You guys need to seriously consider decaf.
Suburban sprawl sucks. It was fine in 1950, when there were barely a hundred million of us and all those nice new roads were being built, but I fail to see how bulldozing even more of the landscape to build yet another concrete wasteland studded with flimsy tract housing (built at grade on guaranteed-to-crack concrete pads by illegal immigrants) is somehow more "American" than living next door to neighbors within walking distance of both the church and the liquor store. News Flash: the "America" of suburbs and superhighways was a historical anomaly, a special situation that existed for a very brief time during the Cold War. As a result, our cities were abandoned to the gangs, and are now ringed by fringes of decaying tract-home ghettos where the white folks lived back in the '60s and '70s. And the farther out the white folks move, the bigger these fringe ghettos become...
Suburbia was invented as a way for the upper middle class in turn-of-the-century urban America to escape those funny-speaking, garlic-eating types that had moved in. This was an innovation; it wasn't how most Americans ever lived, or ever would have wanted to live. The traditional American way of life was for competing ethnicities to live in neighborhoods within a single city until internmarriage and class-climbing, "Abie's Irish Rose" style, erased the boundaries between them. THAT is the American Way. As a traditionalist and an American, I support the traditional American way of life -- which means living in cities, getting along with the weirdos next door, and traveling by foot and by train instead of by car. What it doesn't mean is abandoning ship for the glassy-eyed "security" of Foxxe Bynde at Willowe Creeke (a Gated Community) fifty miles outside of town.
I repeat: suburbanization is contrary to the American tradition. There never was a Suburban Mouse in American folklore -- there was just City Mouse and Country Mouse. Up until the freeway era, City Mice -- people who wanted the conveniences of living in a city -- by God lived in a city, a real city, not some glorified freeway exit with a fancy name. Those who desired a rural lifestyle -- the Country Mice -- gave up the conveniences of city life and moved to the real country, out beyond the pizza shops and all-night grocery stores -- that shadowy land where the food comes from. The idea of driving fifty miles in traffic each way to get from home to work and back would have struck them as nuts.
I'm all for freedom, but let's be real: anyone who thinks that freedom equals traffic jams, tract housing, and treating what little open space we have left as if it were an unlimited resource needs a CAT scan, stat. A person who cannot live without owning a car is a slave -- to the machine.
Hey punk. I live in an old, inner ring community of small (too small) houses. What is being discussed here is being applied to long standing communities. They are not simply trying to prevent sprawl. They are trying to tear down entire, well functioning, communities and cram individual land owners into beehives. Move to Europe if you think we are wrong.
So, where do you live, and where do you work?