TED 2004, Kunstler Dissects Suburbia
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I present Markham, a very typical suburb (exurbs are even worse) of Toronto: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/14/Mar...
As with other things, I'd take the UNIX philosophy here - small, powerful, well-designed tools that can be combined. I'd take a small apartment in the downtown and a small cottage in the middle of nowhere rather than one of the houses above.
Feel free - suburb folks aren't going to criticise your preferences.
However, many folks can't afford both of those things.
$400,000 for an apartment alone would be pretty cheap in New York City. http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2009/01/30/new-york-city-r...
From the first quarter, the average price of condos and co-ops fell 11.5%, hitting $1.37 million in the fourth quarter. The median price for condos and co-ops meanwhile, peaked in the second quarter at $920,000 before plunging 17.8% to $757,000 in the fourth quarter.
Yet another "I don't like suburbs and/or people who do like them therefore suburbs are evil and/or said people are cretins." screed.
If a puritan is someone who is mad because someone, somewhere is having fun, what is the word for such people?
Note that he's pining for a past that (1) didn't really exist and (2) to the extent that it existed, people (mostly) abandoned it for suburbia.
There are still some instances and he's welcome to live in one. He's even welcome to build more, with his money. (If he's right, folks will flock to them. If he's wrong, well, shouldn't he take the hit?) The folks in suburbia won't mind.
And that's what makes them better than he is. They don't get pushed out of shape when someone has different preferences.
Speaking of suburbs, or exurbs, have you seen the latest ones? This one is 51 miles northeast of San Jose: http://www.mountainhouse.net/town/technology.php
Mountain House is truly ready to be the town of tomorrow with its comprehensive technology plan. All homes and businesses will be wired with:
· A cutting-edge, expandable fiber-optic
broadband telecommunications infrastructure
· Virtually unlimited high-speed internet
access to online and electronic information
· Video conferencing capabilities in both
commercial and residential structures and the
ability to order goods and services online
· A state-of-the-art, community-wide intranet,
MyMountainHouse.com, that allows residents
special local connectivity, including the
ability to access children's schools or in-town
businesses without picking up the phoneThere was towns/cities, and rural land (with houses miles apart). Suburbia tried to be a hybrid, something between country living and city living, but failed at doing both miserably.
There are other social factors. At least, here in CA, there is a huge adversity against building more density, (the NIMBY effect). A vocal group of people are opposed to tall building/building anything close to their backyard, creating a lack of density, and artificially limiting the free market and real town-higher-density formation, at a reasonable price.
I'm referring to the delusions that he has about the "grand doings" of folks in town squares. (I do like the town squares that have an artillery piece set up by the local VFW chapter but I don't think that that's what he has in mind.)
> Suburbia tried to be a hybrid, something between country living and city living, but failed at doing both miserably.
Failed according to whom? Not the folks who pick suburbia over towns/cities and rural, which are still available for those who want to live in them.
> At least, here in CA, there is a huge adversity against building more density, (the NIMBY effect).
It's not NIMBY to point out that high density is often a disaster.
Besides - CA is a big and mostly empty state. There are plenty of places where you can build high density that is no where near someone's back yard.
And, it's fair to point out that CA also has govt restrictions that significantly reduce rural living.
Meanwhile, dense city neighborhoods that have suburban levels of violence tend to have much higher real estate prices than the suburbs. This indicates that people really do prefer cities, but it's the violence that keeps them out.
No, it's not a typo, it's an error. DC is not a typical American city and it takes a considerable amount of ignorance (or ?) to claim that it is.
The comparison with the Victorian era is somewhat odd. DC's crime rate in the 90s was considerably higher than it is now or than it was in the Victorian era. DC was proportionally less populated during the Victorian era than it was in the 90s. (It may have become somewhat smaller since the 90s.)
Yes, US cities became more violent as they grew relative to suburbs and small towns. The big increases in violence happened in the 60s, when the cities were still growing. The shrinkage, where it has occurred, is very recent, since the mid 90s (and violence started dropping soon after).
That said, violence in American cities that have significant violence is highly localized in areas populated by people who, for the most part, can't afford to move out. (That's not to say that folks don't move because of a fear of violence.)
Note that folks who leave cities don't have to move to suburbs. They can move to small towns. They don't. (Suburb isn't a "size", it's a kind of community design. Big cities used to be surrounded by little cities. Those cities were turned into suburbs by folks who prefered that.)
In fact, small towns lost population to suburbs and cities.
FWIW, DC's peak murder rate was less than 1/4th of the murder rate of East Palo Alto during the same time. EPA is a suburb which borders Palo Alto (CA) and Menlo Park. Those two suburbs have a murder between them every 5-7 years. (EPA's murder rate has dropped a lot since its peak and may be under DC's now.)
I think the fact that someone living 100 years ago would view our times as unspeakably violent is an interesting fact (and that is even including a drop in crime in most places since the 70s).
The numbers are such that changes in tiny subpopulations have a big effect on the averages. US cities are not "unspeakably violent" - certain blocks or buildings are.
FWIW, the murder drop didn't start until the mid 90s.
City size has nothing to do with crime rates. City size peaked in the 1950's, a time with much lower crime rates. Philadelphia has a slightly smaller population now than in 1910. Yet the homicide rate in 1911 was 4.4 per 100,000. In 2006 it was 27.7. Likewise the homicide rate in Baltimore went from 5.8 to 43.3.
