For a minute there I thought I had to get off my couch, when all the while the fact is we don't have to do anything much but keep things afloat for just a few decades more! In fact, we'd best shut up about PO, because if our offspring finds out we knew about it all along, they'll turn and wring our necks come 2036!
Posted: Fri Jul 04, 2008 7:04 pm Post subject: Re: end of suburbia?
Homesteader wrote:
Yeah, the 4.5 hour bicycle commute, that'll catch right on amongst the masses.
The masses have a ~30 mile commute at ~35mph IIRC, so w/ vehicles taking up half the space, congestion would probably be relieved enough to increase commute speed and reduce commute times. Or we can sit and whine about D00m! _________________
Joined: Apr 12, 2007 Posts: 1162 Location: Central NC
Posted: Fri Jul 04, 2008 7:07 pm Post subject: Re: end of suburbia?
yesplease wrote:
Homesteader wrote:
Yeah, the 4.5 hour bicycle commute, that'll catch right on amongst the masses.
The masses have a ~30 mile commute at ~35mph IIRC, so w/ vehicles taking up half the space, congestion would probably be relieved enough to increase commute speed and reduce commute times. Or we can sit and whine about D00m!
Enjoy your alternate reality. You've earned the ignore button. _________________ "The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences…"
Sir Winston Churchill
Posted: Fri Jul 04, 2008 7:25 pm Post subject: Re: end of suburbia?
Homesteader wrote:
Enjoy your alternate reality.
I apologize for using facts and figures. Clearly, if the masses used velomobiles their commute distances would increase because they lurve themselves some exercise, and congestion would increase because those velomobile doohickies are the size of boats!
Homesteader wrote:
You've earned the ignore button.
Yet another PO member interested in reasonable discussion, but only w/ those who drink of the same kool-aide.
But seriously, I kid! Do what ya like, ignoring another poster won't change the options people have, regardless of if they choose to use 'em or not use 'em. _________________
Posted: Fri Jul 04, 2008 7:55 pm Post subject: Re: end of suburbia?
Homesteader wrote:
yesplease wrote:
Homesteader wrote:
Yeah, the 4.5 hour bicycle commute, that'll catch right on amongst the masses.
The masses have a ~30 mile commute at ~35mph IIRC, so w/ vehicles taking up half the space, congestion would probably be relieved enough to increase commute speed and reduce commute times. Or we can sit and whine about D00m!
Enjoy your alternate reality. You've earned the ignore button.
Posted: Fri Jul 04, 2008 11:05 pm Post subject: Re: end of suburbia?
DantesPeak wrote:
Some posters think they are very funny and witty, when actually what they say is insulting and irrational
Since that's pretty much subjective, isn't it up to the person who feels offended to inform the other person that they're offending them? Personally, I don't mind, with a few obvious exceptions, changing what or how I write stuff if someone asks, but at the same time I'm not going to walk on eggshells for fear of offending someone.
That being said, if someone's responding sarcastically and blowing stuff out of proportion, I'll respond in kind. I don't think it's hurtful per say, and I do enjoy joking around, but if someone feels differently they can always ask the individual in question to stop in a polite manner like anyone else.
Posted: Sat Jul 05, 2008 1:54 am Post subject: Re: end of suburbia?
Homesteader wrote:
yesplease wrote:
Homesteader wrote:
Yeah, the 4.5 hour bicycle commute, that'll catch right on amongst the masses.
The masses have a ~30 mile commute at ~35mph IIRC, so w/ vehicles taking up half the space, congestion would probably be relieved enough to increase commute speed and reduce commute times. Or we can sit and whine about D00m!
Enjoy your alternate reality. You've earned the ignore button.
I don't know what the big fuss is about, really. This place would be really depressing if we didn't have any at least semi optimistic members. _________________ Peak oil is sort of like a mental Everlasting Gobstopper, except it tastes like ass and you can't get it out of your mouth.
Posted: Sat Jul 05, 2008 3:05 am Post subject: Re: end of suburbia?
mos6507 wrote:
....
I don't know what the big fuss is about, really. This place would be really depressing if we didn't have any at least semi optimistic members.
I sincerely hope you are NOT trying to *suggest* people are being put on ignore lists because there is a disagreement.
I disagree with you mos6507 (remember the suburbia debate and public transit?)
I disagree with MontyQuest on nuclear power.
I disagree with Ludi about urban gardening.
I disagreed with Tyler_JC when the Chevy volt electric car was announced
I disagreed with kublikhan on wind power
However none of the people above listed is on my ignore list because they have all behaved professionally.
I have 5 people on my ignore list and ALL of them have truly earned it by their own behavior.
In a IRL (in real life) conversation if someone is:
1) respectful I gladly return the favor.
2) acting unprofessional I tell them to leave me alone and then I ignore them
Why should an internet conversation be any different?
