Posts Tagged ‘neighborhoods’
slum lords
After yesterday’s entry on enormous homes and bad neighborhoods, I couldn’t resist posting this poem (tip of the hat to NPR’s Writer’s Almanac):
by John Updike
The superrich make lousy neighbors—
they buy a house and tear it down
and build another, twice as big, and leave.
They’re never there; they own so many
other houses, each demands a visit.
Entire neighborhoods called fashionable,
bustling with servants and masters, such as
Louisburg Square in Boston or Bel Air in L.A.,
are districts now like Wall Street after dark
or Tombstone once the silver boom went bust.
The essence of superrich is absence.
They like to demonstrate they can afford
to be elsewhere. Don’t let them in.
Their riches form a kind of poverty.
slow news: big houses, bad neighborhoods
Regular readers of ca will notice that the places and spaces we live in is an issue of great interest to me. So, naturally, I couldn’t resist making “The sociology of the mega-home” by Daniel McGinn (the third of a four part excerpt from his new book, House Lust) the slow news article today (tip of the hat to Contexts Crawler).
The article essentially focuses how Americans are currently obsessed with unnecessarily large homes (with obscenely large utilities bills) and how those rich bastards might feel lonely and isolated from each other. Naturally, the actual studies of room usage show that much of the space goes unused and that the majority of waking house are spent in the kitchen.
Though I am wholly unconcerned about the loneliness of people living in 9,000 square foot nouveau riche palaces, I am very concerned about waste of space, materials (does anybody think these shoddily-built monstrosities will last the way older homes have?), and the destruction of neighborhoods that McMansions cause. One of my favorite books, Suburban Nation (by Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk), made me into an absolute evangelical for the New Urbanist movement (see also the PBS Newshour special for a balanced consideration of the movement). While it is clear that development cannot be stopped, it is essential that we pressure for it to happen in ways that are environmentally-sound and foster strong communities where people from all different classes and racial and ethnic backgrounds interact.
It’s hard to argue with the merits of mixed-use (business and residential) zoning, pedestrian-friendly streets, short commutes, architectural consistency (whatever that style might be), and places where their children can play with friends and have some independence without being forced to turn her/his parent into a full-time chauffeur. That type of neighborhood — both of the past and a could-be better future — is impossible as long as McMansions, the SUVs of residential life, keep being built.
