You folks are easy to spot.
If the office moved to Montana ... good question. I’m fairly close to retirement. I suppose I’d have to move some decisions ahead a few years.
And no, I’m neither an architect nor a planner. I grew up in small town southern Indiana and have lived for the last 35 years in the city. Moved onto Capitol Hill, east of Lincoln Park, well before the rebound. People thought I was crazy to buy here ... grain of salt in the pepper shaker, so to speak. Great neighbors over the years, but you needed situational awareness when out at night. I don’t take any guff from libs who try to run a racial riff. I’ve paid some dues. Gentrification has been very good to me. And my politics are somewhere to the right of Ghenghis Khan.
Along the way I’ve developed some biases. One of those is against exclusionary zoning in the suburbs. It’s classic “I’ve got mine, pull up the drawbridge” thinking, and it tends to be coupled with the idea that the city should be the dumping ground for all the problem cases. Another peeve is with people who choose to live 20 miles from their jobs and then want to punch commuter sewers through other people’s front yards to shave a few minutes off their drive time. If you want to live out in Timbuktoo, be my guest, but don’t complain to me about your two hour commute, and don’t try to add lanes at the expense of destroying the neighborhoods of people who made better choices.
Gentrification is now displacing a significant number of lower income working folks. These are mostly solid citizens who are being priced out of their old neighborhoods. You shouldn’t be phobic if some of them move out your way. We are also bit by bit shutting down LBJ’s follies, i.e. the big housing projects. This is a rougher clientele, but they have to go somewhere. I’m open to your suggestions. Just don’t run to a suburban enclave that is zoned up tighter than a drum, turn your back, and say the poor are someone else’s problem. If that’s your answer, I’m in favor of putting a dozen or so into illegal rentals on your cul de sac, so that you can begin to address the issue a little more constructively.
Finally, I have the blessing of living in a walkable, bikeable neighborhood, and it’s great. My humble point on this and many other threads over the years is simply that a little intelligent planning could make such neighborhoods much more common than they are. I am amazed at the visceral reaction some people have against the very mention of sidewalks and bike lanes. Bad planning forces people into cars. Good planning gives them options. It is nice to be able to live without a car in a decent neighborhood with jobs, basic shopping, church, school, etc. within walking distance. This should not be considered an exotic, utopian objective. It’s the way urban neighborhoods ought to work routinely.