Yet the entire focus of our electeds is to rush toward sameness in the name of sustainability. Regulations that force all communities to be built out in the same way at the same density by the same planners influenced by the schools.
For all of the supposed tolerance, diversity and inovation of this region, the majority of planning and redevelopment done in this area is bland, transit based, big box, condo crap.

Knute, a defender of the suburbs! You never cease to amaze me. I've lived on the north side of Chicago and in the distant suburbs of Sacramento and i would maintain that the people and experiences were largely the same in both places. Inner city snobs like to put down the 'burbs because they need to justify dealing with all the inconveniences of their lives. But give me a lawn, a garage, some extra interior space and more spending money anytime.

"Folks also move there, believe it or not, to be closer to nature: to have a yard, a view, some land, more trees."

If more people responsible for Seattle land use planning actually talked to people who have left our city -- you know, to find out why instead of simply making assumptions -- they'd learn the truth of this statement.

Growing Seattle without preserving our inner city environment is a sure and certain path to suburban sprawl. Growing Seattle without preserving a diversity of housing styles -- apartments, condos, townhomes, cottage housing, and single family homes -- is also a sure and certain path to suburban sprawl.

Knute, I appreciate what you have to say and sincerely hope Seattle snobishness will erode over time. I used to be a snob too before I searched for a place to live in Seattle and found I couldn't afford anything that was not in need of extensive structural repairs for which I had neither the funds nor the skills. I didn't move here for the schools (no kids) or because I craved less diversity. Born and raised in West Seattle with working class roots, I moved to Bellevue because I could afford a small house in reasonable condition in a working class neighborhood near Crossroads. I've lived in many different neighborhoods in Seattle--Ballard, Phinney Ridge, U District, Eastlake, Ravenna, Capitol Hill and West Seattle. Living in Bellevue has been by far the most culturally, racially and economically diverse experience of my 56 years. I take the bus, use only organic compost in my yard and mix it up with racially and culturally diverse neighbors in a relaxed atmosphere. People at parties in Seattle question my choice of where I live with a tone that implies I have been cruel to animals or failed to recycle. But I understand where they're coming from. I used to be a snob too. Miriam

I kept reading, wondering when you would say what your ideas for the suburbs are. I would settle for finding out what your opinion of the suburbs are. But all I get is that you think its complicated, nuanced and that suburbs could be better. Wow. They paid you for this brilliancy?

Also, your justifications for suburbs sound hollow. Suburbs have better schools, are more affordable, and are safer. Maybe you should back those claims up.

It seems to me that some suburbs have those attributes, some don't. Some urban neighborhoods are safe and affordable and have good schools, some don't. Some have two out of three.

About the only frank statement was the guy commenting who said he likes his suburb because he likes his lawn! Fair enough.

As an urbanite, I am fine with the suburbs. However, I am not fine with: pollution, auto dependency, eco-system destruction, global warming, disproportionate infrastructure subsidy, blight, and a total disregard for homelessness, mental health and other social needs that are all shipped off to the city centers. (Or in our case, THE city center).

Personally, I happen to prefer walkable neighborhoods, restaurants, museums, libraries, public spaces, cafe culture, and the excitement that comes from a large population of interesting people. I have space to grow veggies and herbs, easy access to wonderful parks, decent transportation options, and a whole city full of incredible vistas. I own a car but the difference is I rarely need to use it.

Suburbs are fine, I can understand the need for a lawn for the tykes to run around on, and as a creative person, admittedly a garage would be nice for some personal space to work on projects. However, the way the current system runs is wrong. It doesn't make sense for various government subsidies through infrastructre spending and tax breaks to get people to live out in the suburbs. We should be spending that money on enhancing the urban lifestyle. Suburbian lifestyles are a greater drain on our environment, they use more resources, and ought to be more expensive, not less.

It is however, refreshing to examine the beauty that exists in our suburbs, and possibly take lessons back to the city. Is there an essence of the desirable aspects of the suburban lifestyle that can be implemented in residential urban neighborhoods? is it important to exit a residential building onto a space that is full of plants and sunlight? What role does open space actually play in our psyche? This should all be influencing our urban design.

Personally, I don't have a lifestyle; and I have little patience with those that do.

