can’t blame cops or redneck hater bigots. They can’t give them safe spaces or a separate system. DC area is one of the most hardcore progressive places on the planet and blacks are filing lawsuits claiming racism. LOL.
Maybe SPLC should call Metrorail a hate group.

Medical Centers, Hospitals and the like.
You have your University Hospitals located in central cities. Johns Hopkins is the largest non governmental employer in Baltimore.

Who funds these? The taxpayer. So, again, the cities are solely propped up by government debt on the back of the few remaining actual private sector citizens.

It is also surprising how few large corporations have large home office operations in cities as opposed to the suburban metro area.

Why would private sector want labor pool of government?

Healthcare is one of the largest and fastest growing sectors of the US economy.

Aging population and government control plus narcissism of so many (“I don’t care what it costs, just give me more hyper expensive treatments!”). Obesity too plays a major role.

You can say that again.

mortgage and property taxes are deductible.

Not so fast. If you live in a blue state, your income taxes are almost always affected by the Alternative Minimum Tax. Theoretically, you don’t pay taxes on money paid in property or income taxes to your local government. Pay enough of them, and your deduction for them disappears.

This was put in place in the 60s to tax “millionaires,” never indexed, and so now it affects people with incomes well below 100k (which would have been a lot of money in 1969)

Interestingly, this deduction limitation does not happen with mortgage interest, which is essentially unlimited in deductibility (I think the limit is 50% of income). It’s almost like the system has been set up to encourage people to take on more and more debt, but undercut state and local governments.

Home schooling? It’s not just for guns and bible-clinging Christians.

Exactly. This urban renewal thing was always limited by the schools. Finding a way to protect little Ian and to provide Kaityln a descent atmosphere in school was the one thing that could have caused urban renewal to both explode and become permanent.

Hipster Gen Xer and millennial parents failed. I know because I know many of them in DC area. God bless them, they tried. Charter schools, local boundary lines, magnet schools, they pushed for them all, but it didn’t work. They were left with the choice of or either sending their kids to schools that are heavily black/Hispanic or outrageously expensive private schools. Neither was a real option, especially considering that DC has several areas just outside the district (Bethesda, N. Arlington) with very good public schools.

Heck, take the cost of private school – $30k a year at least – for one kid and figure how much mortgage, i.e. house, that buy you and you can see that moving a few miles north to Bethesda or over the river to N. Arlington allows you to buy a pretty nice house (after selling your already expensive townhouse in DC) for less than sending one kid to private school, much less two or three.

To paraphrase, it’s the schools, stupid.

Lots of the bigger selling vehicles these days are more or less station wagons: they’re basically sedans except having a trunk, the passenger compartment just keeps going, much like in an old station wagon.

They’re wagons in everything but name. Big SUVs are wagon bodies on truck platforms and CSUVs are wagon bodies on car platforms. The big SUVs are perhaps closer to the 1960’s wagon due just to weight and body-on-frame construction. But the CSUV is nothing more or less than the current year model of the old Buick Roadmaster. AWD and the rest of it are available/originated on sedans.

We forget that up until the late 1970’s we still had two door coupes longer than current year Ford F-150’s. Today a Ford Flex wagon has more useful cargo space than a Ford Expedition. Automakers today are flexible enough to focus on filling every conceivable niche while building only a handful of actual platforms. Car geeks place performance wagons at the top of the pyramid: Mercedes R500/R63 AMG, E500/E63 AMG, Ferrari FF/GTC4Lusso (shooting brake), Cadillac CTS-V wagon, Audi RS6, etc.

The station wagon never died – it just legally changed its name.

Air conditioning means that city living is quieter now because you can shut your windows to noise. Also, you can get double paned windows that are quieter.

Also, high rise building. Look at NYC hotels such as Hilton Midtown or Times Square. Upper floors are almost completely isolated from the 24/7 din that is manhattan. It’s somewhat surreal in these buildings to look at the vastness of the city and realize the only sounds are those of the buildings’ HVAC systems then to descend to the street and hear the subways, taxi & livery cars, sirens, etc

Praise the heavens for Lee Iacocca. He killed rebranded the station wagon with the first Chrysler minivan in the early 80s.

Fixed it for you..

Not everybody. I am amazed at how huge and high the average pickup is now. I saw a young guy driving a ford 450?? yesterday. The wheels had to be 20″. It was badass for sure. These rigs are the El Dorados for the lawyers, salesguys and CEOs here in MT. They must get 6 mpg.

Even my tradcon wife thinks of them as uncool. It got meme’d in oblivion.

View from Portland Maine

One of my Ph.D students has just handed in her thesis on drilling technology, now she has to start learning about f**cking fracking.

What about the financial situation do you find to be crazy?

(Zero Hedge, by the way, is probably not representative of the typical college educated viewpoint.)

What makes you think that the SWHTF?

It’s been happening. Very slowly.

One plus for the South Side is that there is another, lower powered but more technologically inclined, university, IIT, on the South Side.

Weirdest thing I saw recently was a Porsche hatchback. Maybe there’s some technical name for the style that sounds cooler, but it was a Porsche hatchback.

This is traditional urban design. I love it and have to disagree totally. If American suburbs had been build a little bit closer to this model, much about the decline in community would not have happened.

