I am also hearing cesar’s fit over this. Most ex-Cubans would rather hear nothing good coming from Castro’s regime.

As an aside, in case you were thinking I liked the idea of cities, my daughter was sitting at a stoplight yesterday when she became a minor player in a road rage incident (or a gang war?). Apparently a young man, with his wife and daughter in the car, cut another young man off in traffic. The person who was cut off began shooting. The person being shot at was fleeing to his house to call 911 and when he couldn’t negotiate a corner and crashed into my daughter’s car. The victim’s 2-year-old daughter (I know, she was the actual victim) had been shot in the leg. The man fled 26 blocks, with an apparently bleeding two-year-old before hitting my daughter’s car, speeding through an adjacent parking lot, across a street, and into his driveway. Then he and his wife jumped out of the car, ran inside, and called the cops.

Aside from my daughter (who is fine), my grandson who was in the car and will have great stories to tell at high school today), and the car (‘Josh’ has two smashed doors), a hundred things have flashed through my head. Mostly I want to tell her to GET OUT OF THE CITY NOW!

Michael Irving

That’s a mouthful and no doubt. I’m struggling with a deadline right now so I will concentrate on one idea. At the outset I’m sure you realize that the deck is stacked against changing any of the laws in a way that would make it illegal to continue the build-out of suburbia. Politicians from the lowliest village backbench town councilor to POTUS are in the pocket of the business community. It is the money business pours into campaigns that puts these guys in office and it is the money governments gets back in taxes that allows them to do things that entices the voters to reelect them over and over. It is the money from business that hires the lobbyists that craft the laws that are skewed towards business. And then in many cases there is the revolving door that puts the businessmen or lobbyists into office, or into positions of power in government bureaucracies where they can make the rules that make themselves and their buddies rich.

So here is the idea, and it is definitely not mine. In the book “Ecotopia” by Ernest Callenbach (or it could be “Ecotopia Rising) there is a section that describes a developer who has forsaken the constant build-out of suburbia, in this case east of San Francisco, and instead had begun buying, renovating, and reselling older buildings in town, I think Oakland in the book. It discusses how this man had determined that it was an economic advantage for him to do that rather than trying to go through all of the red tape required by government. He had discovered further that he had a bigger profit margin with this technique. He also did not want to talk too much with other developers because this idea was turning out to be the goose that laid the golden egg for him. Finally he had discovered that he felt much better about himself and what he was doing. Now granted, all of that is fiction, but I don’t know why something like that couldn’t be a model for the real world of 2010. In fact I would be willing to guess that exactly that is going on all over the country but we just don’t hear about it.

Same book (books) different situation—Callenbach also has a section where he talks about at group of truck farmers, again east of SF, who have been purchasing land, in fact out-bidding developers, because then found it was an economic advantage to pay higher land prices but to be closer to their customers. Again, fiction, but…

Finally, from the same source, references to neighborhoods taking over their streets, blocking them off to create cul-de-sacs to improve their livability.

Sorry I don’t have time to find real world examples of these same ideas right now. They may not be workable. However, your question was is there a way? Remember that Kunstler has predicted the early “End of Suburbia” via peak oil so maybe it will happen by itself. If not, I’m thinking there are ways to approach the problem from the bottom rather than trying to force change from the top.

I’ll try to spend some more time thinking about it later, but like I said, I’m up against a deadline.

Michael Irving

Please go back to the previous “Infiltrating the Mainstream Media”.The 1st comment there of Jan.13,2010.I’d really be interested in your perspective on it.I invite others to do the same.

ProfEmGuy:

I realize there is a limit on what we can say here,especially with your
new venue in “The Examiner”.I tried to be as oblique as possible to get
by the censors.Your thoughts please.

Frank Mezek

I’m in that place too.

I may be atheist, but I loves me some Lao-Tse.
Mist-hidden, but still radiant:

-vertalio

Another thought for you about Jensen’s comments and your 10 steps. Today my daughter reminded me of the Tao, verse 64. It’s the one that notes, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Lao Tzu also points out in that verse the following:

“Being prepared for hardship,
One will not be overcome by it.”

Michael Irving

Thanks.

Michael Irving

Were my ideas on the suburbs too radical,too subversive.Certainly illegal.But are they not food for thought?

How far can we go?

Frank Mezek