Interesting article. The word "suburb" brings with it class-warfare baggage and an outdated view of a single, Emerald City sitting in the center of things, with suburbs sprawling outward endlessly. Seattle and the urban cities are all working to achieve concentrated urban cores that include (1) sustainable business and (2) residential communities (condos typically), producing a reliable (3) tax base that supports highly leveraged (4) infrastructure investments (tunnels, roads, libraries, parks), with all cities connected through mass transit, i.e., (5) light rail.

Thus the megalopolis of old -- a large city center with many concentric rings growing outward until the suburbs were reached -- is in the midst of being down-sized (by growing upward), constrained (through growth management), and metastasized (through interconnection via freeway and eventually light rail).

In this context, what we usually call suburbia is all the bedroom communities and neighborhoods in Seattle, Bellevue, Redmond, et al. Because homes with yards beget sprawl, we've put limits on their growth. More in-fill is occurring. Smaller yards. More regulation. More environmental constraints. Still, the ideal for a growing family is a home near the local schools. A good example is Education Hill in Redmond. Many of these homes were built circa 1970. In the last ten years the high school, junior high, and grade school (all within about a half mile of each other) have been rebuilt. In a lot of ways, this "suburban" neighborhood is very similar to many of Seattle's neighborhoods.

Because of Microsoft's growth and influence, Eastside neighborhoods have an increasingly cosmopolitan feel. Redmond has a heavy Indian influence, and Bellevue's Crossroads food court, as remarked above, is well known as a multi-cultural gathering place.

Ironically, the heavy densification of downtown Bellevue with office towers, hotels and the behemoth Bellevue Square seems to be the model that Seattle is now striving for. I don't want to underestimate the importance of Microsoft in all this. High-paying jobs at Microsoft (40,000 in the Seattle area) help support the Eastside's relatively high standard of living, including wall-to-wall high rise motels and office buildings, Bellevue Square, and McMansions in the residential neighborhoods.

Our regionally planned future revolves around making way for huge population increases. I personally think that a growth management policy that promotes, encourages and plans for unbridled population increase is fundamentally flawed. But that's what we have. Building density in city cores is the way that the Cities want to handle this population. Cities (and I'm speaking of government entities now) love the idea of light rail (at virtually any cost) because city cores will all benefit from it disproportionately. Conversely, residential neighborhoods will continue to pay disproportionately for our urban cores.

For young single adults and older empty nesters, the urban core is an appropriate place to live, but this vision of urban utopia ignores that most families prefer houses with yards near schools and parks. Insofar as the urban core is near surrounding neighborhoods, the urban core has a trickle-down positive effect. But only a trickle.

On the other hand, neighborhoods tend to, well, sprawl. If done well, sprawl is a beautiful orderly mosaic. People should be and can be part of our natural environment. That's why I live in a house with a yard next to a park.

Government now owns more than half the land in King County. Most of that land is now restricted from development and from logging, which means that it doesn't pay its own way, unlike the property that pays the property taxes and utility fees, which in turn, pays for most of government. As population doubles over the next fifty years or so, we'll have more tenement-like condo buildings (akin to what you see in China) and virtually no new homes with yards next to schools and parks. This is a tragedy. Both the metastasized urban cores AND the residential neighborhoods should be expanding, with proper regulation. The focus on big, expensive infrastructure projects that support the urban cores of our cities is fine, so long as those who benefit pay. Certainly those in suburban residential negihborhoods benefit somewhat from their proximity to the "big" city, but not nearly as much as they have in the past. The big winners are those who will someday live in the urban cores in the decades to come, and urban core property owners, who deserve no special subsidy. This is the argument against freeways for Bellevue Square, against tunnels for Viaduct property owners, and against the sales tax on all tax-payers in three counties for a Sound Transit that will primarily support a thin sliver of the population.

As the national and regional economy declines, the extravagant funding of urban infrastructure will increasingly come under attack for being unaffordable, wasteful, unfair, and unsustainable. In contrast will be the affordability, the measureable benefit, the fairness of taxation, and the new-found environmental sustainability of neighborhoods of homes with yards near schools and parks. Long live this environmentally sustainable, idylic suburbia. In many places it is called the neighborhood. In others it is called the close-knit community.

We live in interesting times. They will only get more interesting.

Now that I've lived in West Seattle for six months (and on Queen Anne Hill for eight years before that), I have to ask just where this "diverstiy" everyone talks about is. Both places are populated almost entirely by upper middle class white people who drive Priuses, have nannies and live in extensively renovated houses that were originally built for "working-class" people. True, every once in a while someone in West Seattle gets shot in a gang dispute, but the parties involved seem to come from somewhere else. But it gives the neighborhood an "edge."