Also, high rise building. Look at NYC hotels such as Hilton Midtown or Times Square. Upper floors are almost completely isolated from the 24/7 din that is manhattan. It’s somewhat surreal in these buildings to look at the vastness of the city and realize the only sounds are those of the buildings’ HVAC systems then to descend to the street and hear the subways, taxi & livery cars, sirens, etc

One problem I personally have with downtown areas is that I don’t like highrise buildings. I don’t like being in them nor do I like being around them. Part of it is the reason cited above and part of it is simply an irrational personal aversion to them. Portland’s downtown is not so bad because there are relatively few highrises and the ones they have are 20 floors or so, with plenty of room between them. Medium rise (5-10 floors) works better for me in urban areas.

Why gentrify the south side when there are plenty of substantially safer Latin neighborhoods?

Real estate.

That patch is the nice south side real estate next to the water with parks and near the U of Chicago with jobs and activities for intelligent people. If that area were white again it would be a really nice place. (Ok, not in the winter … but hey, it’s Chicago.)

No argument that the Mexicans will–in general–produce a safer neighborhood, so if they had chased the blacks off that patch the gentrification would proceed forthwith, while the sheer level of violence and menace from blacks makes it difficult for whites move in–and stay when they have kids–away from the immediate well policed Hyde Park neighborhood.

But that’s the deal with Mexicans. They’ll go anywhere. And will generally colonize the cheapest–which often means the worst–real estate in town. Unlike blacks it generally isn’t the case that Mexicans have taken some very desirable area from whites just by making it unsafe–like many near downtown areas were taken by blacks post-war by making them unsafe/unpleasant. Mexicans are taking territory just by sheer numbers. They arrive, and their women–unlike white women–aren’t afraid of being women and getting pregnant. So while gentrifying Mexican territory might be theoretically easier, generally there’s no point, because there simply aren’t the white numbers to justify gentrifying even the best piece of territory the Mexicans hold. If there were, the Mexicans wouldn’t have it in the first place.

We had a station wagon with the rear facing third seat. I’m pretty sure my sensitivity to getting motion sick had a lot to do with it….Original Vomit Comet.

I don’t think it’s that as much as the size and power tradeoffs of American cars. Bigger engines use more fuel.

I have ridden dc metro thousands of times. I do pay attention to operators’ ethnicity. 100% according to my observations. Not very diverse

Long term trends are converging toward nuclear weapons being used somewhere on planet earth soon. Rapid de-urbanization is the logical response to the nuclear threat or the bio-terrorism threats of the future.

Good observation Anonymous. (BTW, take 5 seconds, pick a moniker and contribute.)

This definitely is one of the decentralizing impulses and not one I think most of us think about much.

You have your University Hospitals located in central cities. Johns Hopkins is the largest non governmental employer in Baltimore.

The original hospitals are generally there–at least central city, though often not “downtown”. And those do tend to grow and grow.

However, often when these centers do an expansion they’ll do it out in the suburbs precisely to get themselves closer to more of their customers and get them into their “system”.

Those areas such as Lafayette and Orinda are not particularly suburbia but where wealthy ex-urbanites from SF go to re-recreate small town living.

http://www.starktruthradio.com/?p=5088

Robert Stark interviews Korezaan about Transit & Urbanism:

Topics:

Korezaan’s political views, the Euclidean vector towards Giovanni Dannato, and the Alt-Center
Korezaan’s article BART, Americans, and Attitudes, vs The East which has maps of land use around the BART Stations
Robert Stark’s recent meeting with Korezaan in the Bay Area and some personal observations from the trip
Transit Oriented Development and the lack of housing density around BART Stations
The importance of having retail in or near transit
The importance of pedestrian friendly development
NIMBYism, density, parking, and height limits
How suburbia makes it difficult to form communities and contributes to social isolation
Ethnoburbs
New Urbanism
Housing Crisis: Razib Khan on how $100,000 in Palo Alto is equivalent to $16,000 in St. Louis
The misconception that suburbs are necessary for family formation
The Upscale East Bay towns of Lafayette and Orinda, and Korezaan’s point that these are places where ex-urbanites bring non-suburban culture to the suburbs
Bay Area Greenbelts and Conservation in Hong Kong
Self-contained urban structures, urban oasis’s, the Embarcadero Center, and Elements, Hong Kong above the Kowloon MTR station
The Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong, Blade Runner, Ghost in a Shell, and Western vs. Eastern Cyberpunk
Korezaan’s artwork featured on his blog Rezzealaux

The retreat was cut short Saturday night, however, after three black students found a banana peel in a tree in front of one of the camp’s cabins.

End-of-times is nigh when you can’t tell the difference between Onion satire and a serious news story.

Pilsen, close to Downtown Chicago, which has been partly Hispanic for 100 years and was almost totally Hispanic from about 1975-1995, has been gentrifying, especially in the last 10 years. Other Hispanic neighborhoods near Downtown have at least partially gentrified. The first neighborhoods to gentrify, 1965-1985, tended to be mixed White and Hispanic neighborhoods on the North Side.

You express my own thoughts so much better than I could. Thank you.

Yes, the attitude is live for NOW. No thought is given to the future or the past, aside from hypocritical virtue-signaling.

