Gori the Grey
The Poster
- Joined
- Jan 5, 2009
- Messages
- 13,458
Changes come around real soon make us need a bed-pan.
Things that make you feel old.
- Thread starter AmazonQueen
- Start date
Rail is mostly for carrying cargo now, not passengers. At least in the West. If you want to take a ride on the Via now, it costs $$$$ in this part of the country. It's still a passenger thing in Central Canada, but that's because there are lots of people going places in southern Ontario and Quebec.
We don't even have Greyhound out here anymore, so if you're like me and don't drive and have nobody willing to drive, you're basically stuck where you are. I haven't been outside of Red Deer in 4 years, and last time was only to a neighboring town for eye surgery. There's lots of ballyhoo over bus service between Calgary and Banff (to try to keep traffic down in Banff), but it's useless if you can't even get to Calgary. A day in the mountains would do wonders for my mental health.
"Get off my lawn" may not have been common until the 1980s, but it was around a long time earlier. I remember being on the receiving end a few times when cutting through yards to shave off a few minutes when walking to school.
Broken_Erika
Play with me.
This song make me feel old
Narz
keeping it real
Iirc a lawn was originally a status symbol, like "look @ me, I'm so rich I don't need to grow food on my lawn I can just let it goto waste"
privatehudson
The Ultimate Badass
- Joined
- Oct 15, 2003
- Messages
- 4,821
I'm kinda intruiged as to how housing styles or areas has changed over the years and what was considered good in the past is now undesirable.
For example in my local city (Liverpool, UK) there has always been a lot of slum housing, right up until even the 60s or 70s. For example it was not uncommon for people to live in what was essentially a cellar in the 19th century, and right up until the 60s there was a lot of "back something streets" which were essentially a street of very poor standard housing built betwen two other streets. They would often have one or two communal toilets for the entire street.
Starting in the 1930s a lot of new council estates were built with houses that had indoor toilets and front and back gardens, which were a complete luxury compared to the slum properties. People didn't always like them though because they felt that they lost the sense of community that they had in the slums. It didn't help that the shops, schools, churches etc were often built after the houses (it wasn't uncommon to have a van shop in some estates). Funnily enough many of these estates are now considered pretty run down and less desirable areas to live in these days.
After the war a lot of blocks of flats went up to replace the large number of houses destroyed by the Blitz on the city, these weren't always built to a very high standard though given post war austerity.
Meanwhile some of the cities older, larger properties built in the Georgian and Victorian period have been retained but subdivided into flats, so where there was once one family, there's often 4-5 residents.
For example in my local city (Liverpool, UK) there has always been a lot of slum housing, right up until even the 60s or 70s. For example it was not uncommon for people to live in what was essentially a cellar in the 19th century, and right up until the 60s there was a lot of "back something streets" which were essentially a street of very poor standard housing built betwen two other streets. They would often have one or two communal toilets for the entire street.
Starting in the 1930s a lot of new council estates were built with houses that had indoor toilets and front and back gardens, which were a complete luxury compared to the slum properties. People didn't always like them though because they felt that they lost the sense of community that they had in the slums. It didn't help that the shops, schools, churches etc were often built after the houses (it wasn't uncommon to have a van shop in some estates). Funnily enough many of these estates are now considered pretty run down and less desirable areas to live in these days.
After the war a lot of blocks of flats went up to replace the large number of houses destroyed by the Blitz on the city, these weren't always built to a very high standard though given post war austerity.
Meanwhile some of the cities older, larger properties built in the Georgian and Victorian period have been retained but subdivided into flats, so where there was once one family, there's often 4-5 residents.
Lawns, even if small, gave children a place to play outside but close to home and can be more easily watched by parents. As US urban areas enlarged though suburbs, and the boomer generation expanded, (1946-1964) yards were an important feature of neighborhoods and life. Neighborhood yards, taken together, added a sense of rural country-side to those living there. We often roamed from yard to yard and into the yet-to-be developed fields and woods. The line between urban and rural was beginning to blur.
PhroX
Deity
- Joined
- Jan 12, 2009
- Messages
- 2,804
Yeah, definitely when it comes to the basic concept of the lawn its to show off wealth. But when it comes to the uniform lawns of American suburbia, and particularly when it comes to residents being obliged to keep those lawns mowed, while it wasn't the only reason, anti-communism did play a role. The idea, pioneered by a guy named Levitt (or something like that, I'm too lazy to check how accurate my memory was) was basically that men who were obliged to put in a lot of effort keeping their laws in good condition wouldn't have the time to learn about dangerous ideas like communism. And so when he set up a realtively cheap suburban town (which was of course named after him....), he put obligations like lawn maintenance in the contract for purchasing the houses. And his town was pretty succeful, so the idea spread.
