Pedestrians Lost In The New Suburbia
A resident of a touted New Urbanist development in San Diego, California, comments on its failure as a walkable community.
I recently learned, to my surprise, that I am living in a Traditional Neighborhood Development (TND). I was surprised because it does not really resemble a traditional, walkable neighborhood. Rio Vista West in San Diego is an enormous luxury apartment and condominium complex with many of the desirable qualities of a New Urbanist development: attractive architecture and landscaping, quaint first floor retail, and a very convenient trolley station. However, few pedestrians wander beyond the pleasant confines of the central courtyard and trolley platform. Despite the tree-lined sidewalks, this community and its environs are ruled by the automobile.
Rio Vista West is a suburban infill project located in the Mission Valley area of San Diego, a sprawling region best known for its abundance of shopping malls. While the new transit-oriented residential units in the valley are a welcome improvement, their designs have incorporated more of the old-style sprawl elements that prioritize automobiles than New Urbanist characteristics. For starters, Rio Vista West is enclosed by huge, multi-lane thoroughfares, which feed rapidly-flowing traffic to Mission Valley's freeways and malls. Compounding the problem is Rio Vista's main retail component -– a big box shopping center set upon acres of asphalt surface parking. The immediate surroundings are also scaled for cars, not people, including an expanding 1960's-era mall and a new office park. Pedestrians who venture into the adjacent areas not only face daunting intersections, but also find themselves lost among parking lots and traffic. As a result, the Rio Vista West development is not walkable beyond its own driveways.
Main retail component of Rio Vista West
In addition to the hostile environment, other key factors actually promote car use and discourage walking. There is no accessible grocery store -- not within Rio Vista's borders nor in the many nearby shopping centers. In fact, residents must travel by freeway to grocery stores, farmers markets and non-fast-food restaurants. A car is also needed to access outdoor recreation areas because park space is scarce in Mission Valley. Even though the apartments border the San Diego River, the isolated river trail system is not really a safe space for children or women to brave alone, and is interrupted by highways. Finally, expensive trolley fares ($3 to go one stop, round trip; $4.50 to travel downtown, round trip) mean that it is cheaper to drive to stores and attractions, many of which are less than 5 miles away.
Rio Vista West is technically considered a Transit Oriented Development (TOD), so perhaps walkability was sacrificed for transit access. Still, developers began with a blank slate site: a former gravel quarry along the river. The original site plan, by New Urbanist firm Calthorpe Associates, was clearly designed for pedestrians and trolley riders -- it offered a network of paths and plazas, a community center, a possible grocery store, and plenty of green space. Unfortunately, developers abandoned the original plan in favor of yet another shopping mall, with the same tired discount chains and restaurants intended to serve freeway commuters.
Large intersection adjacent to Rio Vista West
Auto-centric New Urbanist communities are not uncommon, at least in Southern California. In fact, the challenge for pedestrians lies in the nature of these expansive, master planned projects that are built from scratch on greenfield or infill land. On paper, they look like dense, mixed-use settlements; in reality, they are constructed on such a large scale that they end up mirroring conventional subdivisions, particularly in their use of wide collector and arterial roads. In the San Diego area, Otay Ranch (Chula Vista), Bressi Ranch (Carlsbad) and 4S Ranch (Rancho Bernardo) are far-flung greenfield TND's accessible only by car. While they offer pedestrians more open space, their street networks tend toward classic Southern California suburban sprawl. Infill projects like Rio Vista West, though located closer to urban amenities, may be squeezed into an already car-dominated environment. Many of the suburban TND's in the San Diego area fail to meet pedestrians' basic needs, such as human-scaled dimensions, narrow streets, diffused traffic, a nearby market, and active building fronts (many buildings are security gated). These large-scale projects also tend to be homogenous, lacking the authenticity and diversity that make for an interesting walk.
Of course, New Urbanist signatures are found throughout the country, displaying a cornucopia of scales and styles. The most promising developments for pedestrians are actually redevelopments -- revitalized neighborhoods within and around city and town centers. Often constructed before the age of the automobile, these older neighborhoods are set upon a narrow and almost continuously walkable street grid. Revitalized neighborhoods grow organically, in smaller steps than master planned TND's and TOD's, sometimes one cafe at a time. Here in San Diego, wildly successful Little Italy integrates vibrant mixed-use apartment buildings, from several different designers, with historic establishments and refurbished structures. The neighborhood is still growing, as locally-owned businesses sprout along once-blighted city blocks. Modest New Urbanist housing projects that emerge within revitalized neighborhoods are also good options for pedestrians. For example, residents of the Uptown TND in urban Hillcrest (just uphill from downtown San Diego) can easily walk through blocks of shopping, or across town to Balboa Park. These existing urban streets are an untapped resource here. Vast stretches of San Diego's outer urban mesa villages lie desolate, even though they have the vestiges of main streets.