But in post-family America, many young people think only of the NOW, and so, they were bit more adventurous in where they lived since they only lived for themselves and hookups.

Since the 60s, people became less consequentialist. They didn’t think in terms of “what will be the consequences of actions I take now for short-term pleasure or thrills.” That was a factor in making cities more attractive. La la la la Live for today.

The idea of future-time orientation, delayed or deferred gratification is just so 20th century.

Live in the moment. If it feels good, do it. Do your own thing. No judgments. No shame.

Selfish narcissism is the overriding trait. In fact, creating a spectacle by doing the outrageous, preferably embarrassing act–being the center of attention–is a mark of this era.

We had the Me Generation followed by the Look-at-Me Generation.

It’s The Narrative.

Richard Florida, the professor who did well for himself pushing his “creative class” theory of urban prosperity that led to a lot of amusing developments such as the city fathers of Spokane going all Gay Pride,

I believe the main person and driving force behind all these progressives ideas, experiments and developments in Spokane, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expo_%2774 , was Allison Stacey Cowles:

In 1996, he married Allison Stacey Cowles, widow of William H. Cowles, 3rd. (died 1992), who was part of the Cowles family which owns The Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Wash.[9][10]

– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Ochs_Sulzberger#Personal_life_and_death

Allison Stacey Cowles, a longtime trustee of Wellesley College who was the wife of a newspaper publisher in Spokane, Wash., and, after he died, of a former publisher of The New York Times, died Saturday night in Spokane. She was 75.
[…]
Ms. Cowles was an influential advocate for educational and conservation programs, both in New York and in Washington State. But her ties to Wellesley were particularly strong. As a student there, she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and was editor of The Wellesley News in 1955, the year she graduated.

– http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/26/us/26cowles.html?mcubz=1

Who runs Spokane? 03/03/99

Anybody who has lived in Spokane very long knows what we’re talking about when we refer to “the establishment, ” “the elite ” or the “downtown power structure. “ Whatever you call it, there’s a strong perception that the streets of downtown are the Monopoly board for a handful of wealthy citizens. An intriguing theory, but proving the existence of a downtown power structure is not easy.
[…]
So the question follows: As long as the downtown power structure stands for progress, what’s the problem?

Local historian John Fahey, who says Expo ’74 is the downtown power structure’s finest hour, says there isn’t a problem: “We talk about the power structure as if it’s evil, but it’s been benevolent over the years. Obviously, the structure has always served its own interests, but by and large it’s been benevolent. ”

– https://www.inlander.com/spokane/who-runs-spokane-030399/Content?oid=2173726

This is how Spokane County voted in 2016:

Don’t overlook the flight of the Atlanta Braves from downtown Atlanta to the North Fulton suburbs! They wised up and built their new stadium in proximity to their fan base: affluent, white suburban families who hated driving into black ATL for games.

Why is that a bad thing?

Disagree,

Bradburn looks very old school in terms of architecture and aesthetics – actually quite pleasant. It’s designed to be pedestrian friendly instead of a six lane city center where you need a car to go anywhere.

You can still find it in some small towns and which makes them so nice. Usually it’s the first thing destroyed by big box stores – they are the equivalent of a cluster bomb dropped on a small town. I watched over the years what Wal-Mart and Best Buy did to my city center and adjacent towns to make me want to burn down every big box store I can find.

Mexicans must not follow the American Dream but the Mexican Dream. Use all that energy and talent to make Mexico blossom.

Say no to DACA and say yes to TACA, the Taco-daca.

Indeed, how come no one’s heard of the Mexican Dream? Why can’t Mexicans dream in their own nation? Why do they pursue the dream in ANOTHER nation? How shameful.

To fix all this, we need TACA.

Mexicans must stop seeing their nation as a nightmare while seeing US as a dream. Mexico is a dream.

Sueño Mexicano must be the future.

Every working and middle class person you talk to in the northeast, black, white or Latino, says the same thing; once the kids get out of school, I’m ditching this highly taxed house. And I am going to the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida

Ever since my paternal grandparents moved to FL from MA in 1975, much of my family, extended family, friends, and acquaintances have relocated, in successive waves, to FL. If they haven’t already, then they wish they had or are planning it.

Funny thing about home schooling, it’s quite popular among public school teachers and county workers where I live on the outskirts of Los Angeles. They are not about to put their kid in a school that’s 90% Mexican/black or pay $15-30K a year for a private school.

Others who can opt for parochial schools go that route. Public schools are just a no no for white kids now.

The millenials probably still think that Home Schooling is for losers and religious fanatics. Heaven forbid teaching your own child – that is so not natural. It’s much better to give your child to a agent of the state whom you know nothing about and let them instill the state’s approved values and ideas into your child’s noggin.

True story. In the early 70s the Washington Post printed an article about a huge black lady who’d been hired by some Fed agency as a GS4 temp. Quite reasonably she exploited the then new concept of systemic racism by intimidating her white male superiors with the threat of lawsuits if she didn’t get promoted. Within, if I recall correctly, about one year she rose to the rank of full-time GS13. It got so ridiculous a boss finally stood up to her and she actually did sue him! The judge threw her case out of court and she was eventually fired.

Takeaway for me: under the right circumstances 1) people are capable of unimaginably selfish and violent actions in order to “fight racism” (or “hate” nowadays, its broadened out a bit), and 2) mid-level whites will do almost anything to avoid being burnt at the stake.

