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Geography. Environment. Urbanism. And other stuff.
Browsing All Posts filed under »suburbia«
The mall fights for survival
Is emphasizing the “experience” of going to the mall enough to save it from extinction? Perhaps that sounds like a ridiculous question. When I think of the “experience” of going to the mall, I think of parking lots with their own ZIP codes, surly teenagers, and pervasive homogeneity. A company named Glimcher Realty Trust is […]
Both sides get it wrong
July 5, 2012
You may have read something about how, according to Census data from 2011, cities in the US are growing at a faster rate than the suburbs. Kaid Benfield‘s post on the subject is pretty representative of what popped up on dozens of urbanist blogs. But hold on a minute. According to a number of other […]
Where are the suburbs, really?
June 22, 2012
Where do you draw the line between urban and suburban? For most of us, it’s kind of an “I know it when I see it” situation. We have certain characteristics that we look for to tell us when we’ve left the city and crossed over into the ‘burbs. Low densities? Detached, single-family homes? Big front […]
What’s in the Big-Box? Increasingly, nothing
June 19, 2012
It’s been about a year since Borders Books & Music closed for good, and during that time many suburban shopping centers that rely on big-box stores like Borders have been having difficulties. There seems to have been a chain reaction after Borders closed, in which no new tenants stepped forward to fill the void left […]
Raising an urban generation
May 8, 2012
“Mommy, I’m scared.” These words came out of the mouth of a nine-year-old girl, in the middle of a group of adults doing a neighborhood cleanup on a sunny Saturday morning. The neighborhood in question was my own St. Pete neighborhood, and the child who uttered those words was the visiting niece of a friend […]
Oakland is a suburb now
April 25, 2012
I just read Wendell Cox’s post in New Geography, in which he performs a bit of fumbling with data in an effort to demonstrate that Americans’ tastes in where they live are not in fact changing, and that anyone who says otherwise is just a big liberal central planner who wants to make us all […]
“It’s so clear that we just don’t see eye to eye”
April 16, 2012
The Wall Street Journal does not like the new highway bill. Oh no they do not, and one reason is that it seems to acknowledge the existence of non-highway-related transportation modes … you know, like transit. The Journal is no fan of transit, presumably because people from New Jersey or (shudder) Staten Island can theoretically […]
Your host
July 20, 2012
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