The owner of this house is a man for whom I have immense respect. It’s always fun seeing the neighborhood historic presevation nazis get it from behind…

As a Geography major and a bit of an obsessive about all things urban, I’m bothered by sloppy social science. Tonight’s example involved my participation in a research study where one of the questions was “how many cities of over one million population have you lived in?”. She just didn’t understand that I needed a concrete explanation of whether she was referring to central city or metropolitan population, and she couldn’t see why it mattered…

While I’ve never lived in a CITY of a million people (San Francisco is just shy of 800,000), I’ve lived in METROPOLITAN AREAS of over a million people for all but the three (sucky, miserable) months of my life spent in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina in 1986…

Am I just being anal?

Mark‘s back from Fresno in a few minutes with presents and clean laundry, and I’ll be able to sleep better tonight. Funny how he should mention in his new “100 Things” essay (currently on the front page with no perma-link) that he sleeps better when I’m in bed with him. I was just about to do a journal entry on the same subject. It’s amazing; I’ve never been able to sleep with anyone in the same room with me before, much less the same bed…

This from the one who used to pick up boys in bars, bring them home, have sex, and then force them to leave, baffled, by telling them “it’s too bad you have to go now”, even when they’d previously expressed no such need…

Greensboro has a apparently been deemed “sprawl city” once again. Now keep in mind that “sprawl” is one of those things which is defined in much the same way that Supreme Court justice many years ago defined pornography: no one can tell you exactly what it is, but by God, planners know it when they see it…

By “they”, in this case, I mean the “smart growth” and “new urbanism” Nazis, who define it as pretty much anything other than cute little overplanned neighborhood units which look nice in magazine articles and newspaper features, but where no one really wants to live. The idea, of course, is to transform suburbia into a cartoon-like version of a central city, whether it’s appropriate to the economics of the area and the lifestyles of its inhabitants or not. They’re like the historic preservation crowd but even worse…

To a one, these developments usually focus on the facts that the houses are closer together and that a few token small retail spaces are placed in some sort of pointless village common in the middle of it all. It would just be too unwieldy to add things like supermarkets and the like, and it wouldn’t be at all picturesque. Granted, the yards are easier to maintain, and it takes about five fewer seconds to walk to your next door neighbor’s house, but the greeting card shops and cute little juice joints are doomed to failure, both from lack of patronage and from lack of exposure (assuming anyone ever leases the space to begin with)…

I rather like this: “Both High Point and Greensboro are changing policies to require more sidewalks to be built and have written new laws permitting the construction of more-compact developments.”. That’s great, really, but what good are the sidewalks when there’s nothing to walk TO? In this case, “compact developments” still means little more than smaller yards in a neighborhood surrounded by a buffer zone of shrubbery and connected to some arterial which will take them to the closest shopping center a few miles away…

The problem, of course, is the stifling zoning in suburbia, which keeps the stores and businesses people would actually USE completely isolated from residences. Planners repeatedly claim they want “pedestrian environments”, but they don’t want shopping centers anywhere near anyone’s homes, although a few small shops which sell nothing that anyone needs or wants would be just dandy, thanks. Evidently, they’d just prefer that residents just walk in circles around the neighborhood, waving at all the people who will, of course, be sitting on their porches with pitchers of lemonade…

A few clues: people, especially people in the suburbs, like to shop in big, cheap stores with parking. The days of the corner greengrocer and butcher shop are over, and no amount of nagging and prodding by planners will change this fact. If people want to live in areas which have “pedestrian environments”, they will generally tend to move to larger cities, where these environments already exist and have developed over time. It is not possible to plan them into existence overnight, especially in areas where no one really wants them except the planners…

Most Americans live in wide open suburbs because they like it. Outside the few dense urban areas like New York and San Francisco, Americans have no intention of taking public transit anyplace, so living in an area clustered around a light rail station is not a priority. You and I may disagree, but our urban snobbery is lost on individuals who are quite happy with the way they live, and who — by and large — are willing to put up with a little extra driving to have the way of life they choose. And frankly, what business is it of ours to tell them they’re wrong?

Extremely depressing hometown news. I’ve been going to this store since I was a kid, and it was ancient even then. The place lasted for 104 years but couldn’t quite survive the “revitalization” of South Elm Street. So where am I supposed to go for a hand-mixed Cherry Coke now?

Speaking of soda (or pop, or fizzies, or dranks), check this out…

It’s comforting, of course, to realize that his list of cities is so compatible with mine, particularly when it comes to the section on places neither of us would ever want to end up…

A hectic week, what with promoting the new fall shows on The WB and UPN, a visit to my part-time job by the new vice-president of the western division, and my obsessive need to fit in at least six full hours of TV every day. Those of you who make it to the birthday bash will please excuse me if I’m a bit of a zombie…

Question of the day: why is Fox News anchor (and hopelessly incompetent amateur) Shepard Smith allowed on the air? Particularly in such visible assignments? Is it just me or is it obvious to everyone else that he has the IQ of a doorknob and the delivery of an overzealous trainee at Radio Shack? Is that supposed to be part of the charm?