Medium rise (5-10 floors) works better for me in urban areas.

Works really well in Washington DC, a delightful city in which to live.

Soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and the city jail.

Heck, until about age 6 I could lay down up on the rear dash of my Mom’s Ford Maverick and not block all of her view out the rear window.

The downtown revival here is mostly government money, including a truly odious scheme

In Florida, cities have this scheme of declaring a downtown and it’s surrounding area as “blighted” and then under the cloak of “Community Redevelopment” are able to keep all of the growth in property tax in the declared area for reinvestment back into the area. Sounds reasonable, but the areas outside of the “blighted” area get short shrift and the blighted area gets some new brick sidewalks and a couple of murals. Creates a few good paying city jobs for connected artists and planners to manage the new tax revenue (or at least what doesn’t get diverted to the general city fund or police officer overtime). City officials are always getting in trouble for mismanaging this new revenue. Oh, and the “blighted” area never becomes un-blighted. These schemes go on for 40 and 50 years.

Telling a woman that she’s driving a station wagon is like telling her that her boobs have started sagging.

I agree wholeheartedly. (I’m not on Twitter, so I can’t formally Agree.)

I don’t live in a New Urbanist enclave, but I do have to visit one from time to time, and I find it most user-unfriendly.

This used to be a car dealership. It’s right across the street from one of the busiest malls in the Miami area:

Admittedly, the car dealership wasn’t anything to write home about:

Here are some shots of the vibrant nightlife. Note the size of the crowd:

The back side of the mall borders a canal. (The mall’s developers failed to take advantage of their proximity to the waterway – there’s nothing on that side but parking garages.) This hideous structure lies on the other side of that canal. It looks like the housing project that Howard Roark blew up in the movie version of The Fountainhead:

These abominations are sprouting up all over.

The thing is that these retail/residential communities is supposed to be “highly walkable,” but many of them have huge trees in the middle of the sidewalks. If the sidewalk is nothing more than a narrow strip between a tall building and a busy street, and if a tree is blocking your way, then you’re constantly having to contort your body to avoid getting whacked in the face with a branch and/or getting run over by a speeding car.

This picture shows the size of the trees, but it doesn’t show how narrow the pedestrian right-of-way is in some places:

(It goes without saying that most of these sidewalks are open to the elements. They offer no shade and no protection from the weather.)

You never see anyone strolling around for the hell of it. There’s no sense of “community,” in the sense of children playing or couples cuddling.

You do see folks walking their dogs. Everywhere you go, you see dogs taking dumps … on the sidewalk. (There is no grass to speak of. The trees are housed in metal grates.) The owners are good about cleaning up after the fact – they face stiff fines if they don’t – but still.

Of course homos are the best customers. According to our wildest overestimations, only 9 out of 10 people aren’t gay, and they don’t reproduce! What more could you ask for?

Then again, they have pozzed the culture, have disproportionate influence over high culture and fashion–because our civilization is frivolous–and they’re helping turn the rest of society into perverts, just like them.

If they can get us all to worship women who look like boys as sex goddesses, they can get us to bank at Chase.

Well played Hippo, well play.

And yes, Steve’s observation is a very good one. It’s amazing how much AC has affected America’s demographic geography. The whole move to the sunbelt would not have happened but for AC.

And yet, people think “tech” is limited to stupid electronic toys OR “apps” that exist to monetize ads.

We had a 1991 Chevy Caprice station wagon, and I loved the rear facing third seat. To each their own.

In the Bay Area and Los Angeles, the average home costs more than 10 times the average income

Interesting, but one assumes that there must be some kind of compensatory mechanisms, for example perhaps there are 5 families living in each home, or there is cheaper housing available within commuting distance, or there is HUD housing in the area that is subsidized for lower income workers or retirees, or everybody finds a spot via Bnb.

Also in these premium areas, I would assume that people acquire property mainly by inheritance rather than buying it out of earned wages.

Here in Florida a large percentage of the population live in trailer parks, also known as mobile home parks. These are cheaper than apartment complexes. The parks often look small from the outside, but once you pass a narrow entrance, you find a maze of streets with scores or even hundreds of homes, housing huge numbers of people, often hidden from view from the main arterial roads. There is often a swimming pool, playground, lake (drainage pond), and club house.

Some are reserved for residents who are retirees, others allow families with children to live there.

Many of these prefabricated homes are surprisingly pleasant and well equipped inside, the main problem being the obvious one that the rooms are not large and that families will find themselves living on top of each other. This problem is partially resolved by “double wide” homes that will have more space than many expensive New York or San Francisco apartments. The biggest drawback is that you cannot be certain who your neighbors are or what they are smoking.

Watching the television and internet coverage of the Houston floods, it seemed that all the worst hit areas were stone-built, or at least stone-faced homes in residential subdivisions. I did not see any flooded trailer parks on display. Possibly one factor is that trailers usually have a space a couple of feet deep under the floor, where water can flow freely in times of flood, making it less likely that residents can be photographed standing up to their waist in their kitchens.

Of course that would not help much in a really big flood like the Mississippi flood of 1927 in which 27,00o square miles were inundated to a depth of as much as 30 feet.

