Earlier quoted context omitted.
I live in a small suburban city and I can walk to: * The library (5 minutes) * A supermarket (8 minutes) * A dozen restaurants (7-15 minutes; mostly local restaurants + 2 fast food chains) * Two liquor stores * A drug store (12 minutes) * A coworking space (15 minutes) * Several antique stores (12-15 minutes) * (Almost forgot) Walmart (10 minutes) * Two barbers (8-12 minutes) * At least three major bus lines And if I…
Sounds like an old railroad town that became a suburb. When was your city founded?
How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations
491–500 of 534 posts
Re: How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, I stand corrected. Thank you.
To a certain extent you have to read between the lines, people aren't usually gonna come out and say, "Yes, these regulations are to prevent minorities and the poor from coming to my neighborhood." But that's kind of the obvious takeaway from, say, zoning regulations that mandate houses/lot sizes of a minimum large size: they make it so that a lower-middle class family can't enter an upper-middle class neighborhood b…
Probably 30% of the housing in my town is manufactured homes, though (i.e., dirt cheap), and the city council and planners are actively looking for ways to improve diversity of housing. The people living here in the rich-people subdivisions predictably are against any higher density housing being built, though, probably for exactly the reasons you site (some explicitly site "undesirables", despite the already existing low-income housing).
They also complain that it will affect their view, though. Not the view from their homes, but as they drive along the road. Considering the housing is proposed for right behind a WalMart and other big box development, and in the opposite direction from the mountains from their subdivision. Sigh. "But we'll have to drive past it on the way to WalMart or the grocery! OMG!"
Despite having plenty of "undesirables" (not my word), we're in the top-10 safest cities in the state (#3 or 4, if I recall). The neighboring town (Louisville, CO) has won "best place in the US to raise a family" several times.
And the state is Colorado, where even the "rough" cities are actually pretty safe to begin with. I used to live in Oakland, CA, so there's probably no area in Denver that I'd be uncomfortable walking around at night. There are places I've been quite wary of in Oakland, though.
Re: How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations
#493Earlier quoted context omitted.
I live in a small suburban city and I can walk to: * The library (5 minutes) * A supermarket (8 minutes) * A dozen restaurants (7-15 minutes; mostly local restaurants + 2 fast food chains) * Two liquor stores * A drug store (12 minutes) * A coworking space (15 minutes) * Several antique stores (12-15 minutes) * (Almost forgot) Walmart (10 minutes) * Two barbers (8-12 minutes) * At least three major bus lines And if I…
That's exceptional though. Most American suburbs aren't like that at all, and many of the ones that do have a walkable area, most of their housing is still in unwalkable areas.
>That's exceptional though.
Yes, it's the exception. But it's not non-existent. You just need to choose to live in an area like that.
I lived in Oakland, CA, and had the ability to walk to tons of restaurants, a post office, and a library. And Bart. But Oakland counts as "big city" by most measures.
I also lived in Lafayette, CA [0], walkable to Bart, restaurants, and grocery shopping. And Alameda, CA, walkable to grocery, the post office, an entire shopping center (Southshore [1]), and a beach. And in Boulder CO where I could walk to a supermarket, restaurants, and a library. And another location in Boulder where I could walk to restaurants.
And I've looked at walkable housing in a dozen other suburban cities. If "walkability" is your priority, you can find it all over the place.
[0] Ironically I'm now in Lafayette Colorado. I keep saying I just have a couple more Lafayttes to live in, and I can collect the whole set. :)
Re: How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations
#494Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also just remembered another anectdote. One morning (age 13) I set out to go birdwatching. I had to get up around 5am, in order to get to the estuary before sunrise. I had a small backpack with all my gear, and about a mile from my home, a sheriff's deputy stopped me in his squad car. He quizzed me on what I was doing, asked to look in my backpack, and after 15 minutes, I was on my way. He was obviously surprised t…
> He quizzed me on what I was doing, asked to look in my backpack, and after 15 minutes, I was on my way I don't know what the laws are where you live but I would guess he had no right to search your backpack without your consent. To me, what you're describing is police aggression and you must always push back against any such aggression. You should not have submitted to the search. The legal system is adversarial an…
I was 13, maybe 5'8, and 100lbs soaking wet. He was probably twice my size, armed with numerous weapons. Sure I could have exercised my 4th Amendment rights, but most judges would believe that he had probable cause. Expecting a 13 year old to be a constitutional lawyer (especially back in 1977) is a bit much.
