Our new apartments. (If we're lucky)
Posted on 06/06/2009 3:58:27 AM PDT by Kaslin
You may not have noticed, but Hollywood has: you’re miserable.
No, really. According to Census Bureau numbers, roughly 75 percent of Americans live in suburbs. And, according to one of last year’s Golden Globe nominees for best picture, that’s eating away at us.
“Our whole existence here [in the ’burbs] is based on this great premise that we’re special. That we’re superior to the whole thing,” declares the female lead in the movie Revolutionary Road. “But we’re not. We’re just like everyone else. We bought into the same, ridiculous delusion.”
That “delusion,” as depicted in the film, is that a couple can be happily married, own a home with some land and raise children together in the suburbs. Indeed, it’s difficult to conceive of such a crazy notion.
But never fear, suburbanites. The government will ride to your rescue (if it doesn’t get stuck in heavy traffic on the way). The Department of Transportation and the Department of Housing and Urban Development have teamed up on a new interagency partnership to create what they call “affordable, sustainable communities.” Hint: the communities won’t look like your current cul-de-sac.
In a news release, DOT and HUD announced they intend “to give American families:
• More choices for affordable housing near employment opportunities;
• More transportation options, to lower transportation costs, shorten travel times, and improve the environment;
• The ability to combine several errands into one trip through better coordination of transportation and land uses;
• Safe, livable, healthy communities.”
Well. We’d all like to think Washington has bigger problems to worry about than whether we make one trip or two to pick up, say, groceries and prescription medicine.
But, just for the sake of argument, consider the fact that it’s much easier to “combine errands” in suburbia than it is in Manhattan. With one trip to the Super Target, one can pick up everything from food to clothing to entertainment. That would require at least three separate stops in a city, imposing a much higher cost in both time and money.
Still, if Washington gets its way, we’ll have more people packed into smaller spaces.
How can we be so sure that’s going to be federal policy? In April Energy Secretary Steven Chu explained to The Washington Post, “You read stories in Europe where there are in small apartments zero-net energy consumption apartments [sic]. There is -- you know, body heat keeps a lot of the apartment warm. You can’t do this in a big apartment with a few people.” No, you can’t.
Nor can you do it with a big house in the suburbs. Of course, that’s one reason people move out of the crowded apartment and into the home -- they’re not interested in sharing body heat with dozens of others. They want space and privacy, and the suburbs provide it.
Another reason people want their own home is that, according to the Energy Department’s own 2008 Buildings Energy Data Book, the single family home is actually more energy efficient for its size. That survey reports that the only reason apartments seem more efficient is because they’re so much smaller, a trade-off that Americans, by moving to the suburbs in the millions, have shown we’re not prepared to make.
Housing policy expert Ronald Utt of The Heritage Foundation took a closer look at the Data Book and made a surprising discovery. “The Energy Department forgot to collect and incorporate information on the energy required to light the common areas, including exterior and parking areas, lobbies, stairwells, laundry rooms, and hallways” of apartment buildings, Utt writes.
He adds it “also forgot to collect data on the energy used to heat and cool these common areas and the energy used to operate the elevators, washers and dryers, and swimming pools.” Include that information and apartment living becomes far less efficient, combined body heat or not.
Every now and then Hollywood looks out across the fruited plain and scoffs.
In 1999 it was American Beauty, which collected five Oscars for depicting a world in which the Marine officer was the bad guy and the drug dealer was the good guy. One can only wonder if the producers of the film doubted themselves after Sept. 11, when real American military heroes went to Afghanistan to destroy the Taliban, which had been supported in large part by drug money.
In general, a policy that enjoys 75 percent support is considered “popular.” Well, three quarters of Americans have chosen to live in the suburbs. They’ve invested their time and their money into getting out of “the city.”
Filmmakers scoff at us at their own peril -- suburbanites are, after all, “customers.” As for Washington, bureaucrats there are free to huddle together in their offices. But they should allow Americans to keep our split-level ranches, no matter how unhappy we supposedly are.
Steve, these were called "flats" in the old USSR; too bad you weren't there.
I thought they call apartments flats in Great Britain
Government is the bane of our civilization.
