Free Republic

Cal Professor John Ogbu thinks he knows why rich black kids are failing in school. Nobody wants to hear it. The black parents wanted an explanation. Doctors, lawyers, judges, and insurance brokers, many had come to the upscale Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights specifically because of its stellar school district. They expected their children to succeed academically, but most were performing poorly. African-American students were lagging far behind their white classmates in every measure of academic success: grade-point average, standardized test scores, and enrollment in advanced-placement courses. On average, black students earned a 1.9 GPA while their white counterparts held...

The downturn accomplished what a generation of designers and planners could not: it has turned back the tide of suburban sprawl. In the wake of the foreclosure crisis many new subdivisions are left half built and more established suburbs face abandonment. Cul-de-sac neighborhoods once filled with the sound of backyard barbecues and playing children are falling silent. Communities like Elk Grove, Calif., and Windy Ridge, N.C., are slowly turning into ghost towns with overgrown lawns, vacant strip malls and squatters camping in empty homes. In Cleveland alone, one of every 13 houses is now vacant, according to an article published...

The downturn has accomplished what a generation of designers and planners could not: it has turned back the tide of suburban sprawl. In the wake of the foreclosure crisis many new subdivisions are left half built and more established suburbs face abandonment. Cul-de-sac neighborhoods once filled with the sound of backyard barbecues and playing children are falling silent. Communities like Elk Grove, Calif., and Windy Ridge, N.C., are slowly turning into ghost towns with overgrown lawns, vacant strip malls and squatters camping in empty homes.

Rent car in suburbs, pay Chicago? 8% TAX | Enterprise sues city over attempt to force collection February 24, 2009 BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter How would you like to rent a car in Waukegan or St. Charles, only to be slapped with the 8 percent "transaction tax" that applies to Chicago car rentals? Brace yourself. With a burgeoning $50.5 million budget gap, Chicago is reaching into suburban pockets. And Enterprise Rent-a-Car has filed a lawsuit challenging the Daley administration's effort to collect the tax from drivers who rent cars in the suburbs. » Click to enlarge image Enterprise...

Poor Kate Winslet she’s had to appear in two films this year which portray her as living in a concentration camp. In one it was literal–in The Reader she was a concentration camp guard, although we don’t see her locking women and children into a burning church so as to “keep order”; we only see her after the war in prison, learning that reading is fun! (see my further thoughts about “The Worst Holocaust Movie Ever Made” [1] here. But in Revolutionary Road her husband Sam Mendes, the British director, portrays her as the prisoner of what Mendes clearly views...

The Suburbs -- Hollywood Image and Mission Reality Posted: Tuesday, January 06, 2009 at 4:34 am ET America is a nation transformed by demographics. Flash back just over a century and a majority of Americans live on farms and in rural settings. Today, a clear majority of Americans live in metropolitan settings. Cities are now surrounded by vast rings of settlements and clusters known as suburbs -- and Hollywood doesn't like it. Something significant is represented in Hollywood's depiction of the suburbs as soul-killing enclaves of those unwilling to brave the "authentic" culture of the city itself. A current example...

"Revolutionary Road," based on Richard Yates's 1961 novel of the same name, is the latest entry in a long stream of art that portrays the American suburbs as the physical correlative to spiritual and mental death.

Head Strong: Ignoring suburbs doomed the GOP To win Pa., it must appeal to moderates. By Michael Smerconish - Inquirer Inquirer Currents Columnist If retail politicking alone determined the election outcome in Pennsylvania, McCain-Palin would have won in a landslide. Speaking on MSNBC election night, Gov. Rendell joked that the GOP ticket had spent so much time in the state that he was thinking of assessing them with a state income tax.

So, zero disdains suburban America like the msm types so often and readily do? This shouldn't surprise anyone as he is a product of the urban mindset. The one thing that zero and his campaign are missing is that they can't win this election with just the urban vote. And with Mac, with all of his flaws, will bring out suburban voters like crazy. And, with SarahPower, we draw rural voters out like no one has since Ronaldus Magnus.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (Legal Newsline)-A Wall Street Journal opinion article that claimed California Attorney General Jerry Brown had waged "war on the suburbs" continues to reverberate around rural and suburban towns in California. Critics of Brown's efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and slow urban sprawl have another target, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who rekindled the debate when he signed pro-environmental bills earlier this month. Editors at the Sun-Herald in rural Colusa, Calif., which lies 90 minutes north of Sacramento, became the latest to rebuke the Republican governor for acting too much like the Democratic attorney general. "In his zeal to battle...

