Wendell Cox: California's War on Suburbia

[LtBk]

Does anybody take Joel Kotkin or Wendell Cox seriously?

[mhays]

They get a lot of press in mainstream news, including the Fox/WSJ Murdoch empire. That's about the PR machine, unrelated to their being paid hacks not respected here.

[LtBk]

Originally Posted by mhays

They get a lot of press in mainstream news, including the Fox/WSJ Murdoch empire. That's about the PR machine, unrelated to their being paid hacks not respected here.

I know a certain user in SSC who loves to post maps and articles from Joel Kotkin's website.

[SHiRO]

Suburbanist?

[LtBk]

No, chicagogeorge.

[SHiRO]

Blah, both equally bad...the latter being a climate change denier to boot...

[LtBk]

chicagogeorge loves to argue for the sake of arguing. I got so annoyed of his posts that I put him on ignore.

[Doady]

Obviously the people who are against sprawl don't have children. When you fianlly do, good luck raising them in a tiny condo and taking them to school on public transit.

[SHiRO]

Originally Posted by Doady

Obviously the people who are against sprawl don't have children. When you fianlly do, good luck raising them in a tiny condo and taking them to school on public transit.

Children here typically live in a rowhouse with their family and walk, bike or take the bus to school. Absolutely no problem whatsoever...

[vid]

Originally Posted by SHiRO

Children here typically live in a rowhouse with their family and walk, bike or take the bus to school. Absolutely no problem whatsoever...

Same thing in my neighbourhood. It's a lower-middle income area right beside downtown, but middle-class families have been flocking here for cheap houses and the ability for students to walk or bike to school.

But then we're not talking about tiny condos, this area has actual houses.

[LtBk]

The idea that kids have to be raised in auto-centric suburbia is just stupid.

[Chicago103]

Originally Posted by Doady

Obviously the people who are against sprawl don't have children. When you fianlly do, good luck raising them in a tiny condo and taking them to school on public transit.

I sure hope that this statement is sarcasm, if not then you are just part of the masses that think of everything in the world in black and white and are either unwilling or unable to see the world in nuanced shades of grey. Only people who see the world in nuances can understand urbanity, people who think in absolutes simply don't have the intellectual acumen for this kind of discourse and rightly so will receive ridicule and are not to be taken seriously.

Anyways my entire life experiences and years and years of intellectual study demonstrate how silly your statement is and personally I bank on my personal experiences and reason over your silly touchy feely "gut" feelings and so called principles and values. Also before you play possum and accuse me of being an intellectual "elitist" or whatever rhetorical label you want to use demonstrate to us that cities in the western world are mostly composed of tiny condos, good luck with that.

[p-vidal naquet's ami]

With all due respect, some individuals, groups, and political parties make such absurd, patently biased, and fallacious arguments as to disrespect evidence or the very notion of truth.

Wendall Cox is just such a person.

One does not dignify the absurd hokum that the Earth is flat, the moon is made of green cheese, climate change is a "hoax" by "greedy scientists," that Hawaii-born Obama is a "foreigner," and that presumably liberal politicians have waged a "war" on American suburbs––which in truth have benefitted for over seventy years at the expense of the cities upon which they depend via government tax, zoning, transportation-energy policies and loans and appropriations.

Cox's "argument" is land-fill rubbish, and, as with so much of the noxious rubbish from his side of the aisle that passes for "discourse," it is not worthy of intellectual engagement.

[strongbad635]

Originally Posted by Doady

Obviously the people who are against sprawl don't have children. When you fianlly do, good luck raising them in a tiny condo and taking them to school on public transit.

Because children in Paris or Stockholm or Hong Kong obviously grow up with severe psychological problems from not having a backyard they use once a month when their eyes get tired from playing all that Xbox and watching all that Nickelodeon. Clearly in America if you have children then you should only have ONE choice to live: in auto-centric sprawl. I guess choice is overrated here in the land of the free anyway. Better to offer the country one product and then cry foul whenever people want to build an alternative to that one product.

[Dralcoffin]

Originally Posted by LtBk

chicagogeorge loves to argue for the sake of arguing. I got so annoyed of his posts that I put him on ignore.

Yes, I was just bickering with him on Chicago's future.

As for the article, well, if there is a war on suburbia like the conspiracy theorists say, then I volunteer for the front lines. (Meaning I plan to live in an urban environment and spend my earnings in the city, not out in some cul de sac.)

[Chicago103]

Originally Posted by strongbad635

Clearly in America if you have children then you should only have ONE choice to live: in auto-centric sprawl. I guess choice is overrated here in the land of the free anyway. Better to offer the country one product and then cry foul whenever people want to build an alternative to that one product.

It truly shows you how twisted things are when providing people with more choices is "elitism". How if you don't choose to live in sprawl like everyone else you are anti-american and you need to conform with others by living in sprawl in order to be considered a "rugged-individualist". No choice is freedom, conformity is individualism. If that isn't Orwellian double speak than what is? People who believe this nonsense are either brainwashed drones, payed hacks or addicted to a political label like a crack addict to the point that narratives don't even have to make rational sense anymore, just be like a rabid dog foaming at the mouth to contrast yourself form your perceived foes.

Thus we have people believing that saying everyone should have the chance to go to college makes them a snob, that someone wanting the choice of taking public transit for themselves and others means they want to take choice away from others. I mean what next, Obama is seen petting kittens at a shelter and thus a pundit on talk radio says it is a sign that kittens are communists and you must support mass euthanasia of kittens to prove you are a true conservative?

I mean don't get me wrong, I respect rational conservative arguments and have rational conservatives as friends but this kind of nonsense needs to be stopped. Some people are just mindless drones who use political labels without having any true rational comprehension of them, it is just 100% pure reactionary paranoid nonsense.

