4 ms·

As someone who lives in Houston, the simple reason there is sprawl is because its flat and land is cheap. This makes it easy to live on large lots or on small a

by redm 6y ago

As someone who lives in Houston, the simple reason there is sprawl is because its flat and land is cheap. This makes it easy to live on large lots or on small average. It's also hot, so people spend more time indoors and drive everywhere.

ska 6y ago
Don't forget lack of zoning and state commitment to building highway/freeway infrastructure. It's partially a collective action problem. Since everyone has pretty much committed to doing nearly everything via car the marginal cost at either the individual or system level of adding one more car (side) trip is very low.
wmeredith 6y ago
I'm glad someone said this. The size of the interchange vs a small town in Italy is an odd comparison. Land and gas are cheap in one place and they're not in another. That's basically the end of the story.
- conductr 6y ago
  I’d say more to do with technology available at onset of growth. Modern versus ancient in terms of cities. I found the marketing brochure in my mid-century house in Dallas, they really thought that the Jetsons was going to happen. Same house was built north of downtown Dallas from some horse farms and pitched country life with modern conveniences. The exurbs that reach damn near Oklahoma now are still pitching the same thing while my house is very much considered in the city.
- jxramos 6y ago
  (still working to articulate this all precisely) I think a lot of these country to country comparisons bank off the fact that people presume they're dealing with an oranges to oranges comparison like two sporting teams or something equally sized. Evaluating two comparands on some single concept they both happen share in common without looking to the specifics is grossly inadequate. Concepts like city, country, state, hospital system, etc, can indeed both be shared between two countries at a conceptual level. However those concepts can take drastically different forms with their reality on the ground. The two comparands' actualizations of these concepts can be huge simply looking at scale alone. As far as I can tell the US dwarfs pretty much any EU country in terms of population, land mass/area, and a bunch of other stuff too I'd imagine. I'm awakening more to the fact that without highlighting from the outset any known differences in scale one can be lead to strange conclusions in the results of comparison. There's that common software architecture analogy regarding the techniques to build a single family detached house being woefully inadequate at building a skyscraper. It would be nice to have some normalized terminology of city and country etc that speaks more directly to the population scale at hand.
crispyporkbites 6y ago
Italy is pretty hot too

by redm 6y ago

ska 6y ago

Don't forget lack of zoning and state commitment to building highway/freeway infrastructure. It's partially a collective action problem. Since everyone has pretty much committed to doing nearly everything via car the marginal cost at either the individual or system level of adding one more car (side) trip is very low.

wmeredith 6y ago

I'm glad someone said this. The size of the interchange vs a small town in Italy is an odd comparison. Land and gas are cheap in one place and they're not in another. That's basically the end of the story.

conductr 6y ago
I’d say more to do with technology available at onset of growth. Modern versus ancient in terms of cities. I found the marketing brochure in my mid-century house in Dallas, they really thought that the Jetsons was going to happen. Same house was built north of downtown Dallas from some horse farms and pitched country life with modern conveniences. The exurbs that reach damn near Oklahoma now are still pitching the same thing while my house is very much considered in the city.
jxramos 6y ago
(still working to articulate this all precisely) I think a lot of these country to country comparisons bank off the fact that people presume they're dealing with an oranges to oranges comparison like two sporting teams or something equally sized. Evaluating two comparands on some single concept they both happen share in common without looking to the specifics is grossly inadequate. Concepts like city, country, state, hospital system, etc, can indeed both be shared between two countries at a conceptual level. However those concepts can take drastically different forms with their reality on the ground. The two comparands' actualizations of these concepts can be huge simply looking at scale alone. As far as I can tell the US dwarfs pretty much any EU country in terms of population, land mass/area, and a bunch of other stuff too I'd imagine. I'm awakening more to the fact that without highlighting from the outset any known differences in scale one can be lead to strange conclusions in the results of comparison. There's that common software architecture analogy regarding the techniques to build a single family detached house being woefully inadequate at building a skyscraper. It would be nice to have some normalized terminology of city and country etc that speaks more directly to the population scale at hand.

crispyporkbites 6y ago

Italy is pretty hot too