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Uh - whose mirror are we talking about here?</p>
<p>I can easily understand the attraction of the suburbs for families with young children or people who like more space and green than is usually available in cities.</p>
<p>That said, I agree that for old people, it can be more convenient to live in cities than in the suburbs or country, especially if you are single. I’ve met people who had to go to hospital five days a week for treatment, over a six weeks period. For some of them, living far away from a major hospital, it was a whole day affair, getting up at 4 to catch a train in time for an 11am appointment, then not getting home until 4pm. Unless you have a strong support system, it’s also harder to organize shopping cleaning when you are not well.
I wonder whether a study has been done of the prior residence of people who move into assisted living communities: were they mostly suburbanites? urbanites? is there a correlation?</p>
<p>FS, when you grow up, you can choose to live wherever you want, as a moralist, disfigured, petty or whatever.</p>
<p>I am comfortable with my own choices. I assume those in the gated community are comfortable with theirs. Doesn’t make it a less interesting conversation, even with such different choices.</p>
<p>Poetsheart…You gotta move to where I live!</p>
<p>Cities vs burbs for retirement: Perhaps my perspective is biased by my proximity to NYC, but who can afford to move into the city when you retire? I recently heard that the average co-op in NYC goes for over a million dollars now. Most people when they retire attempt to downsize - both in size as well as expense. While certainly fitting into a cramped NYC residence would be size-downsizing, the financial impact would be quite sizable.</p>
<p>While having some of the advantages of city life more accessible, I think it would be very tough to trade off the gardens, trees, sunsets, songbirds and quiet of suburbia for the bleak, dirty and noisy surroundings of a city. It is very comforting to sit out on my deck at night and see the gardens and listen to the various families of birds that have set up housekeeping around my property.</p>
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You mean, even those fear-mongers who let fear rule their lives? Now, thats what I call big-hearted tolerance.
Any mirror will do, even when staring into someone elses you will be gazing into your own righteous mug; dont let the Las Meninas effect on cc confuse you into believing otherwise.
<a href=“http://www.artchive.com/artchive/V/velazquez/meninas.jpg.html[/url]”>http://www.artchive.com/artchive/V/velazquez/meninas.jpg.html</a></p>
![http://www.artchive.com/artchive/V/velazquez/meninas.jpg.html[/url]](http://www.artchive.com/artchive/V/velazquez/meninas.jpg.html%5B/url%5D){kind=link}
<p>FF: </p>
<p>I can quite understand your perspective. I suppose I have the best of both worlds, though H wants us to move into a condo with no lawn and no snow shovelling eventually. But I was struck by the difference having to go to hospital every day for several weeks made for me as opposed to someone lving one or two hours or more from a major hospital. In some cases, the incovenience was for both the patient and the person who had to drive the patient every day.
I know an older couple; he is heavily arthritic, he is legally blind. They live in an apartment building, have their groceries delivered, someone comes and cleans and cooks for them. The people who provide these services come by public transport.</p>
<p>Marite - you make a good point. People who decry “sprawl” sometimes ignore the fact that families with children have legitimate priorities which are different than young adults or retirees. I wanted to live in a neighborhood where my kids could walk out the door and play in the street with the neighbor kids - and moved to a place where that was possible. Now that my kids are older, I’m looking forward to a more compact living space, with more things within walking distance - and letting a new family with young kids move into our current house. Needs change as our lives evolve, and good planning provides a mix of living space alternatives. The problem comes when all you have are McMansions which require getting into a car for anything outside of the house. Few suburban communities plan ahead to have those places where young adults and retirees can live without leaving town.</p>
<p>Except for the playing in the street part ;)- my kids could do that in the city.
Yes our yard and house is smaller than it would be in the suburbs( but we have fruit trees and a pond with fish), but there are parks within walking distance large enough for soccer or baseball games.( and parks with beaches!)