Posted: Sat Jul 05, 2008 3:44 am Post subject: Re: end of suburbia?
cube wrote:
In a IRL (in real life) conversation if someone is:
1) respectful I gladly return the favor.
2) acting unprofessional I tell them to leave me alone and then I ignore them
Why should an internet conversation be any different?
I dunno why, but apparently an internet convo is different for you. For instance in the past, instead of ignoring me, you instead wanted to "expose" me!
*plays X-Files musicz*
cube wrote:
yesplease you must be confused.
You see I didn't come here to convince you.
I knew from the beginning what you were going to do.
Your personality is predictable.
You have a history of lying and I'm just here to expose you.
Posted: Sat Jul 05, 2008 3:50 am Post subject: Re: end of suburbia?
mos6507 wrote:
I don't know what the big fuss is about, really. This place would be really depressing if we didn't have any at least semi optimistic members.
I wouldn't even go so far as to say I'm optimistic. However, it seems that in these here parts, pointing out cherry-picked, irrational, or just nutty statements automagically makes one an optimist/cornucopian. If I went on an auto forum and pointed out that Hydrogen fuel cells weren't viable I'd probably get the same crap except I'd be a d00m3r. It's just more Groupthink BS. You, TheDude, energyunlimited, The_Toecutter, BigTex, and plenty of others take stuff in stride. If I'm talking w/ y'all, and point something out, if it checks out you don't seem to mind, and if it doesn't, you'll posting somthing showing it doesn't and/or explain your position, and I'll be all like, omgz, I am wrong FTW! Ditto on my end IMO. Otoh, there seem to be some posters who really don't like it if anyone says anything contrary and will use evasive tactics and insults to avoid the mere notion that maybe their assumptions or ideas weren't accurate in the first place. To them a question seems like a personal insult!
In any event, I think alomst anything in our control is secondary compared to ~10,000-20,000 nukes, most of which could probably level a city alone. Not counting all the superbugs and nasty chemicals available to the survivors should they want to continue slaughtering each other. All of which could be triggered by some cranky old dude who probably isn't gonna live for another decade anyway.
Edit- In any event...
Quote:
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Joined: Apr 12, 2007 Posts: 1162 Location: Central NC
Posted: Sat Jul 05, 2008 5:57 am Post subject: Re: end of suburbia?
cube wrote:
mos6507 wrote:
....
I don't know what the big fuss is about, really. This place would be really depressing if we didn't have any at least semi optimistic members.
I sincerely hope you are NOT trying to *suggest* people are being put on ignore lists because there is a disagreement.
I disagree with you mos6507 (remember the suburbia debate and public transit?)
I disagree with MontyQuest on nuclear power.
I disagree with Ludi about urban gardening.
I disagreed with Tyler_JC when the Chevy volt electric car was announced
I disagreed with kublikhan on wind power
However none of the people above listed is on my ignore list because they have all behaved professionally.
I have 5 people on my ignore list and ALL of them have truly earned it by their own behavior.
In a IRL (in real life) conversation if someone is:
1) respectful I gladly return the favor.
2) acting unprofessional I tell them to leave me alone and then I ignore them
Why should an internet conversation be any different?
+1
Heineken said
The doom position is a learning process. If learning does not occur or elaborate counter-theories are spun, one may be said to be in denial or simply stupid.
Time is to short to put up with either scenario. _________________ "The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences…"
Sir Winston Churchill
Joined: Jul 06, 2008 Posts: 37 Location: Pennsylvania USA
Posted: Sun Jul 06, 2008 12:16 pm Post subject: Re: end of suburbia?
alokin wrote:
We're not living in the US so I would like to know if it is something what you are experiencing in your daily live? Neighbors must leave their home, or whole suburbs going down or vacant houses?
Are new families moving in or do the houses just stay vacant?
The people who are moving out must live somewhere, so they must rent somewhere, hence there shouldn't be vacant houses?
Yes, it's effecting some of us in our daily lives.
I would like to move, especially closer to work. I have a 40 mile round trip commute. (I live in the city, and I work in the countryside.)
I have had a HELL of a time finding an appropriate apartment. I realize apartments are less common in the countryside, but I've even been looking in towns just closER to work, or outside the city where the wage tax is less.
It's not like it used to be, I can say that much. The apartments are not as nice, or they're much more expensive, and/or the landlords are more often able to demand more restrictions (like higher deposits, less perks, no appliances, no pets, etc. etc.). Things have definitely changed in that respect.
I think a lot of people who used to live in houses, are now renting apartments. And maybe also a lot of people who would ordinarily be buying houses are having to continue renting.
And I'm saying this, and I live in an area (the Northeast US) that SUPPOSEDLY has not been significantly effected by the subprime mortgage foreclosures.
