Quotes About Sprawl

First, as I will explore in this book, our preferences—the things we buy, the places we choose to live—do not always maximize our happiness in the long run. Second, sprawl, as an urban form, was laid out, massively subsidized, and legally mandated long before anyone actually decided to buy a house there. It is as much the result of zoning, legislation, and lobbying as a crowded city block. It did not occur naturally. It was designed.

Sociologists point out that the suburbs have done an efficient job of sorting people into communities where they will be surrounded by people of the same socioeconomic status. Meanwhile, the architectures of sprawl inhibit political activity that requires face-to-face interaction. It is not that sprawl makes political activity impossible, but by privatizing gathering space and dispersing human activity, sprawl makes political gatherings less likely.

Suburban zoning and development codes grew so powerful and so entrenched by the end of the twentieth century that the people who financed and built most of suburbia had all but forgotten how to make anything but car-dependent sprawl.

The cataclysmic use of money for suburban sprawl, and the concomitant starvation of all those parts of cities that planning orthodoxy stamped as slums, was what our wise men wanted for us; they put in a lot of effort, one way and another, to get it. We got it.

I think ultimately, bringing more nature back into the city is a way to deal with urban sprawl and things like that. If the cities feel a little more natural, people like to live there more rather than moving out and dividing up another piece of land that shouldn't be touched.

We loved cars until the '70s or so. Then they became appliances. They turned into motorized cup holders. Most of it has to do with urban sprawl. What began as pleasure ends up in necessity, as so many things do.

Horizontal and vertical sprawl... are the dinosaurs of an ending fossil-fuel age of synthetic culture.

Fads swept the youth of the sprawl at the speed of light; entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly.

There's nothing sexy about Orange County.

McDonald's has been extraordinary at site selection; it was a pioneer in studying the best places for retail locations. One of the things it did is study very carefully where sprawl was headed.

The thing you gotta understand about L.A. is that everything is suburbia. Los Angeles isn't set up like San Francisco or New York.

In L.A., the only thing within walking distance is your car.

In 1995 Bank of America issued a famous report on sprawl in California. The bank pronounced: 'Urban job centers have decentralized to the suburbs. New housing tracts have moved even deeper into agriculturally and environmentally sensitive areas. Private auto use continues to rise. This acceleration of sprawl has surfaced enormous social, environmental, and economic costs, which until now have been hidden, ignored, or quietly borne by society.

HOUSTON, TEXAS, IS A CULTURE DISH of urban sprawl, a baffling and stultifying and astonishing congeries of good taste, bad taste and no taste scattered across five hundred square miles of flat Gulf coastal plains.

In postwar America, mass production of automobiles and tract housing signaled the beginning of urban decline and suburban sprawl.

no one wanted to think about the gangs of no-hope teenagers who already took over the nearby park all day, drinking lager and waiting for something to happen to them, trapped in a forgotten village in no-man's land between a ten-shop town and an amorphous industrial sprawl.

Environmentalists hate sprawl - except when it comes to the size of their expansive pet legislation on Capitol Hill.

You know you're in L.A. when you put air in your tires and they cough.