LEAVE MY HOUSE ALONE

Here's an interesting review that is trying hard to pitch a book about how Americans should be forced to live because this crew knows best: from amazon:

 The Geography of Nowhere traces America's evolution from a nation of Main Streets and coherent communities to a land where every place is like no place in particular, where the cities are dead zones and the countryside is a wasteland of cartoon architecture and parking lots. In elegant and often hilarious prose, Kunstler depicts our nation's evolution from the Pilgrim settlements to the modern auto suburb in all its ghastliness. The Geography of Nowhere tallies up the huge economic, social, and spiritual costs that America is paying for its car-crazed lifestyle. It is also a wake-up call for citizens to reinvent the places where we live and work, to build communities that are once again worthy of our affection. Kunstler proposes that by reviving civic art and civic life, we will rediscover public virtue and a new vision of the common good. "The future will require us to build better places," Kunstler says, "or the future will belong to other people in other societies."

The simple fact is that what people build and where they build is based solely on how and where they want to live. It isn't what the control freaks who want to run your life want. People with small children want a place where the kids can play safely. They want good schools. They want neighbors who share their values. They weren't rounded up at gun point and forced to march out into the bleak wilderness to create the 'horrible awful suburbs with good schools, sidewalks, driveways, 2 car garages'.

What relentlessly escapes the utopians attention about suburbs is that suburbs, by their very nature, regulate who can live there. People who are like you can afford to live near you in your suburb. Every morning you go out and find your car is where you left it and nobody has smashed it to steal the radio. You come home from work to find your house is just as you left it. Sirens are a rarity and you may go for months without seeing an emergency vehicle on your street.

Crime-ridden, abandoned, recently gentrified, vibrant, diverse are words used to describe city neighborhoods but you seldom see them applied to suburbs. There are towns like that, but let's be honest, those aren't suburbs; they are old towns that failed to take off as cities after something happened to the industry there.

People actually choose the suburban life and even give up the city life for the things that matter most to them. Starbucks and the endless catering to people with money have brought the things people like most about cities to the little towns they prefer to live in. Freeways made it all possible. Naturally, the modern fascist utopian loathes freeways for letting the people escape from the collective.

I wish the modern utopian fascists would just shut up and go live in the places they imagine are ideal such as New London, Detroit, Chicago or Philadelphia. Maybe they'd like to gentrify Anacostia and get a nice place with a river view right there in our nation's capital. It might be nice if everybody had an apartment like Seinfeld's or like the ones you see on TV about people living in the big city but it isn't really like that now, is it?