"As of now, polls suggest McCain, who lagged in the suburbs into the summer, has pushed back some of the Democratic momentum. He now enjoys, according to the latest Wall Street Journal poll, a 10-point edge among suburban voters, not far from what Bush garnered in those parts of the swing states. If McCain can combine this suburban group with his rural and small-town base, he could be in striking distance of staging an upset." Suburbs will decide the election By: Joel Kotkin and Mark Schill Excerpts from: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0908/14082.html "Suburbs may not have cooked up the mortgage crisis, but they...

Reinventing America I am not known as an optimist. I am more than willing to point out that the glass is half-empty. So my friends were not surprised when, during the general euphoria over the collapse of the former Soviet Union in the early 90's, I said, “We are looking into our own future, 10 or 15 years from now.” Of course, the statement seemed absurd. The West had “won” the Cold War, and America was the world's only super-power. International hegemony was in sight, and there were no credible opponents. The economy was booming, and the internet revolution was...

Former Calif. Gov. Jerry Brown is waging war on California suburbs because of global warming, says Joel Kotkin, a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. Brown is concerned about the alleged environmental damage caused by the suburbs. He wants to compel residents to move to city centers or to high-density developments clustered near mass transit lines: • Brown has threatened to file suit against municipalities that shun high-density housing in favor of building new suburban single-family homes, on the grounds that they will pollute the environment. • He is also backing controversial legislation -- Senate bill 375 --...

The tenets of suburban life are the oxygen in the economic bloodstream, and the nation is suffering hypoxia. The reason a lot of folks think we're just getting warmed up on an economic swoon is that the global economy has neatly garroted all the drivers that make suburbs flourish. ...America in the early 2000s was a frothy brew of low inflation and cheap houses financed by what we'd later find out were mortgages handed out like those little dum-dum lollipops at the dentist; everybody got one no matter how bad their teeth. Nothing percolates GDP like the need to fill...

Americans migrate back to the cities By Tom Leonard in New York Last Updated: 2:23AM BST 19/06/2008 Americans are choosing to abandon the suburban sprawl in favour of a more comfortable, cheaper and greener life in the city centre. Americans flocked to the suburbs after the WWII. Soaring energy prices and the sub-prime crisis are driving them back to the cities The mass migration of America's middle classes from urban areas to the suburbs amounted to a demographic revolution in the years after the Second World War. But the so-called "driveable suburb" is becoming increasingly unfeasible as soaring fuel costs...

LEESBURG, Virginia (Reuters) - Million-dollar fixer-upper for sale: five bedrooms, four baths, three-car garage, cavernous living room. Big holes above fireplace where flat-screen TV used to hang. The U.S. housing crisis has come to McMansion country. Just as the foreclosure crisis has hollowed out poorer neighborhoods, "for sale" signs are sprouting in upscale developments so new they don't show up on GPS navigation screens. Poor people weren't the only ones who took out risky, high-interest loans during the housing boom. The sharp increase in housing costs -- and the desire to live in brand-new, spacious houses with modern features --...

For the first time, the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation has adopted a policy in favor of high-density housing developments in rural areas to preserve farmland.But the state's largest organization of farmers, with 43,000 member families, also recommended that the current power of cities and villages to impose their zoning regulations three miles outside their borders be severely cut back. The policies, which set the farm bureau's legislative priorities for next year, were approved by 250 delegates representing members of the 61 county chapters around the state. Paul Zimmerman, executive director of public affairs for the farm bureau, said preservation of...

GREENWICH, Conn. -- You know you're in a different kind of town when the signs against drunk driving show a line drawn through a Martini glass to which the artist thoughtfully added a stirrer. Greenwich, Conn., is one such town. Greenwich is home to billionaire hedge-fund managers, private-equity kings and corporate chieftains, as well as ordinary multi-multimillionaires. Interviewing people here requires leaving phone messages with au pairs and catching folks between board meetings. You'd think that Greenwich would be solid Bush-loving turf -- what with all those tax cuts for the rich. It is not. The voters are roughly 40...

Finally the grass is greener on my side of the fence. I've spent the past year converting my lawn to organic care. After some early setbacks, my lawn looks pretty great, and the only herbicide I've used is an all-natural corn substance that's safe enough for my dog to eat. The same scene is playing out in yards around the country -- but it's not a peaceful transition. As the organic lawn movement grows, so are tensions in some communities. The latest front is over whether lawn-care methods are the horticultural equivalent of secondhand smoke: a choice that affects the...

Threat to Sarkozy as suburbs prepare to vote By Henry Samuel in Mantes-La-Jolie Last Updated: 1:11am BST 09/04/2007 Election fever is gripping the Val-Fourre housing estate in Mantes-la-Jolie, west of Paris, often listed as one of the most violent in France. Like many of the country's most troubled suburbs, locals here, who in the past might have failed to vote out of a sense of marginalisation, have been registering to vote in this month's presidential elections in record numbers. Since the banlieues - suburbs - exploded into riots in autumn 2005 over the death of two teenagers of immigrant origin...