Our new apartments. (If we're lucky)
In a news release, the government announced they intend “to give American livestock:
• More barns near dairies, egg distributors, and feedlots;
• More efficient hybrid stock trucks to lower transportation costs, and we will include animal psychologists prevent stress that can cause undesirable weight loss;
• Safe, livable, healthy stockyards.”
Then we’ll drive ya’ll into the chute and through the meat packing plants’ doors for “processing,” after which we will give you a nice chipotle dry rub ...
Dr. Zhivago returning to his formerly elegant home, now ruined and overrun with squatter riff-raff, he and his wife confined as tenants to a single room, comes to mind.
Screw the government.
The message here (again) is that we must submit to the collective. Individualism, private property, self interest are bad. Huddling like cattle in a pen, where government can better monitor, rule, control the people is good and desirable.
We can’t have people cluttering up and misusing the common land outside of the urban areas. It should be kept pristine for nature’s sake and maybe some for farming. (done organically of course...)
Lead by example scoffers. Give up your houses and live in 300 square foot per person apartments and show us all how enlightened you are.
Caves were cool insummer and relatively warm in winter compared to the outside.
And you could cram a lot of bodies together in one to maximize the living accommodations.
Isn’t it strange that very few people choose to live in caves anymore?
Though Yankee Stadium was a few blocks away.
I always wondered why they were called flats. Maybe because the ceilings are so low that the inhabitants have to lie down all the time?
Here they are - literally saying they want us to go back to primitive times. I used to joke about that.
Hollywood is sickening!
What Steve did not go on to say, and probably only thought at a sub-conscious level, was something like, “but of course, such places necessary are for all those little people...the ones who didn’t go to Harvard and Yale like my friends and I. We’re special, you see, and we’ll always be able to avoid whatever burdens we’re forced to impose upon the little people. It’s such a responsiblity — looking out for all those stupid, unfashionable little people — so it’s only fair and right that my friends and I should have certain...privileges.”
• More choices for affordable housing near employment opportunities;
• More transportation options, to lower transportation costs, shorten travel times, and improve the environment;
• The ability to combine several errands into one trip through better coordination of transportation and land uses;
• Safe, livable, healthy communities.”
This could be accomplished by putting huge trailer parks around Super Wal-Marts. LOL!
I first posted this years ago. Alas it is only more drearily true today:
THE POPULATION OF AMERICA HAS DOUBLED IN MY LIFETIME
If you have lost control of your local school system and you believe it is because liberalism is triumphing over conservatism, you are right but you have identified the symptom and not the cause: The population of America has doubled in my lifetime.
If you have lost control over your own real property, if your rights to manage, improve, and develop your property have passed over to bureaucrats, if you can no longer choose whom to rent to or whom to sell to, if you have lost confidence that your deed in fee simple absolute will protect you against a venal government or one wholly given over to interest groups, and for all of this you blame liberalism, you have identified the symptom but not the cause: The population of America has doubled in my lifetime.
If you are a rancher who has lost his rights to graze his cattle upon lands licensed to his family for generations, if you're a fox hunter who has been deprived of his sport, if you must wait three hours for a tee time, if you have given up taking the family to the Jersey shore because the travel time now exceeds three hours, if, after hours of travail, you finally arrive at the Jersey shore with your family and you find your neighbors to close, too numerous, polyglot, and uncongenial, know this;The population of America has doubled in my lifetime.
If you look at Broward and Palm Beach counties in Florida as-miracle of the jet age-suburbs of New York City, and you watch helplessly as the politics of these counties veer ever farther left potentially dragging all Florida and, with Florida, the soul of the Republican Party in America, be advised: The population of America has doubled in my lifetime.
If, as a parent or grandparent, you find yourself mightily boring your children or grandchildren with descriptions of how Christmas used to be, descriptions of a time gone by when shopkeepers were permitted to say, "Merry Christmas," when Christmas carols were really that, carols, when the public square was a place for the exuberant celebration of the birth of Christ, rather than a forum for the celebration of the pagan, then you instinctively know: The population of America has doubled in my lifetime.
