- Six dollars to drive the InterCounty Connector sounds like highway robbery to some and totally justified to others. Both sides get to make their case to state transportation officials at public hearings on the proposed tolling plan this week. The first is Wednesday at High Point High School in Calverton followed by another on Thursday at Shady Grove Middle School in Gaithersburg. Both events run from 6 to 9pm.
- And over on The Other Pike, Cindy from Rockville Central and others are hosting a Zombie Walk of their own. That'll be this Friday at 7:30pm outside the Apollo Bar at 12 N. Washington Street before lurching through Rockville Town Square.
- MSN Real Estate says that suburbs are the new slums, but dense, pedestrian- and transit-friendly places with "Main Street charm" like Silver Spring will prevail. Montgomery County hasn't had many issues with stalled developments or abandoned subdivisions as in other parts of the country (sorry, no-growthers) but I have to admit converting McMansions to rooming houses, as is happening elsewhere, sounds kinda cool. (I'll take the kitchen, thanks.)
1 comment:
Dan writes, in part:
> [...] have to admit converting McMansions
> to rooming houses, as is happening
> elsewhere, sounds kinda cool.
Nice example of trolling. Fortunately I can just cut-and-paste. Note the date:
http://tinyurl.com/yzmcxzt
Newsgroups: alt.politics.immigration
From: Tiny Human Ferret
Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2002 19:05:35 +0000
Local: Thurs, Feb 21 2002 3:05 pm
Subject: Re: Answer this
[ ... ]
Probably the only city that you'd visit and immediately find objectionable
would be Washington DC, since the bad parts of town are pretty much all
parts of town, and you need special guides to find the nice parts of town;
the only hotels that are surrounded by unmitigated "niceness" are ones like
the Willard that are affordable only to Heads of State... but I suspect that
in any other town, you're probably staying in a nice hotel in a nice part of
town, and when you look out the window all you see is the upper class.
I'm not suggesting that you go slumming, or stay exclusively at the Hotel-6
in the crack-haven part of town. But if you were to get out of the business
district in almost any city in the US, and go into suburbia, you might see
what I am seeing: "white flight", and those who remain live to see their
neighborhoods first turn into middle-class barrios, and then you see the
neighborhoods flooded with the first American generation, six kids per
family, and then when those kids all grow up, suddenly there's noplace for
anyone to stay and the city explodes into growth, to the limits of the
ecology and transit system to support it. Everyone who can afford to move to
the farthest outskirts does so, and back in what was a middle-class barrio,
everyone who had the capability to get a decent job has done so, and has
moved out, leaving nothing but the worst to remain. The neighborhood goes
downhill very rapidly from there, especially as a declining tax base
combines with an aging infrastructure. Just add a poor economy, stir well,
and you have an "instant" slum.
And this is happening all across the US, but you're staying in the best
hotels, so you don't see it, and maybe you report what you see, but even in
Nairobi the downtown is glittering and modern, but in the suburbs they might
have no plumbing and chickens in the yard. But if you only stay downtown,
you would report Nairobi to be a very modern city with a vibrant business
community and graet prosperity evident everyplace.
In summary, "you need to get out more".
[ ... ]
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