What I find really interesting is how much these people talk about how much more "sustainable" the place they live is, but someone in a zero lot line townhouse is going to have a much more difficult time growing their own food than someone who has a back yard...

What this piece seems to miss is that most of the snobbery is not coming from Seattleites looking down on the Eastside, but rather the opposite. Just this week there's a magazine cover that shouts "The rise of the Eastside." Over the past 5-6 years we've been inundated with a series of articles and TV bits about how urban and hip Bellevue is -- a claim that is starting to seem desperate given how often it's spouted.

It's true - the venom flows East to West, NOT the other way around.

Thanks for the link to the Willamette Week article on Vancouver and Portland. Fascinating stuff.

Bellevue urban and hip? Sorry, no. I don't mind Bellevue, but urban and hip are two of the last words I'd ever use to describe the place. Honestly, what modern Bellevue reminds me of is Arlington, Virginia!

Someone may want to let Cale know that there are often as many auto-dependent people traveling from Seattle to the Eastside each morning as the opposite way.

Good article, Knute. Your best atribute is your honesty, although you are city-centric in your thinking.

Stuka's observations add greatly to your's in my opinion.
"If done well, sprawl is a bueatiful orderly mosaic"
There are many well done G zoned (about an acre, now illegal) communities in unincorporated King County near towns. Many more exist in 5 acre and larger tracts which planners hate.

People are individuals. They will be diversity in lifestyles. many will not fit the planner profile. GMA,CAO, rules and regulation to the extent today threaten freedom and liberty. People are the best stewards of their land and should be left alone to decide what is best for them. I'm not against reasonable regulation, just not the extremeism we see today.

It should be noted when talking about "sustainability" that a home with a freestanding well and septic system has less impact on the environment than one connected to a water main and sewer system. Of course, to have a well and septic system you need about a half acre of land, as well.

Knute, this is an excellent article. My young family rents in the city but some of our friends have chosen to commute from the suburbs, and I can't say that either one is the right choice for everyone. Our friends do have more yard space, and in at least one case is closer to extended family (a must with young children). However, in other cases it is simply a matter of cost and they are consciously "slumming" in neighborhoods without sidewalks or farmer's markets until they can afford the urban life they want. It's a complicated picture.

Wow. Seattle Weekly's "Uptight Seattlelite" has outed himself. Cale, you clever dog. One thing about "tykes": there are a lot more of them out here, a long with a lot more of everything else. When I hang out with friends at my old haunts in Seattle, the sameness of it all strikes me: everyone is about the same age and ethnicity, everyone is dressed alike, speaks the same language, and there are no children. (OK, there are more gay people in my old neighborhood on Capitol Hill.) I live in the down-scale suburb of Renton, where the people who wait on the people who work at Microsoft live, along with Boeing people, and commuters to Seattle and/or Bellevue who really and truly cannot afford to house their children in Wallingford or Newport Hills. (And by the way, where are we supposed to live? Even if you tore down all of Seattle's single-family homes and built Soviet-style apartment blocks you wouldn't be able to house us all. Many of us would prefer the walkability of an urban neighborhood, but we don't have the bucks to live in one: and it's not our fault that capitalism doesn't support suburban neighborhood development, quite yet anyway. Many of us do live in condos and apartments -- look at Totem Lake/Overlake/Crossroads/many Renton neighborhoods -- chewing up fewer energy resources than your average Seattle bungalow, and much less than the megahome ala Leschi, Laurelhurst, Queen Anne. Just south of Boeing, there's a big "urban village" going up in Renton, not far from the transit center. And as Mossback points out--Seattle is going the way of the suburbs: I was driving up 25th NE the other day, just north of University Village, and I hardly recognized where I was--the suburban-style commercial/residential development there is startling--and I thought suddenly: wait a minute, where am I? Overlake? Issaquah? Renton? So enough with the claim to aesthetic superiority.)