(added later)
BUT A few months back the local tv news did a piece about the animal shelters being overloaded with dogs & cats, and they interviewed a young girl, probably around 13 years old, and she said she believed the reason the shelters were overloaded was because of the people losing their houses & being forced to move to apts that didn't allow pets. Out of the mouths of babes.
My parents put their house up for sale in the Pacific Northwest a couple of months ago, and they've had zero interest in it.
They want to move to another state, a warmer climate, closer to medical facilities... for health reasons. (They're elderly.)
They live in a house that's about 20 miles from a regular grocery store, and a 45 minute drive from the nearest metro area.
My parents are retired, and therefore do not commute, but even so they only go to town twice a week now that gas prices have gone up.
Their house was new a few years back when they bought it.
Back then, people were taking advantage of the nice surroundings (it's beautiful where they live) and lower prices, and commuting to the metro area. This has changed because the offset is becoming different.
Add to that, there's just less people able to buy a house, period, because of the mortgage issue.
They know someone in their area who's had their house on the market for a year with no serious offers.
My mother was a real estate agent, and they've always made money when moving. That's probably not going to be the case now.
From what I've read about the foreclosures, it's often NOT that people just try to hang onto their dream house until it goes into foreclosure, but that they simply aren't able to sell their house before that happens.
I don't know of any developments that are full of empty houses overrun with vagrants, gangs, or partying teens, like I've heard is happening in some places. But that's because my area is a very old area, with a river, with a lot of it structured a century or more before the automobile & the suburban planning started, so there's not as many suburban strips & developments that you see in some areas.
So for example, there aren't many McMansion developments around me. (Which I think are being hit hardest first.)
Thank goodness there aren't a lot of that around here.
Years ago I said those developments looked like just bigger versions of government housing tenaments. The way they clear all the trees, and the houses all look the same, etc. I never understood why anyone would buy one of those houses anyway, if they could afford a nice house in a regular more natural residential neighborhood. But I guess people were lured in by floor space or something. _________________ May fortune favour the silly
Last edited by watermelonpunch on Sun Jul 06, 2008 1:51 pm; edited 1 time in total
Joined: Jul 06, 2008 Posts: 37 Location: Pennsylvania USA
Posted: Sun Jul 06, 2008 1:47 pm Post subject: Re: end of suburbia?
Mominator wrote:
While I do find all of this discussion on securities, insurance, reinsurance. . .etc. interesting I tend to think that the forclosure "crisis" is going to be less about people who didn't understand what ARM meant and more about people loosing their jobs in an economy that doesn't support extraneous spending well anymore.
Maybe I'm just looking at it from my own perspective way too much and I readily admit that I am not nearly as knowlegeable about economics as most of you, but I know that I didn't buy a house because it's an investment. I bought it because it's a home. I didn't buy too much house (debatable--but our house is pretty conservative compared to most of my friends in similar wage brackets). We had nearly 10% down on your standard 30 year fixed. I read the contracts (much to the annoyance to everyone at the table who was waiting for me). I even have an IQ over 130.
Yet none of that changes the fact that DH is loosing his job and if we can't sell our house we may default.
I think some of the attitutes in this thread are a little ethnocentric about who is loosing their houses and why. It's probably bound to happen to most people who hold mortgages in the suburbs--unless their job is supported in this economy.
I had at first thought the foreclosures were almost all caused by people buying bigger homes than they could really afford.
I definitely had an attitude... I don't know if it was "ethnocentric", but it was definitely based on my personal observations, and I realize now, they were a bit myopic, and not taking into consideration the big picture.
The reasons:
1. For years I've seen people all the time living it up on credit in general. I see people, for example, with mortgages & whatnot, buying new cars, or cars with large payments, people who either make no more than me, or perhaps less, or maybe they make more than me but have exponentially more expenses, like children or whatnot. They buy expensive clothes, and furniture, etc. While I have 1991 car, and I still have financial worries, and live in an apartment, with all inherited furniture... and I don't have the expenses of a child etc. I'm having trouble getting credit, because I'm in my 30s & never had a credit card. At the same time, I don't have the debt many people do. And they have no problem getting more & more credit, and getting further into debt. And I can't even get a credit card I only really want so I can rent a car!
And I often joke that at this point, if I wanted to get married, I would probably wind up marrying someone in deep debt from years of spending money on fancy cars, booze, & loose women.
LOL
2. My mother was a real estate agent for several years before retiring for real (she became a real estate agent as a senior, and worked in 3 different states over the years, including California). And she'd tell me stories about buyers who were horrified when she would show them that were in their affordable price range. (Often because they weren't hoidy, or there was a person of another race in a front yard in the neighborhood - people often tried to get my mother to give them info on race demographics, which of course she would not, because that's highly illegal.) And those people did wind up buying homes, somehow, and not the ones they found unacceptable. So I had some clue that banks were giving mortgages to people that probably shouldn't have taken on the payments or whatever they were taking on.