The TV coverage was possibly dictated by where the photogs could get to. Or perhaps news agency photogs don’t know about trailer parks. I did not see much evidence of businesses, government agencies, gas stations, churches being flooded either, so perhaps they were better prepared than the residential areas, although since Houston is reported to have no zoning laws, I don’t see how that could be.

Perhaps future building codes for Houston should stipulate that homes must be built so that they functionally work as houseboats in times of flood. This could be called the ‘Noah principle’. I believe that Biblical literalism is popular in Texas, so it might not be such a hard sell.

Flood insurance seems to be a bit like health insurance. Insurance companies can’t make any money from it unless the premiums are unaffordable in the first place or the government chips in. Living in a flood plain is clearly a pre-existing condition. Given that is the case, it might best to flood proof at the time of construction.

Of course insurance companies are always crying wolf. After hurricane Charlie hit Florida several years ago, various insurance companies were pulling out of the entire state, and yet I doubt if more than 1% of the total buildings in Florida were damaged and most of those only slightly. What is the point of pooling risk and paying premiums for many years if such a small hit makes the whole system unworkable?

Telling a woman that she’s driving a station wagon is like telling her that her boobs have started sagging.

Haha!

As far as the former, yes, you can never say anything until that car is safely in the junkyard. As for the latter, someone’s got to break it to her eventually, but not before a “silicone” account is already set up at the bank (just $25 out of each paycheck – 5 years later, presto, make the appointment and start off with “I have some good news and some bad news, what do you want to hear first?”)

It was a lot of fun back then!

Hey, maybe you were from the wrong side of the tracks. We didn’t have some old Ford Maverick; our car was a Plymouth Gold Duster. Maverick! Sheeesh!

In answer to both your question-comments, Opinionator, how about I wait for a post that is somewhat finance-oriented, like Steve’s stuff on the housing bubbles 1.0 and 2.0? It comes up quite a bit.

I’m not trying to blow you off on this, but a) this thread is old, so I’m not sure you’ll read the reply and b) this post isn’t about this subject, and I’d rather discuss it somewhat in context with other stuff on here.

Hopefully, the SWNHTF during this interval! Haha, joking there!

I don’t know how walkable that area is. Dadeland Boulevard is also subtitled (as shown above) Alfred W. Terrinoni Boulevard.

Terrinoni was a local cop who was shot and killed while moonlighting as a security guard at a local restaurant. He was making a night deposit of takings from the restaurant when he was approached by 4 pedestrians in an attempted robbery and ended up being shot and killed.

Do you really want your street names to serve as a reminder of awful street crimes?

Of course I understand that the dead man is honored for his bravery in trying to prevent a crime taking place, and getting shot for his trouble, while off duty from his police job. Personally as I am scared of guns, I would have handed over the loot, while noting details of the robbers that might help to apprehend them down the road. The restaurant would probably make up the losses within a few days, which would possibly be insured and definitely be tax deductible.

I guess that is why I am not a cop.

http://www.odmp.org/officer/13179-sergeant-alfred-william-terrinoni

https://books.google.ca/books?id=vES5x_cN4-sC&pg=PA153&lpg=PA153&dq=Sergeant+Alfred+Terrinoni+trial+sentenced&source=bl&ots=UrVxVuy6rx&sig=XmQQz2VIoOI6so423Jb3onTT3oQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiVzcfR04fWAhVK1oMKHYnHDc8Q6AEINDAC#v=onepage&q=Sergeant%20Alfred%20Terrinoni%20trial%20sentenced&f=false

A video showing the bustling nightlife in the area around the New Urbanist paradise:

(No one in that clip speaks English, but never mind.)

The mall itself – as I said, the New Urbanist utopia is across the street:

As a kid, I spent many a Saturday afternoon there with either my mother or my grandmother.

In the early 2000s, some New Urbanista developers – Neue Urbanazis(?) – asked the county to zone the mall into oblivion so that it could be torn down and replaced with a “sustainable” development – acres and acres of the kind of sterile, yuppified crap that’s sprouted up all around it. They lost that fight.

When the mall first opened in the early ’60s, as an open-air shopping center – it was enclosed and air-conditioned in the early ’70s – it had a fountain in the middle with a large statue of a horse. (The area that housed the fountain can be seen in the YouTube clip – it has a large circular skylight.) The statue was positioned so that its back side faced the mall entrance. Thus, when you walked inside the mall, the first thing you saw was a horse’s ass.

That statue was gone by the time I was a kid, but there was a fountain in that spot until maybe 15 years ago.

Your looking for Aldi’s.

Old-fashioned prices too.

The millenials probably still think that Home Schooling is for losers and religious fanatics.

In general it’s the social outcasts and nonconformists, left and right, and often regarded as extremists, who are the earliest adopters of new customs. The fact that home schooling was most often embraced by unfashionable Christian fundamentalists made a good idea seem less respectable.

Parochial schools in NYC are just dying. It used to be a mortal sin for Catholics to send their kids to public school, but then the Catholic school was also so supported by the parish that it was for all intents and purposes free.

Given the number of unemployed and underemployed people, especially WWC, and the incredible resources available, I would think WWC people would pull their kids out and teach them at home. The Ron Paul curriculum isn’t bad, though I’d love to see every religion creating online curricula for home schooling. Leave the state schools to the secular.