As I anticipated, this vanity brought two kinds of reactions. The first was that I was some sort of Malthusian who did not understand the potential of technology. The second was that it was a bigoted statement. Undaunted, I posted this reply:
A few posts back one can read an article about a neighborhood uproar over the conversion of a horse ranch into a an upscale housing development. The author and the posters lament the loss of open green spaces. No one apart from me, your humble reactionary, sought to connect our feverish conversion of open spaces into more modern and admittedly upscale Levittowns with our quarter century policy of virtually open immigration.
How many tens of millions of immigrants, legal and illegal, have come to America in the last quarter century? How many millions of children have they brought into our society? Presumably there were all housed. The earlier generations, financially better established no doubt, do what Americans have always done as an immigrant wave occupies the cities, they move out to the burbs and seek higher quality housing, especially housing with cul-de-sacs.
The greater issue here is not cul-de-sacs, nor preservation of horse farms discussed on the earlier thread, but who gets to decide how we control our land-use. If you are a conservative you ought to consider that your freedom to use your land is you see fit, to build on a cul-de-sac or to maintain horses, or even dogs, is much less in a society with 300 million people than it was in a society of only 140 million people which was our population at the time of my birth. Your individual property rights must inevitably give way to the sheer weight of numbers.
If you are a conservative who values your property rights, you should be as aggressive in fighting immigration, both legal and illegal (although not limited legal immigration based on skills), as you all are in defense of a Second Amendment right to bear arms.
if you're still with me, here is another post along the same line:
Have you considered the water needs of the Los Angeles basin and Las Vegas? have you seen the New Jersey shore and Barnegat Bay which once used to be pristine wilderness? Have you tried to drive your car anywhere in Northern Virginia in under an hour? have you tried to get a camping place in Yellowstone?
Your statistics are of interest but I prefer the evidence of my own eyes.
There is a saying in the Rocky Mountains, "definition of a developer: someone who wants to build his cabin in the mountains; definition of a conservationist: someone who builds his cabin last year."
When the population of America doubled in my lifetime from 140 million to 300 million or more, the pressure on the land more than doubles and regulations are not only inevitable but indispensable and desirable. We do not have clean rivers and water in America except by regulation. Industrial polluters did not have an epiphany and join hands with everyone to sing kumbaya. It is not only the amount of people that stresses the environment but the way we live. We travel more and we use more water. The land we want is in the rich and productive valleys, and on desirable beaches and around harbors where commerce can flourish. It is now gotten to the point where we are eating much less desirable land in the deserts heedless of future generations' needs for water.
My point is that whingeing about overreaching bureaucrats and mindless regulations is a losing battle in our population environment simply because people will accept the evidence of their own eyes.
When they build dormitories mext to the Capitol building and put ALL the government “elite” in 300 square-foot apartments, I might believe they are serious.
Their offices are probably bigger and better equiped to live in than what they want to foist onto the general public.
I once worked in an awesomely dysfunctional company. A work buddy told me; “The directors build their castles in the sky, then they move into them.” Incidentally, it was an Israeli company and the directors were all what they called Social Democrats. We’d call them communists. This is what happens when a liberal is hired to lead. They start building castles in the sky. In the posted case above, the government expects to build castles (planned communities) and all of us are expected to move into them. I wouldn’t live in a densely packed community, even in a small city. It would be too dangerous. Down town Tampa, for example, is virtually abandoned after dark to roving gangs of young black men.
When that company I mentioned lost its $80,000,000/year contract (due to incompetence) and collapsed, the directors who caused it got huge separation packages. The rest of us got the shaft. Those federal planners in the post above will continue to live in suburbs or guarded apartment complexes in DC where they go float through the dangerous areas in an air-conditioned limo with an armed driver to work in palatial offices; also guarded. The grand plans are only for the little people in flyover country.
Liberals are becoming very easy to read.
They’re called “flats” because each individual unit, even in a multi-story building, is on a single level.
“We must submit to the collective.” You hit it right on the nail. I went to a lecture on “New Urbanism” and the first thing mentioned was importance of community and how we must submerge or desire for individualism over the need to support the common good.
New Urbanism is a concept where we can all celebrate our community according to the lecturer. My city is coming up with some dumb idea on sustainablity. The ironic thing about New Urbanism is that all the areas these people touch look alike.
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