AN IRRELEVANT COMMENT ON ZONING | 2006-02-09
I am lazy as hell.
But in this case I prefer a Politically Correct way of putting this.
Let's call me " a convenience-minded individual."
But the fact is that I get no fun at all out of shopping for a car. My dream car was the old Volkswagen I owned in the 1960s. You put in gas and took it in for maintenance every 3,000 miles. When it snowed and everybody else was putting on chains, it just drove right over the snow and ice.
I now live in a condo and it saves me a mint. But I loved to come back to the USA and stay in an apartment, where you just called the office if anything broke.
One scientist spoke for me perfectly:
My body is just something to carry my mind around in."
When I returned to Washington, DC I would live in a high-rise apartment with a convenience store less than a block away. All of them were run by Koreans and stayed open almost every hour of every day
The last high-rise I lived in had the convenience store inside the building, just an elevator ride away.
Then Nirvana came close. Right beside the six twenty-six-story high rises, one of which I lived in, was a complete shopping center. There was work underway to set up a DIRECT connection between the shopping center and the high rises.
The shopping center was at the bottom of a hill on which the highrises sat. You couldn't hear a sound from it.
When I left the USA again, I confidently expeted to come back to a country where you could take your shopping cart and walk to the shopping center with it.
By the time I got back, the whole thing had changed. That trend ended abruptly. Zoning came in hard and fast.
A woman in a luxury highrise doesn't want to go out in her curlers. So she has to dress decently to drive to get that coffee creamer. But the very idea of a direct connection between a shopping mall and a highrise is considered the height of vulgarity now.
In the highrise condos where I live now, there used to be a carry-out restaurant on the first floor. Now there is a consulting firm.
Ther is also a job counseling service and a voter education office, and similar things.
It is zoned against convenience shops or anything else that might be useful to a resident of these condos.
When I ride through the expensive suburbs, I see that the more expensive they are, the farther it is to absolutely anything a resident might need.
I don't understand this. Maybe that's because I just ain't got class.
Today, the ideal is that if you have no cream for your coffee, you have to dress for the weather, go out and get your car and drive several miles to a shopping center to get anything.