What’s astounding to me is my area’s wages and salaries are in the sewer, as are real estate values. You’d think that alone would be enough of a draw that brings in private capital. But, nope. We have a legacy caste here of deeply corrupt, deeply parasitic politicians whose philosophy of government is rent extraction, pure and simple. Think building and zoning inspectors as a for-instance, and the uses they can be put to.

There are some genuine success stories, and a very few larger industrial enterprises offering high-wage jobs are clever enough and brazen enough to blast into the area demanding government preferences without a quid pro quo.

Hibernian, I’m sure there are exceptions to my general thesis–generally where the “desirability” of an area has shifted for some reason–and i’ll take your word about Chicago. (I lived there less than a year a patch back–only to experience the marvelous 78-79 winter–and have only visited briefly a few times since.)

But my general rule is sound:
— Mexicans conquer real estate by sheer numbers, and pick off the cheapest/least-desirable areas, so in general–as their numbers are growing and whites are not–they are not sitting on real estate that there are sufficient whites around to justify gentrifying.

— Blacks conquered significant amounts of central real estate through sheer violence/unpleasantness, so in many older cities are sitting on (close in) real estate that would be desirable to whites if the blacks could be chased out.

(And that south side area with UChi, the lakeside parks and CTA Green line and Metra seems obviously an area that whites would find quite desirable but where black crime/unpleasantness has kept whites from gentrifying, beyond their little University/Hyde Park redoubt. While most of Chicago’s Hispanic areas to SW and NW have nothing in particular going for them–beyond transit access along the lines–that’s going to especially interest the white gentrifying crowd.)

Wow, thanks for that great photo-essay!

I find the “community” aspects of these places to be especially grating. You can no more manufacture a community by plopping people into these Potemkin Villages than you can recreate a Greek polis by moving them into a replica of ancient Athens. Architecture is downstream from culture. The old world towns and villages were the living expression of a preexisting culture. It doesn’t work when you try to back into that proposition.

Typical or exceptional case?

http://portlandphoenix.me/columns/urban-conditional/item/6922-hungry-hungry-housing-or-yes-portland-is-dying

If Pakis were not a nuclear power, it would have been Iraq’d or Libya’d long ago.

Pakistan has about 6x the population of Iraq and more than 30x the population of Libya. It isn’t and hasn’t ever been run by megalomaniacs, much less megalomaniacs who’ve been taking people out in six-digits worth of job lots. It has passably co-operative and decidedly antagonistic elements in its government (which does not describe Libya prior to 2003, much less Iraq). So, no.

It used to be a mortal sin for Catholics to send their kids to public school, but then the Catholic school was also so supported by the parish that it was for all intents and purposes free.

It was never a mortal sin literally or metaphorically. An insufficient critical mass meant you did not have many Catholic schools in small towns and rural areas (there is currently one on the arc which runs from the Utica exurbs to the Binghamton suburbs 90 miles away – and it has no high school). In the city where I grew up, perhaps 1/3 of the nominally Catholic youth population were enrolled. Recruitment to the religious orders had already collapsed but there remained a large corps of teachers who had entered prior to 1966. Of course, such people have now nearly all retired or died.

The NW and especially SW areas lack the quality of housing that you can find on the lakefront N and S. That has slowed gentrification. I agree that Hispanics have generally, with a few exceptions, not settled in areas formerly home to the gentry, which have the massive brownstone or greystone fronts, high ceilings, etc. They have tended to settle in areas which previously were always occupied by white working people. Pilsen was originally German, then Bohemian, then Hispanic.

True for therapists too. Got keep the customer coming back. My daughter has an old friend who is an insufferable spoiled brat. Hardly anyone can stand her. Her therapist assures her that her problem is that she’s “too giving of herself.” She likes hearing that and the therapist likes keeping that slot in her schedule filled.

When I click my ruby slippers together. I say, ‘There’s no place like Palm Beach County’.

You can no more manufacture a community by plopping people into these Potemkin Villages than you can recreate a Greek polis by moving them into a replica of ancient Athens.

Nearly everything in commercial buildings in the US is fake, or just a decorative style. There is rarely any relationship between form and function. Buildings are rarely made from locally available materials or even designed to work with the local climate. I once worked in a government office that had a tower at each corner and a grassy open courtyard in the center,and no windows looking onto the street. I was told that to save money on design when constructing it, they had used the blueprint for a prison that had already been paid for.

Look at this picture: what is wrong?

Well, the jalousie shutters cannot be closed, so they are completely useless in a storm. In fact they would just be a hazard in a storm. And what on earth are the use of the lamps above the shutters?

Whereas these shutters do work and are working:

At one time I wanted to install proper shutters for my Florida home that could be used in a hurricane and they did not even sell them in Home Depot or Lowes, only fake ones that would not open or close. People in Florida are expected to buy sheets of cheap plywood and then nail or screw them over windows, and then take them down again after the storm, and presumably store them.

Having said that, I guess it is better to make a token effort to achieve some kind of decorative look that just have a plain commercial building with no attempt to make it look interesting, elegant, amusing, intriguing, or enticing.

