I'm glad I won't live all that much longer

Riverside county (CA) is scheduled to grow TWO HUNDRED percent in the next 40 years :scared:

When we moved here, our town had fewer than 40K and had ONE traffic light..

Even though housing is in the dumper, they are still sprouting like toadstools out here..

It's crazy...

Where will the extra water come from? We get rain maybe 3 times a year (if we're lucky)

There still ARE uninhabited areas of the county, BUT growth is always in the areas where people already live.. gotta have jobs & places to shop..

:D

whoopee! :eyes:

and renting Apartments and the new houses in Cities spawned close to the Research Triangle in NC. I see few local folks in the stores like when I moved here 14 years ago...and Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill ...are starting to look like New Jersey...from where we moved. Inner Cities with empty shopping centers are springing up as the flee to ever more suburbs grows. More malls and strip centers which take business away from already established communites spring up. Housing is out of control and the building is incredible. From "Office Space" to Townhouses and Gated Communities you can find ANYTHING YOU WANT HERE IN THIS Souless..Heartless BOOM AREA!

But..Hey...It's Capitalism and AIN'T THAT GREAT...it's what's MADE AMERICA what it IS! :shrug:

most folks to bear.....unless one works on Wall Street or is involved with the Hedge Fund Industry. :shrug:

and it's the area where Norman Rockwell lived and painted...a little of that might be nice....about now.

of the century. People will be standing in line to get their ration of toilet paper.

that movie gave me shivers.

We are heading towards it if we can't slow down this growth.

is infinitely better than new development in rural areas.

Sprawl = bad, right?

you'll feel better

Would that it were so in Pinal County, AZ, where I live. Or, for that matter, in western Maricopa County, AZ, where I used to live.

Mushrooming houses, but no jobs, very little retail even. If you're not retired with a fat pension and fatter investments on top of social security or comfortably self-employed, you're pretty much SOL. Need a half gallon of milk? Hop in the car, drive ten, fifteen miles down U.S. 60. Never mind the cost of the gas, never mind the hydrocarbons you're putting into the atmosphere.

Sadly, too many of our fellow creatures are just plain short-sighted. "I CAN do it, so I OUGHT to do it."

Duh.

Tansy Gold, who has neither pension nor fat investments and is only uncomfortably self-employed.

Not quite so far to go for milk but the jobs are 20 miles or more north in Tucson. Where the hell is the water supposed to come from folks, we're in the friggin' desert?

we have had plenty of water this year! Still lots of wide open spaces and the glorious Flint Hills.

..maybe 4 more years :)

thunder storms! The wide open spaces and the smell of the ground and the grass. I know it can be red state hell but damn I love it here.

We would love to have you back! Let us know and we will throw a big welcome party!

I just spent the last fifteen years running. Actually, more like twenty years. Here's my report-

It's not just one location. Every place where there is a metropolitan area, people have moved to the outer periphery. First, at a distance that was commutable. But then as they retired, to further out areas. As it stands, the phenomenon you are experiencing is taking place almost everywhere. Have you looked at the price of 40 acres in Crested Butte? Mendocino? Little towns in Maine and Vermont? The price reflects the demand. I've moved four times in the last dozen years in an attempt to escape the hoards. The subdivisions are created, and the dwellers arrive. Beautiful ranches split up. In fact I just got off the phone with a realtor yesterday morning regarding 4000 acres of land that was just sold by the bankrupt laden Pacific Lumber company. That land is already in 40's, 80's, and 160's. Places like Hydesville in Humboldt county. I had a gorgeous piece of property. But the whole place is literally sprouting up with homes. It's sickening. Just this morning I got on the phone to someone I know who owns literally 140,000 acres, pleading to sell me some. Maybe he will. But I'll tell you, it's worse than I ever imagined. And in case anyone attempts to call me a hypocrite, I don't have anywhere near the impact of the standard family. I almost don't drive at all. I don't commute to a job. I don't have kids. And I'm not building a piece of crap house. I really can't communicate my experiences effectively. But I will say that if the typical American were to do things with at least some modicum of aesthetics, I would have far less difficulty accepting them into my life. I know it's elitist. So be it. They're getting ready to build a Walmart in Fortuna. It's so utterly saddening. Where are our values. Where are the limits? Endless growth madness.

I lived in S.F. and Sonoma County in the very late '70's through the 80's. It was just at the beginning of the "boom" up there and I could still go to a beach or the redwoods and be the only person there. It was obvious that would change and I just couldn't bear it.

I moved to MN (for various reasons), and I've been watching it grow and sprawl for nearly 20 years now. Even up north, modest family cabins are being replaced by ugly McMansions and higher real estate values and property taxes. Now my beloved North Shore of Lake Superior is falling to gentrification and (ack!) golf courses.

I don't believe that we really need to cover every inch of land in the U.S. with "civilization."

