[Lorianne]

Had to work Bush's name in there somehow, no mater how lamely, even though Bush had ZERO to do with California's sprawl development and mismanagement for the past 60 years.

Weasel.

Cole should 'get real' about who is really to blame for the problems he sees in California.

[umgud]

We gots ta get everyone back into the big blue cities where we can control them better............

[papasmurf]

I feel sorry for his parents. They spent all of that money on his education, and all they got in return was a “buzz” word vocabulary, and a defeatist mindset.

He lives in a City, in a “Planned Community Development”, I feel sure of that. Why? Because, as most everyone knows, misery loves company.

[raptor29]

Hey Cole, your entire county is chock full of illegal Mexicans whose voracious freeloading on our resource base is a far bigger issue than anything you write about here.

[calcowgirl]

Contrarian Joel Kotkin, in a scathing Newsweek essay entitled “Death of the California Dream,” attacks familiar targets, including real estate speculators and our dysfunctional political class, with particular disdain aimed at elitist “green politics.”

Sounds about right.

But the real problem ... is with our national approach to real estate—one pioneered in California, long the poster child for sprawl. ... Sprawl is now the poster child for our unsustainable way of life, starting with “real estate.” ... massive (but hidden) public subsidies of sprawl ...

S-p-r-a-w-l is eeeeeeeeeeeevil! (Hear them whine!)

If only we had more urban planners. /s

[Old North State]

His wife should have bet him that the Dow would drop below eight thousand afer the democrats took control of Congress. The economy under Bush and the Republican Congress was at an all time high when the democrats took over and opened the sub-prime floodgates.
And never forget that it is the city planners who have created most of the mess our cities find themselves in; remember the ‘Cabrini Green’ style high rise public housing mess? - that was city planners. They don't like suburbs and they want to stuff people in urban boxes so they can engineer society. For them the East German workers paradise is the model for the future and to hell with what the people want.

[Wuli]

What a crock of puke.

Massively, upwardly dense cities like New York city are completely unsustainable without “subsidies”, for everything from housing to food, to trash disposal, to transportation. And, take a survey of a large southwestern city vs a place like Chicago or New York and you also find the distance in the average “wage gap” is greater in the dense, urban liberal cities.

As for zoning and planning, Houston has very little zoning and only minimal planning but has more “affordable” housing ON THE MARKET, per capita, than any liberal, dense, high-rise city in the nation.

The only thing high-rise dense cities do is turn people into sheep; and the group-think in such places can be noticeable to American visitors there.

While the particular housing markets that saw the largest rates of new building and excess in the last housing-market bubble are many in the southwest, the manner of building, the style, did not create the bubble; and transportation “subsidies” for southwestern highways are no greater per-capita, per-passenger-mile than the “public transportation” subsidies that keep Amtrac and ALL major-city transit systems running.

People who write these things have never traveled this country by car. They sit in their ivory towers reading statistics and making correlation try to equal causation, while ignoring the human factor.

[CaptainMorgantown]

I love communities where I can walk or bike to the grocery store and drug store.

However, same eco-greenie-enviro-people who like rant against ‘sprawl’ never admit the reason for it. Families have flocked to developments on large lots in small communities far from urban centers to have the freedom and security to fashion their lives without being subjects of the urban political class. A little bit of land (even if it’s only a half acre) gives families some control over their own environs. In small communities, a single individual can still hope to influence the local government, without having to make payoffs in the form of campaign contributions to a permanent political elite. Low population density and distance from urban centers offers families hope of escaping violent crime.

The problem is that as suburban communiies grow, the same corrupt political bureacracies grow with them, with lots university-educated professionals voting democratic and eager to replicate all the ‘progressive’ policies of the urban areas they have fled.

[NoControllingLegalAuthority]

..and Bruce Springsteen keeps blaming Republicans and pushing the Democrat line - the damn fools hell-bent on destroying wealth and turning Springsteen's, hopeless, rust-belt hometown into EVERONE'S hopeless hometown.

Democrats don't spread the wealth around.

They spread the MISERY around!

[ecomcon]

Freedom and dense cities seem pretty incompatible to me. They want to pack them in like cord wood. How can I be free if everything I do impacts my neighbor? That’s why suburbs sell; people are trying to get a little freedom and privacy.

All these liberal elitist “sprawl” haters and central planners can go pound sand.

[SuziQ]

and we all know other regions across America that have long been stagnant, like the factory towns in Bruce Springsteen’s haunting song, “My Hometown”

Well, if Bruce WAS talking about HIS hometown, it's not exactly stagnant anymore, as least it wasn't 20 years when we left it. It had already turned around from it's stagnant period, and even with the loss of the horse track to a large fire, it STILL came back with many new businesses and a large mall.

My point is that if folks are willing to work at it, the economy CAN come back in places that look depressed now.