The Albany Times Union yesterday debuted the first article in a series chronicling the growth of the Capital Region’s suburbs in the last half century and the effect it is having on the present day.  Yesterday’s cover story gives the editorial introduction, and today’s page prints comments from the TU’s blog.

Now, with the price of gas above $4 a gallon, some wonder if the Capital Region, and the rest of the country, is at a crossroads. Can the growth of suburbia continue? Can the region maintain its high quality of life if existing trends continue? Will fuel become so pricey people can no longer afford commutes from the outlying suburbs?

As I read the article and the comments, I couldn’t help but notice that these questions have great relevance to the Democratic primary for Congress in the 21st district.  Indeed, some are exactly the same questions being asked of the four Democrats running for the seat.

Complete analysis below the fold...

Increasing suburban housing density is a  key issue for progressives under 35.  It is a key issue because it connects directly to economic stability and the quality of life.  

Most cities in this country were built around the automobile, and in many places public transportion is now almost non-existent, even in large cities.

Public transportion that existed prior to the automobile were dismantled by the emergent automobile industry in a move that came to be known as the Great American Streetcar Scandal; General Motors managed to remove over 100 streetcar systems nationwide by 1950. By the time antitrust investigators could go to work, the deed was done. American mass-transit was "dead".

Great American Streetcar Scandal

Prices for homes are down again, and the decline shows no sign of stopping.  But not all homes are equal in the falling market, and there's a new factor that's helping to determine which areas fail and which areas thrive.

But even in regions that have taken a beating, some neighborhoods remain practically unscathed. And a pattern is emerging as to which neighborhoods those are.  The ones with short commutes are faring better than places with long drives into the city. Some analysts see a pause in what has long been inexorable — urban sprawl.

I got into some trouble recently about something I said on my wildly popular and influential PodCast, Grant Miller Media Podimonium.

My comments were taken out of context and now the blogosphere is upset, demanding an apology and calling for my dismissal.

Here are the transcripts. You decide if anything was out of line:

Today's issue of the Philadelphia Inquirer has two articles as part of the Great Expectations Project, a joint project of the Inquirer and the University of Pennsylvania which is supported by the Lenfest and Knight Foundations.  They "Let's drop Us vs. Them attitudes" by former Inquirer editorial page director Chris Satullo (see http://www.philly.com/... and "Move Philly forward via optimism" by former Inquirer metro columnist (and long ago state capitol reporter) Tom Ferrick (see http://www.philly.com/...

This is a vital issue for the Inquirer institutionally as well as for the city and suburbs: Inquirer readership is being eroded on both fronts. The sixth largesst city in the country now has the tenth largest circulation newspaper. In what may foretell an eventual move of its main office to the suburbs, the Inquirer's headquarters a few blocks north of City Hall is now up for sale.

My two maternal cousins live the "American Dream" of supposedly unlimited physical space, unlimited privacy, and unlimited mobility. It's a treat to visit their lovely homes, in exclusive residential neighborhoods in the hills east of the San Francisco Bay. I myself live in a one-bedroom apartment in a mildly scruffy neighborhood in Oakland's urban core.

I would not trade living situations with either of my cousins for all the tea in China. I also don't particularly envy their children, growing up in those pretty, sanitized enclaves.

The reasons why not, strike at the heart of what it is about the automobile culture, and the dynamics of suburbia, that have destroyed communities, so isolating and demoralizing Americans in the decades since World War II, that the ubiquity of the car may indeed have helped pave the way for demagoguery and neoconservatism in this country.  

Yes, some people shun cities for suburbs for reasons I'd find it hard to argue with. The relative health of public education, in city and suburb, comes to mind. There are also many examples of vibrant civic engagement and community life in "bedroom communities." My paean to city living, then, consists of generalizations, supported by first-hand experience. With that disclaimer...

Travel time to work, and by what mode of transportation -- also known as "journey to work" (.pdf) -- is an important issue, effecting our quality of life and lifestyle; the environment and global warming; time spent with family and friends or time alone, obesity; policy and spending choices for families, communities, and governments. And hence it is a political topic.

(as always, it would be nice, and make this poll more valid, if it were to stay up in recommend diary list into the evening hours west coast time, to allow for maximum and equivalent voting by all U.S. time zones).

I'd never heard of them until now, but apparently young, rich, moderately conservative (wah?), machiado guzzling suburbanites have been recently referred to as "Starbucks Republicans."

This gives a bad name to all the self-respecting suburban caffiene addicts - these people are not representative of Starbucks goers or suburbanites. Isn't there a word for those few wannabe hipster-ish, young, wealthy independents? Oh yeah, YUPPIES!