I see so many people cursing "them". I even know a guy with five kids who works in the aerospace industry, and built his own monster mansion by hand. He and his wife hate yuppies. I had to laugh when I heard them. Breeding away, driving to and fro, and still they can't see it. I hate to gloat, but I chose to spare the world and not bring more people into it. I rarely drive. The last time I filled my tank was nearly five months ago. I go to the dump once a year with two garbage cans. What were we talking about?... Sorry. I get sidetracked. I'm no saint. But I try. And I'm not as flagrant as most.

Yeah, it's sad to see loss. I ride a mountain bike, and I find that it gets me to those places where no one goes. It's great. You might try it.

And no, you can't have any of it.

:)

I can be reasonable here. Pass the soap.

Here in the Hollywood area the population has grown it seems ten times what it was ten years ago . You used to be able to tell when the tourist season came along and when they left the roads were pretty clear , one day there was no difference as if everyone decided to stay here . Now it's complete madness , none stop traffic and chaos .

Everything that was a land mark or old has been torn down and all the new high rise malls have sprouted up everywhere and the roads are still the same old roads with ten times the traffic .

I just want out but can't afford to leave or afford to stay . I fear I will soon end up one of the old and in the way , hell I already feel this way .

You'd think the Ohio, Mississippi, Missouri Rivers and the Great Lakes could send some water out west.

and we have a LOT of people here :eyes:

Come up here and settle instead. Upstate New York is losing population...

It's just DUMB to put these big cities in the middle of the desert...

the desert and water lawns and golf courses.

Forget it! I'll be the first one in front of the bulldozers.

BTW, the Great Lakes are already beginning to lose water. How about people in the west figure out how to conserve or build desalinization plants?

Rosemary, I'm sorry to dump on you, but I'm shocked that you would so casually assume that people who have chosen to live in a desert are entitled to just take water from other regions.

I didn't know the Great lakes are losing water.

And I disagree with you regarding choices of where to live. The entire US is interdependent. Or am I to assume you never drink OJ because oranges don't grow in Michigan? Or you never eat california produce? Or use gasoline that didn't come from your own state? It has nothing to do with entitlements, it has to do with what is practical.

Though I doubt building a pipeline to Caleeeefornia is very practical. :) :)

Unfortunately, the pipeline idea doesn't seem impractical to everyone. The idea has been coming up for a while and there have been on-going efforts in the state and provinces (the water also belongs to Canada) around the Great Lakes to get an agreement signed that would require approval from each of those parties before Great Lakes water could be sold or diverted. The situation is quite urgent, IMO. There was already a scheme that was thwarted at the last minute, to sell water to China by the tanker-ful.

There is also the possibility that allowing non-Great Lakes states to take our water, would open the door to Mexico demanding a share because of NAFTA.

People have been moving to the California and the Southwest for decades for warm weather, without thinking about the ecological consequences and people migrating from the south aren't thinking about the environmental consequences either. I don't think those regions of the U.S. have an automatic right to destroy the fragile ecosystem of our region. We have the example of the thoughtless way rivers in the west have been dammed and diverted and the water wasted.

This is a serious problem that the arid southwest is going to have to solve without just grabbing someone else's water.

Don't get me started... :+

:)

The growth in Oklahoma City has been unbelievable--the city proper measures 625 square miles, and we're still growing. In another ten years, towns 30 miles away will probably be a part of the city. It's insane.

I miss the fields and the livestock between OKC and the suburbs. In the spring, there would be baby cows and horses, lots of birds and egrets, and the most beautiful hawks. Now there's nothing but rows and rows of MacMansions, asphalt as far as the eye can see, and a bank, a pharmacy, a convenience store, and a dry cleaners on every corner.

It's very depressing.

I have not been back since but still have friends there . Schaumberg was a small town of nothing when I left and now it's become an extension of Chicago , high rises , malls , super highways . My friends tell me I would not regognise the place if I could even find it amoung the masses of buildings and roads .

Birth control seems to be the only answer .

New housing in the middle of nowhere sprouting, at least 50 mile farther out than I remember it being when I was a kid.

who lived on the east coast as a kid, but has been on the west coast the rest of her life. She shocked me recently by saying that they are moving back east. They say the problem is crowding and over-development, lack of public services and transportation. She says it takes her an hour to drive FIVE miles sometimes....

You know Californians migrating east is UN usual.

20 years ago. Some sprawl has followed, but, luckily, there is still some sense of community and stability here. I hope we don't end up with the same kind of overpopulation of rootless people (and congestion) that warm weather places like CA and Florida have.

DUers are welcome, of course, but everyone else should know that it's horribly cold up here, and miserable and you wouldn't want to live here. So, go somewhere else. :+

I say stay away!

:hide:

I love CA and totally agree. B-)