I remain a staunch supporter of the New Urbanism movement. Since I have lived in some of America's most pedestrian-friendly enclaves, I realize that my standards may be set unreasonably high, given the powerful moneyed interests that surround the construction process. Yet I maintain that walkability is the single most important pathway toward a clean, livable city. If New Urbanist developments fail to entice pedestrians, then they fail to adhere to one of the movement's founding principles.
Diana DeRubertis is an environmental journalist and a seasoned pedestrian. She has a PhD in Geography from UC Berkeley, where she specialized in climate change science and policy.
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How about trying some incremental changes?
Sometimes it seems as though the only solution to pedestrians or cyclists is via a planned development or re-development; there is no hope for those of us trapped in the auto club developments of the '60's and '70's. But is that really the only way to get people walking or bicycling -- rip it all up and try it again?
I believe that an incremental approach can get things started on the right path. As Ken Blanchard notes in his managerial books, Shamu didn't jump out of the water at Sea World the first time someone blew a whistle. It took lots of training, on both the trainer's and whale's part, to figure out how to get Shamu to do what the trainers wanted. People aren't going to just start walking everywhere just because they can in a pedestrian-freindly development; they need to start walking more before they move to such a development.
In San Diego, we have had a high number of pedestrian accidents (per capita), even with great weather and visibility. Why? Because the intersections totally control when cars can enter, EXCEPT for when there are pedestrians. Then, virtually all intersections rely on the drivers to spot and avoid any pedestrians, rather than either notifying all the drivers (i.e. flashing lights visible to all) or totally controlling all traffic (pedestrian and vehicle) in the intersection.
I actually walk to the post office, nearby grocery stores, and even a large mall. I always use a rear-view mirror on my glasses (normally thought of for bicycling) to avoid being run down by someone turning right as I cross an intersection. It has saved my life several times, but I shouldn't need it. The drivers were never notified that I might be entering the intersection, and worse yet, the same control that allowed them to move forward also allowed me to cross the street. We all know what happens when you give green lights to two autos at cross directions at the same time -- you get an accident. Why does anyone expect a different outcome when it's an auto and a pedestrian? When two people think they have been given the right of way, they will collide unless one is lucky enough to recogize the situation and back off. The drivers are too busy, trying to avoid all of the other autos while comprehending the various multilane traffic control, to also look for any stray pedestrians that might bolt into the roadway. The pedestrians must fend for themselves, despite the right-of-way laws.
I have seen add-on strobe lights in confusing intersections to help the drivers awareness of the traffic control. Since these type of lights already exist, they should be relatively easy to purchase and retrofit on intersections near pedestrian destinations. If people think they might actually survive the traffic, they will walk more, even if it isn't the ideal pedestrian experience that this group yearns for.
The all-or-nothing approach gets the same results for humans and whales: nothing. Consider incremental changes that are the equivalent of the first time a Sea World trainer threw a fish in the water next to Shamu and blew a whistle. It doesn't take many whistles before the whale gets the idea; we humans are almost as smart.
San Diego pedestrian & bicyclist
Phony Baloney New Urbanism
An excellent and enlightening, if depressing article. San Diego has been notorious for the real estate fraud perpetrated by developers using the "New Urbanism" pitch.
Here in Portland, we have a project called the "South Waterfront," which may suffer the same fate if not watched closely. Already, it has been noted that residents of the new condo towers aren't to be seen on the streets - they merely drive into and out of their buildings' parking structures.
urbanplanningoverlord.blogspot.com
Big Surprise.
Is it really all that hard to understand? Most of these are what they appear, a slightly different subdivision. Okay some higher density, but I'll bet they still required two parking spaces per unit. And density for density's sake? I just hope the taxpayers didn't have to foot the bill for the infrastructure.
Mark R.
Planning Manager, Berkeley
You are right about density
Has New Urbanism become just another excuse to build a conventional shopping mall? If planners think that "mixed use" means a huge condo complex next to a big box mall, then NU planners are part of the problem. And what is the point of density if you are going to pave over half of the site for surface parking?
Berkeley is doing great things, by the way. San Diego planners should take note.
Great Things - In Berkeley?
Is Berkeley doing great things? It seems to me that there is so much NIMBY activism that relatively little happens.
Berkeley inherited a good urban fabric and a great downtown, though most of its transit corridors were never built out and instead filled up with auto-oriented uses.
Some great projects have been built or approved, such as the Brower Center downtown and a few infill projects on transit corridors.
But most of the transit corridors still look like strip malls, and there is so much oppostion to development from residents who are worried about parking that it can take years to get approval to build anything there.
The New York Times used the opposition to a transit village at Ashby BART as an example to show that there can be huge neighborhood opposition to a relatively small project.
As a result, Berkeley's population is substantially smaller now than it was in 1970. We will build more only if pressure from ABAG or from the state overrides local NIMBY opposition.
