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The Hollywood sign debuted 100 years ago

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Re: The Hollywood sign debuted 100 years ago

#101

Post by arethuza »

twblalock wrote: post #47
rtpg wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that loads of people are fine with apartments because of the price/convenience/location. If you ask a young couple "would you rather pay $1500/month to be in an apartment or $3000/month to be in a SFH", you think everyone is choosing the latter?

Once they have kids, almost everyone who can afford it chooses a home in the quietest and safest neighborhood they can get into. Apartments are fun when you are young and want to live downtown and enjoy the restaurants and the night life. When you get older and want your home to be a refuge and raise a family, apartments really suck.

"apartments really suck"

What I remember most about living in a flat was my wife and I being able to walk to work and our son being able to walk to school. Didn't hear the neighbours and we had access to really nice private gardens.

There is nothing fundamentally sucky about apartments/flats.

Edit: Of course, a lot of flats/apartments suck - but then again so do many houses. If you have flats built with proper construction and sensibly planned then they can be very pleasant.

Re: The Hollywood sign debuted 100 years ago

#102

Post by QuizzicalCarbon »

voltaireodactyl wrote: post #88
fingerlocks wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m from your generation and my only memory of the film was a lot of talking and very little action. Have you seen it as an adult? Curious how it holds up. Wikipedia’s page is interesting, apparently its got a cult following now.

For the record: it holds up brilliantly. James Hornet’s score alone is worth the ride — still used as a primary temp track for figuring out the edits of new movies. Effects are the best practical work has to offer. Timothy Dalton as Errol Flynn with an Aryan secret is phenomenal, having the most fun of his career. Jennifer Connelly is a full on movie star hitting her stride. Alan Arkin at his peak grumpy old man stag…

Seconding the great score.

Re: The Hollywood sign debuted 100 years ago

#103

Post by afavour »

scns wrote: post #99

It was in a bad shape when Hugh Heffner moved to LA, he started a campaign to get it restored IIRC. He did a lot civil rights and ending segregation too. The southern TV stations objected to him showing black entertainers and talking to them in his TV show, he stood by his values. And he gave a voice to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X in Playboy. Source: the documentary about him on Amazon Prime, highly recommended.

Also an interesting watch is the A&E documentary about the dark side of Hefner and Playboy: https://www.aetv.com/shows/secrets-of-playboy

It’s 12 parts and honestly could have easily been 10 if not less but it’s always worth exploring the duality of the man. No denying his social progressivism but he definitely wasn’t all shining light and I’m suspicious of anything that paints him as if he were.

Re: The Hollywood sign debuted 100 years ago

#104

Post by OJFord »

twblalock wrote: post #33
eganist wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your own reference seems to confirm OP's point that sprawl, not density, is what increased. Relatively few places in the greater LA area have properly dense housing projects, and you just have to look across LA from vantage points along either Mulholland drive or Rancho Palos Verdes to see for yourself. Plenty of opportunity for high-rise and even more mid-rise projects, but nearly everything is low-rise. Thankfully…

That’s because people want to live in low rise buildings. The average person in California (and in the rest of the country) desires to live in a detached home that they own. It is not wrong to want that. However, it is definitely wrong to assume that high-rise apartments are “proper” density and that LA is doing it wrong. LA is the way the people live there want it to be. If you want high density and high-rise living…

> The average person in California (and in the rest of the country) desires to live in a detached home that they own.

And then you put them inches away from one another, lined up in perfect rows!

I don't get it, looking on (mainly through TV/film) from the UK, what makes detached houses desirable is almost entirely lacking from North American streets, they frequently seem to look like a terrace that's been chopped up. Is it perhaps because timber framing makes noise more of a problem in terraces/semis; so that becomes the prime motivator for detached?

Re: The Hollywood sign debuted 100 years ago

#105

Post by nemo44x »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #43
hnav wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NYC is a whole city of five boroughs with different densities, Hollywood and K-town are neighborhoods. Manhattan which is what most think of as NYC is 70k+/sqmi

Even with five boroughs, I'm still surprised NYC is this low. In addition to the obvious Staten Island, apparently Queens "only" has 22,125! I always thought it would be close to Brooklyn etc.

When you get out there in Queens (it’s a huge landmass) it’s single family homes.

Re: The Hollywood sign debuted 100 years ago

#106

Post by brenns10 »

sokoloff wrote: post #98
brenns10 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's important to be very clear: you're misrepresenting the options! It's not a choice between suburbia and Manhattan. It's a choice between exclusionary, backwards suburban zoning (which is subsidized by denser development due to the increased cost of utilities for sprawling development), and literally any more sane option. Let people build duplexes, corner stores, local markets, and get rid of the cul de sacs. That…

You seem to be arguing that people who want to buy (or at least live in) housing of type X should not have their ability to do entirely blocked by land use laws that make them illegal. That makes logical sense yet in the same post you propose to “get rid of the cul-de-sacs” which is a type of land use that many people genuinely prefer, even if you don’t.