Women as a group love SUVs for two reasons: one, the SUV raises the woman’s sight line so that she can see down the road better, giving her better situational awareness than she would have in a typical sedan

That’s exactly what my wife says. Between our new snazzy sedan and old small SUV, she chose to continue to drive the SUV. Also, she feels much safer with AWD during the winter.

The south side except for the Hyde park university area is a crime ridden black ghetto. The university of Chicago police force is supposedly the largest police force in the state

You are right the area is full of glorious 1900 big and small homes and apartments with actual front halls, real living rooms and real kitchens instead of the modern shoe box open space apartment.

But it will take decades to rid the area of the Black Plague. If it ever happens

Hmm. Lots of blowback on this one Intelligent Dasein. And not from trolls like Tiny Dick, either.

I suspect that is because the intention (perhaps) and the implementation is unobjectionable (based on the pictures), but the stinking sepsis oozing from the disgusting attitude of the author of the web content on the cited site excites the disgust of even the very-long-dead, not to mention our co-blog-writers.

Thus, when you walked inside the mall, the first thing you saw was a horse’s ass

Take away the horse, and leave the ass, and what you have is another Democrat statue.

In the future we will all have to kneel in from of that rump. Unless we win.

In my experience, Mexicans in Chicago are happy to cash in on gentrification. The term gentrification is just another anti white meme implying that reinvestment in urban areas is evil.

In fact, reinvestment has lots of favorable knock on effects for the population. It provides lots of service jobs, there are still non gentrified areas close by that are safer and get better city services.

In Chicago, the Obama Library was going to be the end of a multi decade long wait to cash in. The problem is that there is never enough. The explicit goal is massive investment in a neighborhood without any disruption to current residents — other than the sudden availability of high paying jobs.

The Jackson Park location was the lower risk choice. The other candidate was to put it in to the West of Hyde Park in Washington Park.

Additionally, a concern for the South Side as a whole that would be present regardless of whether Jackson Park or Washington Park had been chosen is that public works in inner cities often unintentionally drive up rents and result in gentrification — driving longtime residents of the area out. Kamin points out that controlling gentrification will have to be a high priority in the development of the new presidential library and museum in order to ensure President Obama’s goals in giving back to the South Side residents who live in the area now.

With Jackson Park, a worst case scenario is that they build a huge underground parking garage and it becomes just like the Museum of Science and Industry — unconnected with the neighborhoods. Most likely there will be some development in Woodlawn, but not much. Washington Park is a bridge too far. It’s further from the lake and closer to Englewood.

http://www.trbimg.com/img-4fc05cf5/turbine/chi-two-people-killed-in-woodlawn-neighborhood-001/600

But the University of Chicago has been trying to reinvest in Woodlawn since the 1960’s with only limited success. They have expanded about one block per decade into the neighborhood at enormous cost.

http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1377.html

Black cities without gentrification are like East St Louis or Gary, Indiana. They become ghost towns.

Looks like every apartment building built since 1946 on. Everyone sneers at the McMansions. But from the outside their plastic colonial/Georgian, Tudor, chalet, Italian, Mexican facades are a vast improvement over those mid century houses that look like tool sheds.

Are there any trained carpenters or cabinet makers in Florida? I’m sure they could make real storm shutters.

The Bradburn window panes are a plastic grid snapped on a single window sized pane of glass. I can see it even on a computer.

I have an older Prius. I once made a 420 mile drive on about 8 gallons of gas. Priuses seem to use less gas the faster you drive. Of course I was going 90 to 100 much of the way.

Europe calculates fuel economy differently, with the lower number being better.

The problem with your examples is not that form doesn’t follow function. They are obviously and annoyingly functionless without being pretty. That is, they fail as decoration. Touches which graduate to decorative convention without being cliches–which happens all the time–passeth notice. People accept them, even at the highest levels of culture, without worrying about their function.

Unless you are a Mad Modernist. But they abandon their…principles?…regarding every piece rigorously justifying itself only on the basis of Honest Material and Apparent Purpose, and go in for nonsensical decoration along the lines of “expressed structure,” for instance. Or they go post-modern and throw everything out in favor of annoying me personally. (At least I assume that is the purpose.)

Our problem is that our architects and decorators have bad taste or no taste. Your examples are kitschy. The solution is for them to employ conventional elements that have evolved naturally in the culture. But we have no culture anymore to draw upon.

Really. I’ve been under the impression that especially the parish grade schools in all cities are full of Catholic and non Catholic kids whose parents want to keep them out of the public schools.

a Ford 450 comes standard with a 6.7 l diesel People buy that when the need a lot of power/torque to go up hills with a lot of heavy stuff or a boat, camper etc. Our friend’s daughter has an F-350 to pull her horse trailer. They are not “fun” vehicles like jeeps. They are work trucks. They are still shiny when new, but that doesn’t mean people just drive them for looks.

I read about it. The black girls were in tears about the banana peel.

Every city I’ve ever lived in or visited seems to have a black run bus subway system.

But those systems run very well. What’s so different about DC blacks?

Colonization only works if people can multiply. When a bunch of SWPL move into a downtown area close to their daytime cubicle, it probably drives fertility down into the basement. Yes they drink artisan craft beer and wear hip clothes but if they don’t know how to change a diaper it is a demographic sink.

Yeah, I’m rather surprised by all the disagreement, myself.