Cross posted at unclezeb.blogspot.com

"I know the depression's depressing..."
A New Deal for Christmas, Annie

The cheese paring is getting me down. After buying a house, having a kid, going to grad school, then having another kid, we've been broke for years. We're always paying bills the day they're due (or begging for extensions), scrabbling for quarters for lunch money, and handing out blankets to our shivering guests. I look at my house with the collapsing fence, the leaking roof, the chipped linoleum, and I wonder if other moms worry about sending their kids over here.  We drive people in our old, backfiring car (or our ancient van that requires a hand start), and I wince at their expressions. At night, we lie awake wondering: if we miss a payment tomorrow, will our whole house of cards come crashing down? So far, we've been making it...

As a white suburban mom with white surburban kids working in a white suburban school I am getting really sick and tired of bash the white surburban lifestyle thingy as it pertains to bullying, ostracizing and Cho.

I invite you to read below.

Cross-posted from Larry's Phat Page.

I really don’t want to turn this into a Virginia Tech massacre blog, but I did want to mention something else I heard about it that really has gotten me to thinking about the changes we need to make in our culture to prevent a repeat. About 16 hours ago, around 1:00 am EDT this past morning, I was driving along Interstate 495 in Massachusetts, and decided to tune in WBZ-AM (1030) out of Boston. The Steve LeVeille Broadcast was on at the time, and he was discussing several facets of the incident; at one point, he made a comment — an enlightening and mostly correct one, in my opinion — that the vast majority of the student-perpetrated school massacres we have seen in the last 10 years have occurred in suburban areas, or larger rural cities that somewhat resemble suburbs.

Living in white surburbia as a black woman can be very isolating.  In the light of discussions of race I have decided to share my feelings in verse (see below). All minorities have to deal with problems in our society such as classim, sexism,homophobia, anti-semitism etc. These are behaviours that we, for one reason or the other, internalize  on a daily basis.  We black folk speak to our families and friends about racist attitudes we encounter daily but we never address it at work unless it cannot be avoided. Most of the time the people who direct it at us always pull the 'race card'.  So we go along each day learning to mask our feelings with smiles. We have learned to live with it because for the majority of us, we do not have a choice. Yes, we also have to deal with our own dirty laundry in the black community, and believe me there are those of us who fight, in different ways, against those in our communities who perpetuate self-hate through music etc. We just do not get the media coverage on a daily basis.  When the black community gets coverage in the media it is usually for something that went wrong.  

For the past decade, or so, we have been hearing about those Soccer Moms who vote GOP.  

They have been against Government "interfering in their lives", althought how and when that occured was never clear.  They object to "Welfare Queens" althought who and where those folks existed, except in the spin of political operatives was never established.  

They were portrayed as "Christians" determined to uphold "Family Values" promoted by ignorant biblical literalists, anxious to build a personal power base.  

They were carefully and systematically terrified over "Internet Porn", "Hollywood", and the "crime, and degredation of American Values" supposedly rampant in every city.  

I don't like malls, but I went to one yesterday, looking for some leggings, as in warm leg coverings for winter--which this still is. Every store I went to had either just gotten rid of them, or had only a few left. But what I noticed even more was the clothing displays: shorts, tee-shirts, short-sleeved dresses, beachwear--

I mean, c'mon! It's ten degrees outside. The mall itself was reasonably warm--it must take a lot of oil to keep it that way--but is this how people view the world? Beachwear in January? Or are people not expected to shop for clothes appropriate for the season, but only for two seasons ahead? Or do the storeowners think that with global warming winter can just be wished away? Of course malls are a major contributor to global warming, because

I am very active in my local Audubon Society chapter, Prairie Woods Audubon.  One of our proudest accomplishments is the acquisition and continued maintenance of a 7.5 acre virgin prairie in Palatine, IL known as Palatine Prairie.  Although Prairie Woods assisted in the funds needed to purchase the property, the actual owners are the Palatine Park District and the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago.

Join me for the story of our recent fight for this little slice of prairie heaven after the jump ...

While the development reported in today's New York Times, that wages are finally beginning to outpace prices, is somewhat encouraging (although it's about damn time), a far more troubling report has come out suggesting that poverty is not exclusively an urban problem, but a national one.

As Americans flee the cities for the suburbs, many are failing to leave poverty behind.

The suburban poor outnumbered their inner-city counterparts for the first time last year, with more than 12 million suburban residents living in poverty, according to a study of the nation's 100 largest metropolitan areas released Thursday.

On the flip...

In some previous energy independence diaries (list below the fold), I have mentioned retrofitting the suburbs. That is because suburban sprawl creates gross energy inefficiency. However, one of the common objections, when this point is raised, is that Americans are not going to vote for policies to pack them into dense urban landscape ... Americans, we are told, like the space.

SO I am sketching out how this may work. Retrofitting outer suburbs means recreating the option in the outer suburbs of living in conditions like a compact small town. In the town that I am writing from, large numbers of people drive everywhere they go. However, it is possible to walk to the supermarket, the post office, a pastry shop, a coffee shop, etc. ... with etc. including more pizza places than you can shake a stick at.

This is crossposted from the OAC, and the original diary was too big for the Daily Kos. So its been broken into two parts. The sketch of retrofitting an outer suburb below the break.