We can have both, can't we? Obviously I don't like cul-de-sacs personally, but nowhere in my comment did I suggest banning them. The phrase you quoted was just a turn of phrase as I described my preferred style of land use which is currently illegal in most zoning laws. Right now.

It's kind of funny that your reaction to my comment is "he wants to take away the cul-de-sac" when all I'm asking is if we can get zoning for a decent alternative. I'm not asking to replace all the suburbs with this style of zoning, but especially as you get to areas with high unmet housing demand, zoning needs to be reconsidered.

Re: The Hollywood sign debuted 100 years ago

#107

Post by nemo44x »

sologoub wrote: post #52
eganist wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it’s a big place and has many different neighborhoods. That's called sprawl.

Instead of dismissing with derogatory terms, you should try to actually get to know these. You’d realize that Santa Monica is very different from West Hollywood, which is also different from Hollywood, K-town, etc. Even in the valleys, Sherman Oaks is very different from Agoura. OC would take years to really get to know as well. When you look at areal/satellite imagery, Santa Barbara to San Diego is basically connect…

Many people, mainly misanthropes, won’t be happy until everyone lives in a soulless box in the sky and eat crickets for dinner after a day of standing on a crowded train. Every apartment block will at least come with a suicide room.

Re: The Hollywood sign debuted 100 years ago

#108

Post by smcl »

twblalock wrote: post #47
rtpg wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that loads of people are fine with apartments because of the price/convenience/location. If you ask a young couple "would you rather pay $1500/month to be in an apartment or $3000/month to be in a SFH", you think everyone is choosing the latter?

Once they have kids, almost everyone who can afford it chooses a home in the quietest and safest neighborhood they can get into. Apartments are fun when you are young and want to live downtown and enjoy the restaurants and the night life. When you get older and want your home to be a refuge and raise a family, apartments really suck.

I think the problem here is you're taking a personal feeling (that you want to live in a big suburban house), projecting it over a population (suggesting everyone wants to live in a big suburban house) and swatting away any disagreements (where people say they don't necessarily want to live in a big suburban house) without really taking on board what they're saying. I don't think you can be convinced to change your mind, but you should recognise that the lifestyle you're describing is unsustainable at scale - huge chunks of continental Europe would be entirely paved over if we lived this way, or even if they were just at the density of somewhere like Houston or LA.

Re "apartments really suck" - I beg to differ. I live in a 1920s apartment block in an inner-city neighbourhood, it's 50m from a school where my neighbours kids walk every day (high school is further, but they'll take the trolley or tram), there's a cafe on the corner, a couple of local pubs on my street, and a supermarket 5 mins walk away. I don't hear neighbours through the walls, we have a shared garden with an apple tree and grape vines. I walk ~10 minutes to meet friends at my local cinema, and walk my dog in a handful of different parks which are between 5 and 15 minutes walk away. Can you please explain what part of any of this "sucks" because I am personally struggling to see it.

I suspect you'll suggest that my situation is exceptional (it's not, this describes most accommodation where I live) and counter that it's possible to make a bad apartment. But really it's possible to fuck up any kind of housing development - the UK has some spectacular examples of both shit tower blocks and shit single-family dwellings last century for starters. So the difference is that those single home developments also incur a pretty stiff cost to cities, society and the environment that you cannot handwave away unless you just want to say “well I don’t mind if the rest of the world sucks, as long as I get to have a big garden”

Re: The Hollywood sign debuted 100 years ago

#109

Post by foobarbecue »

animal_spirits wrote: post #94

If anyone hasn't watched the documentary 'Cadillac Desert' on the importance of water in the history and development of the United States Southwest, then I would highly recommend putting it on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PR2BSGQt2DU

Is it based on the book?

Re: The Hollywood sign debuted 100 years ago

#110

Post by brenns10 »

twblalock wrote: post #48
rtpg wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a false choice presented here, about choosing to live in high rise/high density. Even NYC basically peters out to low rises just out of brooklyn! The overall problem, though, is that these density restrictions cause a nasty spiral. People looking for work are asked to move to one of these cities where their bosses own these wonderful homes. They mostly have to rent. Rent is high. Supply is low, so it's hard t…

It sounds like your problem is not really about housing at all. This is a rant against the entire society. I used to think the NIMBYs were full of it -- they say their opponents wanted to force everyone into high-density living arrangements, everyone must live in a communist tower block dystopia, people's yards and green spaces would be taken from them, huge buildings would tower over neighborhoods and block out all…

I'm not convinced you understood the comment you replied to, which doesn't suggest placing a public park in somebody's yard. It suggests that people are clinging to their yard when they could instead have a housing option which doesn't have a private dedicated yard, but does have a much larger and nicer public park nearby which serves that need for green space.

And honestly, if a person wants to make a little public park in their yard... I don't see what the issue is with that? But yeah, that's not what was suggested in the slightest.

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