Yes, homicide rates have come down a bit off their 1990 high. But they are still nowhere near 1900 levels. Also, homicide rates understate the violence problem. The rate is partly kept down by people knowing to stay out of the city.
Finally, part of the awfulness of suburban design comes from dealing with the violence problem. Most suburbs have strong zoning laws requiring large lots and no multi-family homes. This is done explicitly to keep out the underclass.
If cities existed that combined strong law enforcement, school choice, and city-like urban design, I expect they would be extraordinarily popular. Unfortunately, such cities are nearly impossible to create in today's political climate.
And, as long as we're making comparisons, tn some cities, the 1960/70s murder rates weren't unprecedented either - it was a return to the Prohibition era murder rates.
FWIW, it's generally believed that accurate crime stats weren't collected much before 1850 and it took a while before they became uniformly reliable. (They weren't in much of the US until the early part of the 20th century.)
In 1914, London had 16 murders from a population of 7.1 million. That's a homicide rate of .22 per 100,000. By comparison, Detroit had a murder rate of 46 in 2007. That's 209x the rate of Edwardian England. If New York reduced its homicide rate to that of Edwardian London, it would save the number of lives lost in September 11th every four years.
Historical murder rates for all of England from 1900 are here: http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-111....
As for murder rates going further back, Gregory Clark has a chart of this in his book Farewell to Alms. See page 127: http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0691141282/ref=sib_dp_srch_p...!
The homicide rates seem to be around 20 per 100,000 for 1300, then about 5 per 100,000 for 1600, and then under 1 per 100,000 after 1800.
In other words, American cities have murder rates unseen since medieval times.
There was a great story in Discovery channel, on how immigrants from Germany, that moved in the USA mid-west, suffered heavily from depression. People were used living in towns and villages, close to family, friends, and support. Now, a lot of these german families, bought a lot of land in the middle of rural midwest, where everything was miles (and hours) of walk to the next house or town. People felt isolated, and women suffered the most.
In europe, houses are usually in hills, grouped together, with a town/village center, and the farmed land is outside the town.
And there are/were no farmers? U.S. urban population share, 1800-2000: http://www.demographia.com/db-usrur1800.htm
1800 6.1%
1850 15.3%
1900 39.7%
1950 59.0%
2000 79.0%
Early 20th century agriculture was labor intensive, and it took place on a large number of small, diversified farms in rural areas where more than half of the U.S. population lived. These farms employed close to half of the U.S. workforce
N.B. I say this only because I myself misspelled it for years (right up until around 2000): "millennia" has double-ell, double-en. Since making this discovery, I've found that "millenni(um|a)" is misspelled ~20% of the time---and the present occurrence makes two just today!
It seems to me that life in the city, in many ways, are much closer to the lifestyle of small, tight communities than suburban life: short distance between various functions, constant contact with other people of various ages etc.
This might sound superficial but I don't think I need much evidence that certain environments feel better than others. I think its obvious to anyone who spends time in different places that some feel better than others. Subjective issues like taste and quality of experience may not be quantifiable, but are still real and relevant to what many here try to do: build well designed user-facing software.
He implies that Main Street shops are important, and states that the world is running out of cheap oil. Do you believe these things?
To your question, 3 things:
1. Even if you completely disagree with the message, Kunstler's delivery alone is worth the 20 minutes.
2. His urban planning arguments go a bit further than "Main Street shops are important". In my view the suburbs are simply a bad design choice - he explains how they came to be, what are their inherent problems, and why this touches many issues of our society & life quality, well beyond energy consumption.
3. As for the world running out of cheap oil - I'm no expert, but as I understand oil is found in nature rather than produced, so by definition its total amount decreases when use it. Even if we have enough oil to last thousands of years at affordable prices, the political and environmental implications of using it still stand.
If that's the standard, let's get Robin Williams, or Brando, reading the phone book, the Boston phone book if class is relevant.
> In my view the suburbs are simply a bad design choice - he explains how they came to be, what are their inherent problems, and why this touches many issues of our society & life quality, well beyond energy consumption.
He doesn't actually explain so much as try to justify his combination of disdain, digust, and pity for folks who live in them, folks who don't have the good sense to flee in horror.
Ultimately it's vote-based site, so it has as much chance as anything. Standard-wise, in a week where the top stories were about Arrington getting spat in the face, I honestly don't think this submission is lowering the average. But, again, it's a matter of taste.
I doubt that you posted thinking thinking "great delivery". I suspect that you posted thinking "great message".
Does Kunstler's delivery not seem like bullying to you? Let's consider some of the things he says:
"We're normal we're normal we're normal we're normal we're normal, please respect us we're normal we're normal we're normal." But we know what's going on in these houses, you know. We know that little Skippy is loading his Uzi down here, getting ready for homeroom, we know that Heather, his sister Heather, 14 years old, is turning tricks up here to support her drug habit
Would you say that to a parent of teenagers who told you that he intentionally chose to raise his children in a suburb because he believed, and still believes, it is good for children to grow up in suburbs? Would you stand up and say that at a townhall meeting of middle-class suburban homeowners and parents?