Yes, Renton is big box, but the irony is that for all the architectural sameness, the users couldn't be more diverse: within a mile of my house, neighbors or local business owners are from China, Vietnam, Laos, Korea, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Ethiopia, Somalia, Iran, and lots of other places. A greater percentage of African-Americans live here than in almost every Seattle neighborhood. It's community in the sense that there's a place for everyone, or, no one is out of place. It's less self-absorbed, less judgmental. I don't have kids, but if feels good to me to see families -- and with so many immigrants -- extended families, including elderly, who are often in charge of the kids, hanging out together every day. So back to my original point, what does it say about Seattle that people with children are marginalized as the ones whose choices have wrecked the environment? A city with no place for "tykes" is dying.

You habitually cover this tired ground and have come only this far: "To re-think the suburbs we should first re-think what we think of them." It's like watching my dogs glimpse their reflection; it's mildly amusing, yet pathetically reflexive; they can not conceive of themselves as reflection. To rethink suburbia, you'll have to actually experience it.

The 'burbs are far more diverse than Seattle. It is only your liberal habits of thought that conjures diversity out of styles of food, fashion, and skin tone, while styles of habit, thought and technique are mutilated for efficiency--the neurotic and fetishist a result; a sense of impotency and accompanying tree fetish come to mind, here. Again, it is only the liberal habit of economic reduction--defining everybody by their house, car, clothes, bank account--that creates a sense of sameness. Maybe you should rethink your concern for other people's habits as the distraction it is from your own.

Woah there hummingbird! I didn't say a thing about Renton. You did.

Bickering about whose kingdom is greater is pointless. I never claimed 'aesthetic superiority' for Seattle. It works for me, but Renton sounds like a wonderfully diverse and non-pretentious place from the way you describe it! Now can we please work together to find solutions to pollution, auto dependency, eco-system destruction, global warming, disproportionate infrastructure subsidies, blight, and disproportionate share of homelessness, mental health and other social services?

dbreneman your comment about 'lifestyle' is glib and spiteful, but you do make a good point. Lifestyle is a loaded word and I probably should have been more specific with something like- "money that goes to building and expanding freeways and other sprawl-inducing infrastructure should be going to schools, playgrounds, parks and alternative forms of transit."

Great comment thread. Very thoughtful. Some reactions:

There is obviously a lot I did not go into. One is the way in which Seattle's suburbs are varied, not all stereotypical, which a number of you pointed to. When I moved to Kirkland in 1983, I lived near the railroad tracks and we had a family of bikers living across the street. The home was a 70-year-old fixer upper bungalow I never fixed up and cheaper than any equivalent house we could find in Seattle. We were walking distance from school, grocery, parks, etc., yet there were few sidewalks. It was a lot like many Seattle neighborhoods, though overall had about half the density of the city. Oddly enough, I shortened my auto commute to my job in Seattle. It took me more than half an hour to drive to it from Ballard; it took 20 minutes from Kirkland. Imagine: suburban living reduced my carbon footprint!

Seattle, on the other hand, is famously suburban: less dense than San Francisco, with neighborhoods full of yards and trees. In recent decades, it's actually looks more suburban with strip malls and big-parking-lot commercial developments proliferating in the '90s (see 23rd and Jackson and the areas Hummingbird notes near U-Village). And speaking of U-Village, it was part of Seattle's car-friendly big mall transformations that include Pacific Place downtown. Remember too that Seattle is made up of former bedroom communities that were simply absorbed into the city (Green Lake, Columbia City, Fremont, Mt. Baker...). The balance struck between urban and suburban in Seattle has been a hallmark. If not for Lake Washington, I'd wager much of the Eastside would have been absorbed too (Mercer Island's old name: East Seattle).

Miriamworks says she is a recovered snob, and I am a member of the same club. I live in Seattle now, but years of living and reporting on the Eastside opened my eyes. I developed some hostility to Bellevue in my teens. Eastkingcountyrednecklogger and George Wade are right that there are diverse lifestyles that aren't categorizable, but my point was that you wouldn't know that from much of the urban/suburban debate. I don't agree that the snobbery flows mainly from East to West. Sure, there's some, and there has been among the country-club set or those who left Seattle because of "the blacks" in the 60s and 70s. But from a policy and planning perspective, and in terms of the power differentials, Seattle has always been the big dog and some of the resentment is justified. The suburban cities have always had to fight for a place at the regional table. It is interesting to watch this dynamic change some as the suburbs turn more urban and bluer politically: will the region find more common cause as urban creep takes hold?