But I do have to walk my dog, as opposed to just letting her roam the neighborhood as we did while growing up in the burbs ( there are dog parks though- but we dont go there as often as she would like)
What really bothers me aren’t necessarily the small gated communities of 10-20 homes in a nice burb, where the gate seems more like a gimmick , but the new suburbs, which used to be rural, but now stretch to the mountains, displacing wildlife, all because " I want to build my house- just the way I like it)
We made a concious choice not to do that, because I think city and country should be distinquishable from one another, not one big mass of rooftops.</p>
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<p>Of course it does. But I pay for more than I get, and people in exurbs get more than they pay for. That’s just how the subsidies work. Just as one quick example, in my home county, public funds support both the roads and the rails, but the train is $2 a ride, while there’s no toll to use most of the expressways – the gas tax is just over a penny a mile, even in a good-sized car. Factor in the environmental (and foreign policy) costs of heavy car use, from which I derive no benefit. It’s no secret that not everyone benefits equally from public revenue. There are net imbalances not just between city and suburbs, but among states (especially densely vs. sparsely populated ones):</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/sr139.pdf[/url]”>http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/sr139.pdf</a></p>
<p>It is without question a free country, and different strokes for different folks. However, we should all be honest about who’s paying for what benefits we’re enjoying. My point wasn’t that everyone ought to live in a highrise, just that (1), expensive choices in a free country still cost money, and (2), people sometimes base their decisions on assumptions about safety that don’t match real-world risks.</p>
<p>This isn’t a high-rise/exurb dichotomy. There are suburbs, small towns, and leafy city neighborhoods out there that offer many of the environmental and economic benefits of the city (walkable shopping/schools, access to mass transit, economic integration, etc.) along with quiet, gardens, etc. But if there are gated communities out there that fit this model, I’ve never seen them.</p>
<p>Hanna are you sure about that? I just read in the NY Times that the property taxes in NYC, for instance, are way lower than they should be considering all of the services that the residents in all of those coops and condos consume. Something doesn’t sound right to me.</p>
<p>In New Jersey this is almost certainly not the case. Property taxes in the suburbs fill the inner-city coffers to the brim.</p>
<p>I didn’t see the article, but Manhattan is very unusual as far as local services because it’s the only place in the country where 80% of home ownership is co-ops, whose value is not publicized. So you have people in Fifth Avenue co-ops that haven’t publicly changed hands in 90 years, and they can be undertaxed.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/28/nyregion/28coop.html?ex=1152763200&en=1bd0924776a93ca2&ei=5070[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/28/nyregion/28coop.html?ex=1152763200&en=1bd0924776a93ca2&ei=5070</a></p>
<p>FS, that is true. The urban school districts are mandated by law to be funded at a level comparable not just with the average NJ districts but comparable to the richest districts. This means that the “sucking sound that you hear” is the that of the money flowing from the burbs to the cities.</p>
<p>Also, as to the use of roads - don’t city dwellers use the roads almost every weekend to escape to the parks and lakes of the burbs? And speaking of parks, our county spends a fortune on its park system. Yet if you are one of the lucky few to be able to get into the park before it is filled to capacity on weekends, you realize that most of your fellow park users are refugees from the cities who don’t pay a dime for its creation and upkeep.</p>
<p>There are just as many toll freeways as free ones in the Chicago area–probably more. The east-west until it hits 294, the Northwest at O’hare, the 294-Tri-State, anf the Skyway. All of the roads around Chicago provide much more than suburban commutes. They are key parts of the national system that help make Chicago a hub of commerce as are O’hare and the mass transit systems. Without commerce there is less need for high priced law firms–get the connection??
The intracies of economic costs and benefits are much more complex than your simplistic approach. Would the ouput of the Chicago public schools provide the level of labor needed to feed the economy or do we need the New Triers and Deerfields? What about all those state supported Big 10 schools that feed the professional level jobs in Chicago? Those states are subsidizing the Chicago workforce. I have seen Iowa called the University of Chicagoland at Iowa City.
Chicagoland does not have enough gated communities to worry about impacting the equation.</p>
<p>Just as a stat…</p>
<p>NYC is the most energy-efficient city in the country, per capita. Most people walk, bike, or take public transportation. Living quarters are small. They (and offices) are laid out in such a way as to lose very little heat during the winter - one apartment heats another apartment.</p>
<p>Sure, different strokes for different folks. I grew up in a suburb of Boston. Had to drive everywhere. I’ll readily admit that my energy use there is much higher than in DC or my law school. In the latter two places, I’ve chosen to live so that I can walk nearly everywhere - in five months, I put 2,000 miles on my car in five months living there, which is roughly equivalent to what I put on my car in a month living near Boston.</p>
<p>There is a completely irrational fear of what goes on in cities. Someone pointed out that more people die on the Beltway every day than do from handgun violence, yet a lot of people desire to live out in VA or MD to avoid the “dangers” of the city. </p>
<p>One thought about rural areas: sure, they do require a lot of highway per capita, BUT I’m not really sure how you expect commerce to happen in the US without that. If you look at the trucking corridors, there’s generally not many people there but they require more funding for road maintenance because of all of the transportation that goes through there, not to there.</p>
<p>While people are equally free to live in the suburbs or the city, that does not mean that such choices have equal consequences or environmental effects.</p>
<p>So what you’re saying is that the smart, environmentally aware folks should sell their houses in the 'burbs, and plunk down $700,000.00 for a nice little 1 bedroom co-op for a family of 6? No thanks. I’ll pass.</p>
<p>That wasn’t directed at me, was it… because that reading of my post is more tortured than anything Bill Clinton ever did to the verb “to be.”</p>
<p>don’t city dwellers use the roads almost every weekend to escape to the parks and lakes of the burbs?</p>
<p>R you frigging kidding?
Have you see the traffic?
the city has public access beaches- the burbs not so much-
Sure I go to Bellevue about everyother month to see my mother, but while I like the Medina nursery, Im not going to make special trip.
If we are going to go * out* of town, we are gonna go * out of town*, at least 70 miles out</p>
<p>I can see the appeal of burbs for families, I have to admit that overall, I think there are several suburban school districts that are better and more responsive, than the urban district.
However, I see people like my sister for example who has a liscense plate holder that reads “Eastside Native” ( east side of Lake Washington apparently), and is quite a snob about the east side.
But where does she go for the freshest veggies and seafood? The Pike Place Market in Seattle Where do they go out to dinner? In Seattle. Where do they go to plays and the ballet? Where do they take out of town guests?
I admit- I am amused.
FOr a family of 7, they have 4 cars, and she is badgering her 17 year old to get his liscence so he can do his share of shuttling.
Its hard to imagine a family needs 4 cars, when none of the kids even belong to any sports teams or take outside anything.</p>
<p>So what you’re saying is that the smart, environmentally aware folks should sell their houses in the 'burbs, and plunk down $700,000.00 for a nice little 1 bedroom co-op for a family of 6?</p>
<p>why would an environmentally aware family have 4 kids?</p>
<p>::::::::::::ducking::::::::::::</p>