At the same time, making spaces suitable for “real” restaurants is much more expensive and limits the use of the space. Many of the popular storefront chains do not require a full kitchen with all of its wiring, plumbing, ventilation, and fire suppression requirements. It’s also more expensive to insure a building that has a real kitchen in it, and it may be more expensive for other business tenants in the building to insure their own businesses. (Besides kitchen fire issues, businesses in buildings with real restaurant kitchens are more likely to have claims for backup of sewer and drain — full kitchens mean more grease in the line, even if they do a good job maintaining their grease traps.)
Not as bad as sharing a building with heavy manufacturing or hazardous materials, but it is an issue.

The same book says it started in the 20s. GM sponsored a “Futurama” exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, which popularized the vision of automobile suburbs. “Leave it to Beaver” and “Bewitched” did not show how most people lived but how they wanted to live. People in the 50s wanted suburbia but actually lived in 1920s walkable neighborhoods, because construction had been halted by the Depression and WWII and was just getting restarted. Full suburbanization was achieved only in the 1970s. So what we think of as “1950s suburbia” is really the 70s and 80s. Now people watch TV shows about city living because many people want that but find their options limited.

Another thing about 1940s-50s suburbia: the houses were small. Less than 1000 square feet. They can still be seen in Mountlake Terrace, SeaTac, the older houses in Bellevue, etc.

The little bit of the interior I’ve seen at WaMu Center Looks nice though.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003209866_diversity19e.html

Talk about an oxymoron.

I wish I could find one other person in this place who isn’t hell bent on paving over every last nice place to live with some Uberbuilding Fantasy of concrete.

What is “Bellevue” — it’s the nice, one-story, 3 bedroom house near the water that used to be had for $150,000. A place where even a middle class family could have a decent, town/country life.

But no. The Habitrail Condo Scoundrels had to destroy that and every other neighborhood in Seattle so they could have their $150,000 “urban planning” jobs.

The nonsense.

However, long after those same officials have moved on, or were booted from office, the people are left with a landscape littered with horrific and unusable white elephants.

There always needs to be low cost of entry for new business and for business to serve (and employ) people at the bottom end of the income chart. It is far better to have a bit of messiness, and not all be served by the same subway platform (even if it has two sides) than for people to beforced from a low paying, but adequate job, into welfare servitude to state that makes them uncompetitive.

Sure, have your Atlantis, your Rational World of technocracy…but don’t enslave everyone else with it.

I’m back home for the holidays and while it has it’s problems there are some cool things about it (like going out to my farm, getting the jeep stuck, shooting guns, drinking beers, starting fires, etc). I can take that.

What I can’t stand is my current residence in Fayetteville NC. Horrible freaking town. Couple hundo K people, tallest building is 8 stories. Sprawl sprawl sprawl. No public transportation, but even worse no actual straight roads. Everything is 25 minutes away, and 18 turns. All subdivisions and strip malls. Every day I have to remind myself of the training I’m getting, the oppertunities for me and my wife to go to school, the added deployments I’ll get and the money we’re able to put back so that when my contracts up we can move back to Seattle. Not back to Bellevue, but to Seattle Seattle.

If you mean capitalism as the largest land (wealth) redistribution program ever carried out in world history then yes, capitalism built the United States.

With apologies, Sherwin is missing a very simple fact here- real estate developers are real estate developers. They do what we tell them to. You or I could be real estate developers too- if we understood the land use codes, the building codes, the GMA codes, the fire codes, the housing codes, etc, and if we understood the markets in which we get money, land, materials, labor, and customers. That’s all there is to it! Is this a great country, or what?

And we have a vernacular. Migod do we have a vernacular. After a day driving around looking at old trolley routes in Seattle last year, I was ready to pack Seattle’s architects off to Western State and let the construction foremen design the buildings.

To be honest, while it seems the post comes from a vague feeling that RE developers ‘done us wrong’, I got sort of lost trying to figure out where it went. And just plain gave up when I reached this sentence: “If there is no motivation to apply form to function, vice versa, and everything in between, then real estate has failed to compliment land use.” Somehow I ended up wondering if a Klein bottle might possibly “apply form to function, vice versa, and everything in between”.

Now six billion barrels would be a megafield if it were all in one place. But in fact it’s spread out over thousands of square miles in parallel reef formations all over the south and southeast part of the state and offshore in parallel reefs. There was the huge pool of WTI along the New Mexico border, but most of that is unfortunately consumed.