Category Archives: Places

Cutting writing tests to save money

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The Chicago Tribune reports on Illinois’ plan to cut down on state writing tests for 2010-2011 to save $3.5 million. From the article:

[L]ate last month, the Illinois State Board of Education decided to eliminate the writing exam given to students in grades three, five, six and eight for the 2010-11 school year.

The 11th grade writing test still will be given because some universities require a writing exam of applicants, said state board spokesman Matt Vanover.

I wonder if this is a cut intended to draw outrage from citizens…who might then be willing to pay more toward education.

Additionally, federal statutes focus on reading and math and do not require a writing test. The article also notes that Illinois’ writing scores are typically poor.

Small home – 89 square feet

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I’ve seen this guy, Jay Shafer, in the news before with his 89-square foot home. Here is a video of his small space from Yahoo.

I have always liked small spaces like this, particularly for their coziness. Every time I go to Ikea, I’m attracted to the 280-square foot home they usually have set up.

Stories like these occasionally pop up, often with some sermonizing regarding American consumption. With the average American home around 2,400 square feet, very small houses are rare. Smaller spaces may be common in places like Manhattan (where we occasionally hear about studio apartments created out of closets) but probably don’t appeal to many.

California Picture #1

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The Golden Gate Bridge is impressive from a distance – the color, the length, its position at the front of the bay. It is more impressive from close-up (it really is large) and from several vista points in Marin County.

(My wife and I traveled to California for nine days in early July – this is part of a series of pictures from our trip.)

The large cities of China

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The Infrastructurist presents a graphic displaying the populations of the 60 cities in China with a population over 1 million.

Some interesting points in the comments about what exactly counts as “city population.” The graphic says: “Generally the lighted area that can be observed from an airplane at night.” This is a measurement issue: should rural areas be included? Whole counties? Just within city limits? Metropolitan regions? Each choice for boundaries will change the numbers.

Finding an old ship beneath Manhattan

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I’ve always been fascinated by cities and what is beneath them. Even American cities, which tend to be younger compared to other cities around the world, have some interesting items buried underground. The New York Times reports on the discovery of a 30-foot long 18th-century ship found at the World Trade Center site.

h/t The Infrastructurist

The high costs of living in suburbia

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Via Yahoo! Finance, the New York Times looks at the costs of living in the suburbs vs. living in the city. The verdict: unless a family is sending kids to private school (particularly at middle-school age and above), the suburban life costs about 18% more.

The basis for the analysis – and Manhattan is not part of the figures:

While our analysis was by no means scientific, our goal was to recreate the type of decision a hypothetical family of four earning $175,000 a year might encounter. We chose an upper-middle-class income because that’s generally what our family needs to earn, conservatively, to afford a median-price home in Park Slope, a section of Brooklyn that is family-friendly, has good schools and is generally more affordable than Manhattan.

The two-bedroom, one-bathroom co-operative apartment that we’re using as a model in Park Slope is listed at $675,000, close to the median price for the neighborhood, as calculated by Zillow.com.

We stacked that against a four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bathroom home in South Orange, N.J., just a 30-minute train ride from Manhattan, where the two parents work. The house is selling for $595,000.

Some experts have been talking a long time about the hidden costs of suburbia due to more driving and sprawl. Homes may be cheaper (and bigger) but there are added costs from lower density living.

If homeowners were presented with this sort of evidence (assuming it would hold up across cities), would they chose the suburbs in lesser numbers? Or would people still be willing to pay a premium for the amenities that suburbia can offer?

A battle over replacing a bridge

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The Ambassador Bridge linking Detroit and Windsor, Ontario has drawn attention as public officials discuss building a new bridge instead of undertaking costly repairs. The twist: the existing bridge is privately owned. Both the private owner and public officials are discussing where they might build a new bridge – the private owner wanting one under his control, the public officials wanting one under their control.

Spies in suburbia: not unusual

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The Russian spy ring recently caught in America was primarily based in suburbia. One New York Times writer argues that this is not that unusual:

We’ve seen this movie before, a variation on “Fun With Dick and Jane” or “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” among others.

It’s fun, but as sociology, the story line set against the presumed seamless banality of suburban life gets ever flimsier. We seem to have had a computer chip implanted in our brain about the time of “Little Boxes,” the dopey and incredibly sanctimonious 1962 song about suburban conformity (“Little boxes made of ticky tacky … Little boxes all the same”) that helped define the suburbs. And it seems to persist even as its descriptive value trends toward zero. So at a time when more than half of Americans live in suburbs, what exactly does the suburban part of this tale tell us? Alas, not much.

The article contains more information about the growing diversity in suburbia including a smaller number of families living the “Ozzie and Harriet sort of life.” (Perhaps this phrase needs to be updated for the 21st century since “Ozzie and Harriet” is a little dated. How about the “Homer and Marge Simpson suburban life”?) If a majority of Americans live in suburbia, it is not unusual that a number of nefarious characters come out of suburbia.

What is not addressed in this article is a stereotype that suburbia leads people to such things as spying, violence, and breaking up their families to escape the dull and empty suburban lifestyle. In this case, the Russians came to suburbia to blend in and live a normal life.

Not simply deriding suburban life

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An AP story discusses a supposed movement to take the suburbs more seriously and move beyond common negative stereotypes. One scholar accurately notes:

“Change your mind about what the suburbs are,” said Robert Puentes, a suburban scholar at the Brookings Institution. “They’re not just bedroom communities for center-city workers. They’re not just rich enclaves. They’re not all economically stable. They’re not all exclusively white.”

“These are not your father’s suburbs of the 1950s and 1960s.”

Efforts toward this end include a new museum in Johnson County, Kansas and several academic centers.

These stereotypes will take time to overcome. Common stereotypes, dating back to at least the 1950s, include: bland homes and people, desperate housewives, whites only, lifestyles centered all around children, wealthy people only, conservative, low-brow, garish (from strip malls to shopping malls to McMansions).

The story cites two academic centers for suburban studies. For much of the last 100 years, academics have often led the way in deriding suburbia. To fight some of these stereotypes, more academics would need to be able to move beyond knee-jerk reactions and acknowledge suburbia’s complexities.