Harry, sdrealtor’s comment is actually not a sarcastic one, the urban renewal crowd would consider the entirety of the oc as suburbia. They aren’t just talking about working in one county and living in another, they are talking about living where cars are not needed at all, the type of urban living found in the downtown of european and east coast cities. Where you live, go to school, work and recreate within a mile or two radius. The west coast living is very “zoned” and the terrain isn’t always flat. Living spaces are not above businesses, shops and houses rarely co-exist, open space is not always shared and people want their own pool, yard, etc.
we’ve all visited cities like that, where someone can walk from their house to the store, to a bar and to a park. Most of choose not to live that way.
I’ve listened to these people, to put a regional spin on it, they believe that everyone in Poway, 4-s and carmel valley will choose to live in the shadows of skyscrapers, within a mile or two of downtown and I say they wont. They wont all commute an hour to the exhurbs, but they arent going to take over North Park, Hillcrest or areas within biking range of the city. Those areas near downtown aren’t all ghettos and they arent much cheaper or more expensive that suburbs 10 or 15 miles away, but the suburbs give families something they dont get near the city, something they want, something they will pay for and drive for. The same can be said for the coastal communities, those residents live there because they like it, they would rather hear the ocean than sirens, they get their energy from the water not from the concrete, some of us like seeing mountains out our window, most californians are a little weird that way and the rest of the world cant understand it. The “people for a perfect world” want every city to look like London, where they fail to understand is that we are a different people with different ideas, wants, desires and needs. It’s just that simple.
Americans have entirely invented or been a major contributor to every advancement in technology this century. Great minds from the world over tend to migrate here and collaborate. Airplanes, cars, telephones, telegraphs, electricity, computers, refrigerators, coffe pots, space travel, toilet paper, light bulbs, revolvers, machine guns, microwave ovens and my personal favorite, the oral contraceptive pill. This is what we do. If something is important enough to us, if we really want it, someone figures it out. Renewable energy will just be another chapter now that it has become a priority.