Stuka makes a great point about Microsoft' influence. It's been huge in all kinds of ways (guess whose pushing so hard to replace 520?). And it's a reminder that in the chicken and egg question about what drives suburban growth, research indicates it was workplaces moving to the suburbs that brought the people. Boeing, PACCAR, Microsoft, Nintendo: sprawl has followed employers and office parks. Cheaper land and taxes made that possible.

Cale,it's great to see that you want to work together on a solution to global warming etc--so I'll encourage you to reconsider your statement: "Suburbian lifestyles are a greater drain on our environment, they use more resources, and ought to be more expensive, not less." I read it as blaming those of us who live in the suburbs. And since Renton is a suburb, I think I was safe in assuming you were in fact talking about those of us who live here.

I'll also encourage you to get in your rarely used car and join the clogged west-to-east I-90 or 520 commute some dark, rainy morning and you'll see urbanites (who choose to work on the Eastside and beyond) contributing their share of carbon emissions. (Thanks enyaw for pointing out that the highways run in both directions.) I don't even attempt to get to Seattle on weekday evenings anymore: the westbound traffic sucks.

I've noticed that urban dwellers like to shop. Renton is famous for Fry's and IKEA, two big box stores that could not stay in business if Seattlelites did not drive down here to buy products that have been shipped halfway around the world, leaving great big carbon footprints all the way back to Wallingford. The dirty little secret of the urban lifestyle is that it depends on the suburbs for many things it pretends it can live without. You can't get a cheap bookshelf or laptop deal at the farmer's market. Here's the rub: the tax revenues Renton gets from your spending fund our schools, repair our streets, pay for our libraries and public housing. We're already hurting because our car dealerships (where many Seattlelites buy cars)are suffering in this economy.

Also, if you really wanted to help end sprawl, you'd be down at the Seattle City Council, lobbying for maximum-density, subsidized housing for people who work in the city but can't afford to live there. Your beautiful vistas will be marred by utilitarian residential towers but that's what it would really take, along with employer incentives to live in-city for low to middle-income workers. I worked for ten years in an office on First Hill. Fifteen out of twenty of us commuted from suburbs because we couldn't afford a house/condo/apt in the city that came close to the modest housing we have in the suburbs. The city's economy couldn't survive without workers who make too little to live there.

And as far as your intimation that wasteful spending on highways (I assume that's what you mean by "infrastructure") to get us to work and back is depriving's Seattle homeless: that's a low blow. The suburban cities all have urban problems too, and much smaller social service budgets to handle them.

As Mossback points out the problem is complex and will require more than the "I prefer the urban lifestyle"

Kudos to Knute and to all the commenters. I almost believe that teaching and writing urban geography for 50 years has truly been worthwhile, as I sense an unusually high level of understanding of the true character of the metropolis.
I think the most important points were these
1. There are different kinds of people (and employers) with different kinds of needs, preferences and stages in the life cycle, and this translates into a market for a continuum of settlement from high rise at the core to quasi-rural living at the edge. So
2 It is meaningless and prejudicial to suggest that either “city” or “suburban” life is better or worse.
3 There is in reality little difference in ”diversity”, “quality of life”, “neighborliness”, and, yes, even “greenness” between city and suburban life.
The numbers, by the way, are that 25 percent of people live in large central cities, 55 (yes, 55) percent live in suburbs and about 20 percent in small towns and rural areas. The suburbs provided the margin of victory for Barack Obama, and the politicians know that. Suburbs, on average, are doing a little better than the core cities in economic well being. I truly doubt if they need “saving” as they are the net gainers from local, national and international migration of people and jobs. And as Knute and others pointed out, part of the magic of Seattle is that it does still have settlement diversity single-family home neighborhoods as well as hyper-urban living. May it ever be so.

"Seattle v. Suburbs", while convenient, is a pretty flawed frame through which to look at land use. Taking a finer grained approach and looking at neighborhoods is much more useful. Downtown Whitecenter, Kirkland, and Renton probably have more in common with Lake City and Greenwood than differences. The same is true for Windermere and Mercer Island But the Sammamish Plateau is not Belltown. Suburbs have more of the former, and cities have the latter, which is a significant difference. But neither Seattle nor the suburbs are monolothic. Break it down by census tract (as they do at http://htaindex.cnt.org/) and you start to see the finer grain.