What I’d like to say in response is, if you think this village is a nice, cozy, comfortable place to live in, you try actually being there. Don’t just look at the pictures; experience it from the ground.

It’s a wreck. This neighborhood is impossible to either walk or drive through. The streets are ridiculously narrow, with those serving the townhouses at the northern perimeter (they call them mews) being effectively single lanes, and those in the interior meeting at frustratingly off-kilter, 4-way intersections. Many of the houses have no street access whatsoever and are only accessible via back alleys. For a so-called walkable neighborhood, there is no consistency for the pedestrian. The sidewalk varies from being nonexistent, to a grassy reservation, to a bike path, to (as Stan mentioned) a slab of concrete, punctuated by caged trees and benches, sandwiched in between the building facade and the fake cobblestone thoroughfare. The central park is surrounded by a maddening, rectilinear roundabout, the principal effect of which is to make sure that none of the other streets are through-streets. It is a real challenge simply getting from one side of this place to the other.

I’ve never been in a neighborhood that induced such a palpable sense of panic and a desire to get the hell out of there. Even the housing projects and the gritty tenements of the old town have more human warmth than this. They are at least comprehensible in their poverty, and even their brutal Soviet monolithosity contains a recognizable element of care for their working class habitues. By contrast, Bradburn looks like mental ward turned inside out. These structures are going to age horribly and will have to be completely repurposed as the pattern of living they impose becomes unsustainable.

Those little VW bugs didn’t have heaters as I remember. They had a great ad for the VW dealer repairs though. It was a German mechanics school, all the guys in clean White uniforms

The wording was VW mechanics learn to fix cars before they work on yours. Other mechanics learn on your car.

Okay, thank you.

The humidity though.

DC Metro is relatively new, with most of the facilities opened in the 70’s and 80’s. The most difficult maintenance are the large numbers and size of the escalators. These were maintained by contract until 1992, when metro took over the function to save money and create jobs. Escalators have been a problem ever since.

There is really no excuse for their seeming inability to maintain track. It is relatively straightforward and has been done successfully for over 100 years. I suspect that it needed very little work for the first decade or so, and the employees had little to do during that period. And never developed the capacity to maintain track in an orderly, systematic manner. Cross ties generally last 20 years and track 40 years plus. US railroads are 100 years old and have needed regular maintenance cycles for generations of employees.

It is clearly a management problem. Some combination of public employee unions, government management, and affirmative action.

Freight railroads maintain thousands of miles of track and run ‘unit’ trains of 100+ cars with 100 tons of cargo. Metro cars are considerably lighter.

A Prius seems to be pretty good in a flood:

mid-level whites will do almost anything to avoid being burnt at the stake.

I’ve turned down good-paying job offers and promotions to avoid having to supervise and work with surly blacks. That’s probably cost me over $500K in lost wages and has stalled my career, but at least I wasn’t tossed out on the street and rendered un-employable for some false accusation and can now ride off into a comfortable retirement any time I want.

Good pics and comments; thanks for sharing. You’re correct on the unavailability of reasonably-priced working shutters. I recently got three in-person quotes for Bahama style shutters for my windows. I want to block the excruciating FL sun and be able to close the shutter in the event of a hurricane. The prices were about $1000 per shutter installed. I ended up buying a kit on-line for aluminum-slotted awnings and installed them myself. They work great at blocking the sun and heat, but will be no help, and will probably be destroyed, in the event of a storm.

Great pics and comments; thanks for sharing. I think other similar FL fabricated open-air shopping centers suffer the same problems – Coco Walk in Coconut Grove, Baywalk near downtown Ft. Lauderdale, Channelside in Tampa, and Bayside Marketplace near downtown Miami, etc., etc. I haven’t been to any of these “attractions” in almost twenty years so I don’t know the current status, but I seem to remember the politicians and press forever discussing how to attract the yuppies and families with discretionary spending. Part of the problem is the excruciating heat and humidity and sudden thunderstorms. Oh, and unruly NAMs.

The humidity though.

I’ll take humidity over stupidity any day of the week.

(I don’t really know what that meant either – it just sounded cool.)

OK, so there’s more to it. Thanks. What do you mean by the “better” number, more accurate?

In the US calculations of fuel economy were changed, a coupla decades back or so, to match reality better. If you had an old booklet of tables, as I did, or just some old numbers printed out as a souvenir from the early ’80’s or ’70’s (nobody cared about mileage before 1973), you would see numbers that were pretty unrealistic and should not be compared to today’s ones.

Yeah, the women will go along with the crowd. None of them would want to stand out, in that way, by being the only one driving one of those old, shudder, STATION WAGONS.

In the meantime, I would feel cool as hell driving an old AMC Gremlin, with a rigged-up coolant fan, full-time-on check-engine light (if it had one at all, then covered up by a strip of electrical tape for night-time visibility), red-duct-taped tail-light, and hatch-back compartment used as a recycling bin. Others might not think it is cool, but that’s the thing – I don’t give a shit – it IS cool, whether they know it or not.

made a good idea seem less respectable.

Organized education is starting to look like an emperor with no clothes, what with social media/internet; student loans for little value; colleges losing their cachet as they become completely politicized.

What’s so different about DC blacks?

I would guess it is management/supervision.

Good managers are hard to find in any cohort. Toss in too much AA, and you get Flint, MI.