leave this town

Orson Scott Card – Walking Neighborhoods and Oil—Past the Peak.

I thought it was just me that, coming from Europe, had a hard time understanding why Americans opted for a car-dependent society, especially in California, and among all places, in the Silicon Valley, where the brightest minds are supposed to be concentrated.

The second article explains very well why: large house lots became the status symbol du jour. This encouraged long commutes (but those owning the lots hired personal chauffeurs), suburban sprawl, horizontal development, pedestrian-hostile streets, big-box retail, horrible rush-hour traffic alternating with desolating local streets, and the isolation of people into cars or homes at the expense of social interaction in public spaces.

The first article proposes measures for combating this trend and reverting to a denser and more interconnected urban environment, with reliable public transportation, decreased car usage, smaller-scale local retail in the form of neighborhood stores, pedestrian and bicycle friendly streets, and vertical development (residential living on the floors above commercial spaces).

1. “The little shops in the mall pay far higher rent, per square foot, than the big anchors. That’s because, presumably, the big anchor stores draw the customers that also feed the small shops.”
2. “Right now, in most locations zoning laws force developers to create neighborhoods with houses of about the same size and cost, on roughly the same size lot, while forbidding any retail within walking distance. Meanwhile, those same laws generally forbid the construction of new neighborhoods that mix income levels, house sizes, and densities. [...] We must reward box stores with huge empty parking lots for placing small-shop buildings on their street fronts, with residential spaces upstairs. Right now our laws forbid any such thing. Why do we citizens tolerate those laws?”

Short version: check out the places in my Google Map
Lively places in the SF Bay Area.

Long version:
I’ve complained in otherposts that the Bay Area often feels like a deserted, desolated, uninhabited place (maybe that’s because I’m a night owl and never hit rush hour traffic…).

Now seriously, the Bay Area is a bit messed up when it comes to architecture and housing. The apartment buildings here are built of wood, and are at most 3-story high. Everyone else lives in houses. This leads to a low population density and to everything being so spread out that you need to drive a few miles to buy a proverbial loaf of bread. Here’s a bit from http://caldrive.com/intro.html:

California’s a car culture. You won’t survive for long without a car in California—California was designed for cars. Californian urban and suburban planning nearly always assumes that every person owns a car, and nearly all tourist facilities, shopping centers, and workplaces are built with the assumption that everyone at least has access to a car.

So I hopped in my vehicle and drove around the Bay Area, scouting for places that are not deserted, places where you can find an eatery or coffee shop open after 10pm, places where you don’t feel like in a ghost town. Since there’s no such thing as “urban agglomeration” except in San Francisco, there consequently are very few “downtowns” where something actually happens:

• Great America Mall, Milpitas – this mall tends to be populated with teenie boppers and other low-lifes
• Westfield Valley Fair – now that’s a cool mall
• Stanford Shopping Center – another nice mall
• ... you can find the other malls easily on the map below. They’re big gray shapes with internal roads.

• Santana Row – Teh place to be in Silicon Valley
• University Avenue – for the Stanford crowd. You can even find an eatery there that has “Neil Armstrong” and “Carl Sagan” written on a wall!
• Castro St. in Mountain View
• generally, streets called “Broadway”. Often, they are lined with decorated trees and have a decent amount of dining, shopping and probably events as well.

This week, Google released My Maps, hooray! The perfect place for the places above. Enjoy!

San Jose feels, pretty much all over, like a ghost town. You drive on the streets and the sidewalks are empty, deserted. You literally see more planes in the sky than people on the street.

The whole place seems like a point-to-point network. People are concentrated in Points of Interest: malls, a few restaurants (try finding an open restaurant in downtown San Jose after 10pm), bars and clubs (I guess). Contrast this with Waikiki or most European cities: far from being claustrophobic urban canyons (think Wall Street), they are teeming with the vivacious vibrations of bustling animation – teeming with LIFE.

I want to move out of San Jose. I want to be an anonymous soul able to mingle in an anonymous crowd, if so I chose, or stay aside and observe its social dynamics. I want to move out of this town.