So gardeners and teens helped people read communist books ^^
Marla_Singer
United in diversity
Montreal and Toronto are currently expanding their metro networks with new lines under construction. Obviously it's not rail paradise but that is still more than what is done in most US cities. There are some public transit projects in the US, but they usually consists of a single light rail line for a metro area of several million people. Los Angeles actually expands it metro network, but it really struggles to do so.
The thing is that the more a city sprawls the more expensive it is to maintain. That is because you need more kilometers of roads, water pipes, sewers, power grid, optical fiber serving a more limited number of people. As such US cities don't have a big capacity to finance new infrastructures because it's already a pain to maintain existing ones. Also I'm amazed how expensive are public transit projects in the US. Construction costs can easily go from thrice to 10 times the European price depending on the project (knowing that within Europe construction costs vary as well, Britain being much more expensive than Spain for instance). Those higher prices are I think due to the lack of an established public transit industry in the US.
All of this put together makes of public transit a real challenge to develop in the US, particularly that, as cities have been entirely built to do everything by car, people can't even see how public transit would be useful to them, as it looks awfully suboptimal and limited in comparison. When a French town of only 200k inhabitants builds a network of 3 light rail lines basically allowing to go anywhere, people want more public transit because that's faster and more convenient than car, so it's easier for public authorities to expand it as there's a demand for it. It's like a vicious circle.
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I don't really know how they do things in the U.S. I don't live there. But it's worth noting that before vehicles running on fossil fuels became common, public transit used to be by stagecoach.
You are old
Anyway, midlife crisis is subsiding. So one can not feel old when middle aged ^^
Remorseless1
Emperor
- Joined
- Jan 24, 2022
- Messages
- 1,214
LOL!!!!!!
Dude I'm pretty darn liberal even after half a century of mowing either my parents' lawn or my own. Takes about an hour or so a week, maybe two. I am quite proud of my six huge trees, five of which are productive and consume lots of carbon dioxide. My little garden produces tomatoes and strawberries, the flowers out front nurture honey bees and the hedges in the backyard provide a safe habitat for a couple of families of horned frogs (bees and especially horned frogs are endangered species). While not voluntary, my yard also provide opportunities for a possum, an armadillo and several raccoons the chance to feast on grubs and pecans.
Voted Sanders in the last Dem primaries.
But hey, conspiracies always are true.
Not really. It was all about making money off of changing demographics.
Overview[edit]
Levittown houses in 1958
The building firm, Levitt & Sons, headed by Abraham Levitt and his two sons, William and Alfred, built four planned communities called "Levittown", in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Puerto Rico; the Levittown in New York was the first. Additionally, Levitt & Sons' designs are featured prominently in the older portion of Buffalo Grove, Illinois; Vernon Hills, Illinois; Willingboro Township, New Jersey; the Belair section of Bowie, Maryland; and the Greenbriar section of Fairfax, Virginia.[citation needed]
The Levitt firm began before World War II, as a builder of custom homes in upper middle-class communities on Long Island. During the war, however, the home building industry languished under a general embargo on private use of scarce raw materials. William "Bill" Levitt served in the Navy in the Seabees – the service's construction battalions – and developed expertise in the mass-produced building of military housing using uniform and interchangeable parts. He was insistent that a postwar building boom would require similar mass-produced housing, and was able to purchase options on large swaths of onion and potato fields in undeveloped sections of Long Island.[7]
Returning to the firm after war's end, Bill Levitt persuaded his father and brother to embrace the utilitarian system of construction he had learned in the Navy. With his brother, Alfred, who was an architect, he designed a small one-floor house with an unfinished "expansion attic" that could be rapidly constructed and as rapidly rented to returning GIs and their young families. Levitt & Sons built the community with an eye towards speed, efficiency, and cost-effective construction; these methods led to a production rate of 30 houses a day by July 1948.[8] They used pre-cut lumber and nails shipped from their own factories in Blue Lake, California, and built on concrete slabs, as they had done in a previous planned community in Norfolk, Virginia. This necessitated negotiating a change in the building code which, prior to the building of this community, did not permit concrete slabs. Given the urgent need for housing in the region, the town agreed. Levitt & Sons also controversially utilized non-union contractors in the project, a move which provoked picket lines. On the other hand, they paid their workers very well and offered all kinds of incentives that allowed them to earn extra money, so that they often could earn twice as much a week as elsewhere.[9] The company also cut out middlemen and purchased many items, including lumber and televisions, directly from manufacturers. The building of every house was reduced to 26 steps, with sub-contractors responsible for each step. His mass production of thousands of houses at virtually the same time allowed Levitt to sell them, with kitchens fully stocked with modern appliances, and a television in the living room, for as little as $8,000 each (equal to $97,085 today), which, with the G.I. Bill and federal housing subsidies, reduced the up-front cost of a house to many buyers to around $400 (equal to $4,854 today).[10]