What land use attribute really matters environmentally? Many think density, but first and foremost may be a good street grid to support walking, biking, transit, as well as apartments and condos. The region has numerous places with a pre WWII street grid, which are the bones of walkable mixed use neighborhoods connected by transit. Cul-de-sac world will be much more challenging to support for a world in which driving gets more expensive. Compact mixed use neighborhoods throughout the region will be the affordable way to achieve a high quality of life. These places deserve public investment in shared amenities -- parks, transit, good streets.

Crossroads, in Bellevue, is 'hipper' than any family based community in Seattle.

The suburbs can take additional density and they will be the better for it. That place is not existing single family cul-de sacs but underutilized commercial property - picture a strip mall on aurora, for one.

Mr. Berger, do realize that EastsideWeek was a business failure and not necessarily the best place to put your credentials. Though I love your slightly off-center Seattle perspective a true Eastsider you are not. I would hope that Crosscut does not continue to make the same mistakes as EastsideWeek.

I understand your point, Knute. I largely agree with you. My point is that Urban Seattlites are not going to retrofit the suburbs unless they have plans on moving. In fact, Seattlites would be better served focusing on the retrofit of their own communities--a matter being bungled by the presumed leaders. Concerns over suburbia are merely a distraction from the task at hand.

One of the major appeals of the suburbs is that they can access the cultural amenities (sports teams, museums, universities, etc.) and employment (commuters) or skilled worker base (reverse commuters) of the established city without paying taxes to support the city which built those cultural institutions and attracted the skilled workers. Fragmentation of municipal authority allows businesses and developers to extract maximum concessions from a given municipality by playing one against the other.

In addition, Washington State allocates sales tax revenue on the basis retail sales volume in a given municipality. This gives small cities huge incentives to permit the development of massive shopping centers, which will do their best to put historical downtown areas out of business, which then forces people to drive on our clogged freeways when they want to buy something.

These factors (and I'm sure others) impede efforts to tackle regional issues like mobility, providing good education for our children, stabilizing our climate, housing, economic growth, or promoting economic justice.

Discussing the "cultural differences" or "relative merits" of Seattle vs. the "suburbs" is great for perpetuating the problems, but personally, I'd like to solve them. And to do that, we need a much better strategy of regional cooperation and governance than we have now.

City-suburb, love or hate either side, is such a 19th century paradigm. Why is everything in reference to one sun (Seattle) with grand sprawl surrounding it? Isn't it inhumane, anti-social and anti-family to spend 1-2 hours every day commuting to make a living?

This is such a thought provoking article. While I don't support more expansion of subdivisions, I think a focus on creating a network of small cities and towns where people do live makes tons of sense. We can move from just looking at growth, to creating elements of really local self-sustainability. That goes for Seattle neighborhoods, as well. If economic development was distributed and focused in this manner, along with growth boundaries and preservation of surrounding farms, we might be able to really live locally.

While the rise of the electric car may mitigate immediate (because that electricity comes from somewhere) pollution, people should have the opportunity to work close to home. Also, some of the zoning codes that pits single family against multifamily housing, where single family neighborhoods are threatened by up zoning, could be mitigated if people were allowed to rehab and green up their house, not increasing the footprint, to be home two households. With household sizes decreasing, along with some interest in multi-generational living by some cultures, why not create a zoning designation beyond the hard fought for auxilliary units grudgingly grandfathered in for Seattle? I've watched the hoops and expense people need to go through to replace a duplex with another duplex of the same footprint in the single family part of my neighborhood. Would have been simpler to subdivide the lot and create two tall skinnies to still house two families, resulting in less energy efficiency and less green space.

Take a cheap ride on the milk train through Central Jersey from Philly to NYC one day and think about, not only our Seattle/Everett/Tacoma/Bellevue/Issaquah/Renton picture, but towns all over the state who have collapsing economies.

The most beautiful city in America, the one that all cities should aspire to is Detroit.

The reason is that all cities are overly dense and overly expensive.

The suburbs are just a way station towards I term "Agraria".

With wireless internet, new technologies like hydrogen fuel cells, we are less and less constrained by the grid. The electrical grid, communications grid and transporation grid restrictions were what kept us in cities. It is what allowed us then to move to suburbs but have to stay near the city center. It is now what allows us to break free entirely and plop down anywhere and do a business or link up as an employee.

The future is a new rural homesteading, and 2 acre homes

I define Agraria here:

http://you-read-it-here-first.com/viewtopic.php?t=3227&sid;=0818aaf4ea249eb53ffe45590edfe0d1