Re: How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations
#495I was thinking about this the other day. Ironically this is the safest time in all of history to let kids do this. Crime is historically very low and our kids want to carry around magical devices that lets us know where they are at all times and contact them instantly. This should be a golden age, yet we've turned it into jail. What gives everyone? Edit: And by "what gives" I mean literally, I live in the US and have…
I COMPLETELY AGREE!! I have been the victim of slander, sadly, so people are right to worry about the state getting all up in one's supposed personal business. Ask any parent of special needs children..State children services getting involved over some BS from the schools.I've seen that situation more than once.:-\
Re: How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations
#496Every several months something like this is posted on HN, and I log in to post a couple of things:
1. During the baby boom, there was a lot of intermittent surveillance. Fewer mothers worked, and every ten or fifteen minutes one might give a look out the back window to see what was going on. This was not intrusive, but it kept down the mischief level on the one hand and the anxiety level on the other.
2. People on HN have a way of talking about suburbs as if they are all cul-de-sacs surrounded by highways. I grew up in a close-in suburb of a large Midwestern city. I was three blocks from school and library, two blocks from grocer, baker, and five-and-dime. In sixth grade, after a transfer, I did take the bus to and from school, though I could and sometimes did walk. Junior high was a mile and a quarter, usually reached by bike.
Re: How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations
#497Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is very true in London, unfortunately. Cars destroy the city - both by polluting it, and making walking and biking dangerous. Boris Johnson's goal as mayor was to optimise traffic flow through London, which just encouraged more cars. Going to a city like Cambridge where the center is shut down to cars is quite eye opening - lots of kids and people walking and biking. In London it's just a sea of cars driving and…
I make a point of banging on any vehicle that's nearly hit someone and not noticed/acknowledged it - regardless of whether it was me they nearly hit or not. People get mad (especially people driving vans/small trucks), but it's disgraceful that people are driving multi-tonne vehicles and are completely oblivious to their surroundings. I'm glad your daughter is ok.
Any vehicle that is close enough for me to touch I hit. There's no reason to drive that close to a human being who doesn't have hundreds of pounds of armor around them.
Re: How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations
#498Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish it were merely a way to avoid taking personal responsibility. There's much more to it than that. Read "The Psychology of Influence" along with some of the stuff by, e.g, Kahneman and/or Tversky on behavioral economics and the various cognitive biases humans have that lead them to make poor decisions. I assure you that corporations have read all of this and are taking advantage of it to part you from your money…
So what exactly are you saying these influences can do? If you tell me that they're going to make me slightly more likely to buy one brand of soap than another, I can accept that. If you tell me that they're going to make me buy diamonds when I have no conceivable use for diamonds, I'm gonna have to call BS.
Well, people buy diamonds and they're basically useless, other than signalling that the purchaser has a certain amount of money. The price for them is much inflated over what it would be if priced purely for their practical value. Artificial diamonds are identical to the naked eye, yet the diamond industry somehow influences our culture to make people think they need to spend many thousands of dollars on useless "real" diamonds.
On a (somewhat) related note, this conversation reminded me of a George Carlin routine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac
Re: How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations
#499Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a critique of that design on new world economics: http://newworldeconomics.com/lets-kick-around-carfree-com/ I think the author did a poor job of arguing there compared to his usual articles, but he does make some decent points.
The articles of this author are interesting, but he’s missing something. Really narrow roads ( But he is right that the #1 priority is in proportions.
(Replying to myself because I can’t edit)
For example, during large events, even smaller cities’ streets can look like this: http://www.bergmann-gruppe.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/vo... (A picture taken during Kieler Woche, one of the largest Volksfests in Europe.)
(Image description for the visually impaired: The image shows a roughly 20-30m wide street directly at the edge of the water in a harbour, people completely fill it, as densely as possible, in the background one can see that it continues for hundreds of meters, all the while being this densely filled with people)
Re: How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations
#500Earlier quoted context omitted.
> He quizzed me on what I was doing, asked to look in my backpack, and after 15 minutes, I was on my way I don't know what the laws are where you live but I would guess he had no right to search your backpack without your consent. To me, what you're describing is police aggression and you must always push back against any such aggression. You should not have submitted to the search. The legal system is adversarial an…
I was 13, maybe 5'8, and 100lbs soaking wet. He was probably twice my size, armed with numerous weapons. Sure I could have exercised my 4th Amendment rights, but most judges would believe that he had probable cause. Expecting a 13 year old to be a constitutional lawyer (especially back in 1977) is a bit much.
> I was 13, maybe 5'8, and 100lbs soaking wet. He was probably twice my size, armed with numerous weapons.
This is the best possible reason to know your rights. Might does not make right.
> Expecting a 13 year old to be a constitutional lawyer (especially back in 1977) is a bit much.
No one's expecting you to be a lawyer but it's not too high an expectation to know your rights, which is the point of Duane's book. Learning your civil rights should be part of everyone's education and it's a shame that it isn't. Police exploit that ignorance, as they did to you.