The planned 2,000 home rental community was quickly successful, with the New York Herald Tribune reporting that half of the properties had been rented within two days of the community being announced on May 7, 1947. As demand continued, exceeding availability, the Levitts expanded their project with 4,000 more homes, as well as community services, including schools and postal delivery. With the full implementation of federal government supports for housing, administered under the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), the Levitt firm switched from rental to sale of their houses, offering ownership on a 30-year mortgage with no down payment and monthly costs the same as rental. The resulting surge in demand pressed the firm to further expand its development, which changed its name from Island Trees to Levittown shortly thereafter.
Levittown was designed to provide a large amount of housing at a time when there was a high demand for affordable family homes.[11] This suburban development would become a symbol of the "American Dream" as it allowed thousands of families to become home owners.
Discriminatory practices[edit]
As well as a symbol of the American Dream, Levittown would also become a symbol of racial segregation in the United States, due to Clause 25 of the standard lease agreement signed by the first residents of Levittown, who had an option to buy their homes. This "restrictive covenant" stated in capital letters and bold type that the house could not "be used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race."[13]
Such discriminatory housing standards were consistent with government policies of the time.[14] The Federal Housing Administration allowed developers to justify segregation within public housing. The FHA offered mortgages only to non-mixed developments which discouraged developers from creating racially integrated housing.[15] Before the sale of Levittown homes began, the sales agents were aware that no applications from black families would be accepted. As a result, American veterans who wished to purchase a home in Levittown were unable to do so if they were black.[16][13]
William Levitt attempted to justify their decision to only sell homes to white families by saying that it was in the best interest for business.[16] He claimed their actions were not discriminatory but intended to maintain the value of their properties. The company explained that it was not possible to reduce racial segregation while they were attempting to reduce the housing shortage. Levitt said "As a Jew, I have no room in my heart for racial prejudice. But the plain fact is that most whites prefer not to live in mixed communities. This attitude may be wrong morally, and someday it may change. I hope it will."[17] The Levitts explained that they would open up applications to blacks after they had sold as many homes to white people as possible.[16] They believed that potential white buyers would not want to buy a house in Levittown if they were aware they would have black neighbors.
Though the Levitts were Jewish, they did not wish to sell homes to Jewish families either; despite this, by 1960, although it was still a completely "white" suburb,[18] the population of Levittown was roughly a third Jewish, with the remainder about a third Roman Catholic, and a third Protestant.[19]
stfoskey12
Emperor of Foskania
Part of the problem is it became a vicious cycle. Some middle class people leave the cities for the suburbs, because they want a bigger house or yard, so the tax base of the city declines. Then the city can't provide as many good public services, so more people feel the need to leave. This can continue for decades and has caused some US cities like Detroit and St. Louis to lose around 2/3 of their population. There was also the racism aspect of white people not wanting to have too many black neighbors (black people were often unable to move to suburbs due to discrimination/poverty). Once the cities were more depopulated, there were fewer economic opportunities, so crime increased. When crime decreased in the 1990s and 2000s, many people started to move back to cities. However, many cities now do not build sufficient housing to meet demand, leading to high housing prices and issues with homelessness. And since 2020 there has been another crime wave (that has this time affected suburban and rural areas similarly), so it remains to be seen what the future holds.
Also, suburbs are often quite a bit more racially diverse than they were 50 years ago, but it depends a lot on the metropolitan area.
Broken_Erika
Play with me.
Aerosmith has been around for over 50 years.........
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-65447052
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-65447052