3. People just have what I see as messed up priorities in our culture. And it seriously seems like to me that most people around me do not worry about finances the way I do, until it all goes to hell completely. So I could easily see people buying homes gleefully ignoring the financial ramifications as they furnish it with brand new impractical items from Pier 1 purchased on credit.
Now how has my attitude changed?
I still think there are a great many people like this that I suspected all along there were.
But I don't think they account for all of, or even most of, the whole mortgage foreclosure crisis going on. In fact, I don't even think they're 25% of the foreclosures.
BUT, I do believe they are probably 75% of the CAUSE of the other 75% of people in foreclosure.
What I mean is, that the relatively small amount of people who did spend lavishly beyond their means in buying a home are at least significantly responsible for the trouble of people who bought homes they could afford, and now can't.
And so I no longer feel most of the foreclosure people are just superficial image conscious finanicially irresponsible people who had it coming to them.
I have come to this conclusion this way. The other day I was listening to Fresh Air in my car, and it was an interesting piece about Terry Gross' husband's terrible credit report mistakes. And she interviewed Prof. Elizabeth Warren, a specialist in bankruptcy and contract law at Harvard Law School.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92049490
I wound up later looking this up on-line, to listen to the part of the story I'd missed because I had to get out of my car before the piece was finished. And then I wound up looking up this professor, and found this article, an excerpt from her book:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3079221/
It caught my eye because it mentioned "Two-Income Trap". And I've been complaining about our Two-Income Based Economy my entire adult life. Not because I want to see women back in the kitchen barefoot & pregnant. haha!! I have a problem with an economy based on a 2-income household because I'm a single woman, never married, who's been supporting myself for the past 18 years. And I've watched how much better off people who share accomodations with a spouse or romantic partner - one light bulb or one heating baseboard spends the same amount of energy whether there's 2 people in the room or one, it's cheaper to cook for 2 than one... the list goes on.
Now I haven't read this professor's whole book. And I don't know how comprehensive her ideas apply to the big picture. But what struck me is the explanation about how these people desperate to move into certain areas for certain school districts, pushed up the price of real estate well beyond realistic levels in the grand scheme of things. And though some people then purchased the houses at those prices, fully able to afford the houses on their combined incomes... when economics started going south for a combination of reasons, because those people who spent beyond their means can't afford Starbucks every day and the shiny new things they used to buy, ordinary good hard working people started losing jobs, at the same time they were feeling the crunch on prices for NECESSARY items like food & fuel.
This is something I can understand because there's an area that's between where I live, and where I work, that would be ideal for me to live in, but I can't afford an apartment in that area, because the rents are OUTRAGEOUS. And it's because it's considered a highly desirable school district. (The apt complex ads boast it big time.) I don't really understand why it's a desirable school district, because socially, for years I've always heard it's rampant with drugs, I think a study a few years back found there was more drug use in the school district than any other in the region or something like that. But it's not gang activity drugs in the school, it's affluent rich kids on pricey drugs. So I guess that makes it attractive.
Anyway, my point is, hypothetically... let's that say there's 10 foreclosures in that school district. I still think maybe at least 5 of them would qualify to me as spending lavishly & ridiculously beyond their means. Another 5 of them I would probably consider to be rather impractical people. But I think there's probably at least 5 of them that legitimately could've afforded an even pricier neighborhood - but because those other people have flown right off the cliff and can't even afford to spend on necessities anymore, that's contributing indirectly in the economy causing truly unexpected misfortunes to the 5 legit people.
But these are just my armchair musings. I'm BY NO MEANS particularly knowledgeable about economics nor real estate nor mortgages, credit, etc.
So anyone feel free to pick at my thoughts here. _________________ May fortune favour the silly
Posted: Sun Jul 06, 2008 2:14 pm Post subject: Re: end of suburbia?
alokin wrote:
We're not living in the US so I would like to know if it is something what you are experiencing in your daily live? Neighbors must leave their home, or whole suburbs going down or vacant houses?
Are new families moving in or do the houses just stay vacant?
The people who are moving out must live somewhere, so they must rent somewhere, hence there shouldn't be vacant houses?
This argument has been mentioned before:
"people have to live somewhere therefore suburbia can not collapse, right?"
WRONG
We may not live in a "free market" economy but we definitely live in a capitalistic society. If a person cannot pay their mortgage then they get the boot. Plain and simple.
Home foreclosures do not happen at random locations. On the contrary there is a definite pattern. MOST of the foreclosures are happening "on the edge" aka very far away from the city core.
Yes it's true there are examples of literally entire neighborhoods that have been abandoned.
IMHO suburbia is collapsing right now, but in slow motion so mainstream media is unaware of it.
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