[pesto]

There is nothing wrong with living in a tiny urban apartment and subjecting your children (2, 4, 6, however many you have) to the same conditions. This is just a fact of urban life. It is not child abuse, but it is hardly what any parent wants for their children.

Those with sufficient money living in urban areas don't do this and neither do people in the suburbs or smaller towns. It strikes me as a very weak position to take when you argue that having plenty of space for children to get individual or organized exercise, have some privacy, establish their own identity and explore the natural world is NOT a benefit.

[Chicago103]

Originally Posted by pesto

There is nothing wrong with living in a tiny urban apartment and subjecting your children (2, 4, 6, however many you have) to the same conditions. This is just a fact of urban life. It is not child abuse, but it is hardly what any parent wants for their children.

Those with sufficient money living in urban areas don't do this and neither do people in the suburbs or smaller towns. It strikes me as a very weak position to take when you argue that having plenty of space for children to get individual or organized exercise, have some privacy, establish their own identity and explore the natural world is NOT a benefit.

Of course space and privacy are a benefit to an extent but there reaches a point of diminishing returns. I don't think anyone is saying that large families living in small tenement apartments in the city is ideal but at the same time the opposite extreme is not ideal either. I for instance don't see the tangible benefit of living in an one acre exurban McMansion lot over living in a small bungalow style house with a small yard in the city for children. I think children actually benefit more from being able to walk (with or without their parents) to stores and places in their neighborhoods and be exposed to different people and modes of transportation. I don't see how a bigger kitchen, a second living room or a few hundred more square feet of grass is a bigger benefit to children than all the cultural amenities a city has to offer. Even mentioning tenements is nothing but an attempt to make a straw man out of any urbanist point of view.

(this part not directed at pesto or anyone in particular):
There is also a big difference between arguing that bigger is not always better,trying to educate people on the possible benefits of living smaller with more transportation options in more urban environments, providing options for those that want it and an organized big government conspiracy to force everyone to live in highrise tenements out of some elitist socialist agenda. Many people are losing sight of the difference between the two. Also the belief in the latter is really nothing but the adult equivalent of children believing there are monsters under the bed that will eat them. Anyone who thinks there is a government conspiracy to destroy single family homes is either a payed hack teaching the drones Orwellian double speak, people with paranoid disorders or stunted emotional growth that has not evolved past childhood levels or some combination or the above or all of the above. Seriously believing in a conspiracy of planners to force people into cities is nothing but the product of a paranoid delusional mind.

[mhays]

Originally Posted by pesto

There is nothing wrong with living in a tiny urban apartment and subjecting your children (2, 4, 6, however many you have) to the same conditions. This is just a fact of urban life. It is not child abuse, but it is hardly what any parent wants for their children.

Those with sufficient money living in urban areas don't do this and neither do people in the suburbs or smaller towns. It strikes me as a very weak position to take when you argue that having plenty of space for children to get individual or organized exercise, have some privacy, establish their own identity and explore the natural world is NOT a benefit.

Having to be driven everywhere is directly counter to all that. In the city you have parks, a corner store nearby, etc. More interesting to grow up in and certainly better training for life (assuming they eventually get some freedom) than being locked in endless surburbia. More connection to nature too in many cases.

I lived in both growing up. The suburbs were the land of pot smoking. There was a reason.

[M II A II R II K]

The Export Business in California (People and Jobs)


05/10/2012

By Wendell Cox

Read More: http://www.newgeography.com/content/...bout+places%29

California Senate President Pro-Tem Darrell Steinberg countered my Wall Street Journal commentary California Declares War on Suburbia in a letter to the editor (A Bold Plan for Sustainable California Communities) that could be interpreted as suggesting that all is well in the Golden State. The letter suggests that business are not being driven away to other states and that the state is "good at producing high-wage jobs," while pointing to the state's 10 percent growth over the last decade. Senate President Steinberg further notes that the urban planning law he authored (Senate Bill 375) is leading greater housing choices and greater access to transit. This may be a description of the California past, but not present.

- Californians are leaving. Between 2000 and 2009 (Note), a net 1.5 million Californians left for other states. Only New York lost more of its residents (1.6 million). California's loss was greater than the population of its second largest municipality, San Diego. More Californians moved away than lived in 12 states at the beginning of the decade. Among the net 6.3 million interstate domestic migrants in the nation, nearly one-quarter fled California for somewhere else.

- More than a net 1.35 million residents left the Los Angeles metropolitan area, or approximately 11 percent of the 2000 population. The San Jose metropolitan area lost 240,000 residents, nearly 14 percent of its 2000 population. These two metropolitan areas ranked among the bottom two of the 51largest metropolitan areas (over 1,000,000 population) in the percentage of lost domestic migrants during the period. The San Francisco metropolitan area lost 340,000 residents, more than 8 percent of its 2000 population and ranked 47th worst in domestic migration (New York placed worse than San Francisco but better than Los Angeles). Each of these three metropolitan areas lost domestic migrants at a rate faster than that of Rust Belt basket cases Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo.

- California is no longer an incubator of high-wage jobs. The state lost 370,000 jobs paying 25 percent or more of the average wage between 2000 and 2008. This compares to a 770,000 increase in the previous 8 years. California is trailing Texas badly and the nation overall in creating criticial STEM jobs and middle skills jobs (Figures 2 & 3) Only two states have higher unemployment rates than California (Nevada and Rhode Island) . California has the second highest underemployment rate (20.8 percent), which includes the number of unemployed, plus those who have given up looking for work ("discouraged" workers) and those who are working only part time because they cannot find full time work. Only Nevada, with its economy that is overly-dependent on California, has a higher underemployment rate.

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