[lbo-talk] Oh dear, LBO patronises Europe again (was Let's Build)

joanna 123hop at comcast.net
Wed Oct 18 09:35:53 PDT 2006



>
>
>For example, I don't like living in a house. Even when I had a wife
>and kid and house, I didn't like it. I preferred our smaller
>apartment. It was easier to maintain, it was closer to both my job and
>my wife's and my kid's school, since it was about three blocks away
>from city hall, a block down from Berkeley High, and around the corner
>from the local elementary school. Our house on the other hand was just
>beyond walking distance from anything, so we had to drive to our jobs,
>drop the kid off at school, and do our shopping by car.
>
There is something about the image of a house that is psychologically satisfying. I also do not like living in a house and have lost out on the real estate boom by not buying a house when they were affordable. But I feel safer in an apartment -- there's less at stake; there are my 21 neighbors who are always good for an egg, or a ride, or an emergency telephone call; and there's the free maintenance. But often, when I drive past houses and think symbolically rather than realistically, I feel nostalgic for recapturing a kind of wholeness and autonomy that the house has come to represent in this culture.

I also hate the way that house ownership has come to represent the totality of the American Dream: my house, my yard, my walkway, my garage, my furniture, my kids, my life. It seems to be a sentence rather than a dream.


>There is something very civilized, very sociable, and very political
>about living, working, and being near just about everything. I am not
>sure it could be planned that way, since the various places I've seen
>that were planned that way, were awful. It is as if the planners had
>lost touch with the real conditions under which this kind of living
>are made civil. It is highly urbanized, yet it isn't really a city in
>the LA, NYC, or Chicago meaning of the word. On the other hand really
>large cities almost always have a system of neighborhoods that some
>how evolve to produce very similar results. San Francisco is full of
>such places, and main downtown or near downtown Oakland is too. As a
>kid in LA we moved around the general metro downtown area and always
>found similar neighborhoods.
>
Yes. It's interesting that it can't be planned that way. It would be fascinating to study how these neighborhoods evolve.


>What made the waves of suburbanization so awful was there was no
>reason to live there---except gaining the single family home as an
>ideal---while escaping the conflict, noise, pollution, races, mixes of
>class and ethnicity.
>
Every once in a while my sister and I drive to a neighboring suburb to go to the mall. There, I think, is partly where the answer to the suburban chemistry lies.When there is no there, there, so much more the reason to go shopping. The mall brings everyone together in one spot and gives them something to do.


>In the US the later waves of suburbanization
>amounted to industry and business flight to cut the fixed costs of
>building, taxes, utilities, unions, urban building codes, and so
>forth. Buying an orchard near a freeway was cheaper than urban
>re-development for office complexes and production
>facilities.
>
The acreage of farmland that have been covered in concrete over the last twenty years is staggering. Actually, according the an architect friend, the quality of the housing going up is so atrocious, that it might just all crumble away in the next twenty years.


>What bothers me are these corridors like the kind that have developed
>between the Bay Area and Yosemite for example, especially between here
>and the central San Joauqin Valley. There is a freeway system that
>connects here and there and over the last twenty years small
>agricultural towns (the Tracy, Manteca, Escalon corridor) which were
>doing just fine as agricultural communities, have experienced a
>tremendous transformation.
>
My truck-driving sister in law bought a house in Tracy. She would commute 90 minutes each way to work each day, and then she would work an eight or ten hour shift. Except on weekends, she would drive home to sleep, wake up and go back to work. After five years of this, she sold the house in Tracy, pocketed some 80,000 and moved to Oregon. Those who buy at the top of the market may not be so lucky.

Joanna



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