Charles Siegel
Catering to pedestrians
I enjoyed the commentary. I think one problem is that we have few development standards that specifically cater to pedestrians. During site plan review, planners/engineers make sure that driveways of are a certain width, parking spots are of a certain depth and that other Fire and ADA requirements are met. But what about the pedestrian? A strip of concrete between point A and point Q is not going to cut it. Planners simply need more tools to help create great pedestrian places. And, we're going to need the political backing from represented leaders and community residents.
Walking and Global Heating
The author's analysis is excellent. The planning "profession" fails to support walking, and utterly fails to address global heating. This is curious because if we profess to promote the common good, we should be pounding on these topics.
Our engrained sloth has led to a culture where health has become a commodity that must be purchased, instead of the result of daily physical activity.
Jump in a Prius, drive to the Gym and rent time on a coal-powered treadmill. You'll look good, and you'll feel even better! Professional planners publish dozens of books about how to build communities on a human scale, sensitive to the environment. But somehow, the result is the same old schlock.
The thing about walking, every day, is that it informs your day with something that is in short supply in these times, known as humility. This happens because, instead of being wrapped in a steel and plastic shell, a pedestrian is somewhat exposed to the environment, and has a chance to think and observe, at 3 miles per hour. I've thunk most of my best thoughts on foot, and few in my car. The designers of the neo-traditional monstrosites may wish to try this.
My planning collegues offer lots of "but's". "I'd love to live where I could walk, bike or ride the bus to work ... but [place your excuse here]". The fact is, driving to work, and living that life style is the easy way out.
Instead we should be getting out, walking and observing the world before we "plan" it. Start the day with a walk and a cuppa humility. Do it over and over and over, hundreds of times, and you start to realize what it means to be just a human being.
The reason this ties into Global Heating is that the arrogance and selfishness that underlies our culture and has blinded us to the real danger to human survival, which is, indeed, Global Heating, is the result, in part, of our cultural disdain for walking.
I suppose that's why I smiled on reaching the end of the article and taking note that its author is a scholar of Global Heating.
Walking keeps you globally warming.
The planning "profession" fails to support walking, and utterly fails to address global heating. This is curious because if we profess to promote the common good, we should be pounding on these topics.
The reason this ties into Global Heating is that the arrogance and selfishness that underlies our culture and has blinded us to the real danger to human survival, which is, indeed, Global Heating, is the result, in part, of our cultural disdain for walking.
The planning profession I know fully supports walking; all our plans call for many enabling designs. Washington State passed enabling legislation to make non-motorized transportation a planning priority. I guess in Rochester they don't do those things.
Global warming is indeed a problem, but part of the auto-centric driving problem goes back to the 1930s in America when the streetcar tracks were torn up, and then after WWII when our culture decided that everyone needed to get around by automobile. The schlocky built environment has many causes, but the next time you travel out to CO or WA, check out the interesting designs, and note how they all enable non-moto transpo.
Best,
D
Walking
I stand corrected. Washington and Colorado and New Jersey and Oregon(?) and several other states, and dozens of municipalities are very supportive of walking - as are most planners. Perhaps my rant was unfounded. Even in New York state ("the dysfunctional state") there are many, many pedestrian advocates.
The City of Rochester, New York is extremely supportive of walking, and its former mayor is a regional visionary. However, within the declining Northeast, the attention is usually focused on "jobs" and even basic infrastructure, such a sidewalks, is seldom provided in the limited development that does occur.
Communities are so desperate for economic investment that developers/planning consultants tear down 150-year old buildings, slap in drugstores and move on, and we thank them and beg for more. I'm sure that wouldn't happen in Boulder or Portland or Marin or Redmond, but that's life in the Rust Belt. Heaven forbid that we require developers to provide sidewalks in residential subdivisions, why, that would drive up the cost of housing!
It would be interesting to see how many planners actually walk, bicycle, or take public transit to work. My gut feeling is that the rate is probably not much higher than the general population.
I know a few planners, myself, and I still believe that, within the profession as a whole, support for bicycling and walking is weak, usually centered within the obscure realms of the bureaucracy. It's not mainstream, except within a few enlightened states, cities, and regions.
Of course that's the way of the world, we can't be all things to all people. I suppose it takes more than planners, to change the world. It takes political leadership, for one thing. Here in the Empire State, there is some hope that Elliot Spitzer will bring us up to speed , he certainly talks the talk. We'll see if he walks.
Could be more walking.
Good comment sir.
I agree that there are too many planners in the community that need to do more to support non-motorized transportation. And your bureaucracy point is right on - in my view bureaucracy kills many good ideas.
I think the public health and the environmental health communities are trying to figure out how to connect with the planning community to share their ideas on the built environment. Once we all connect, I think what you and I want will start to happen in more places.
Best,
D
Expectations for San Diego walkability set WAY too high.
I would say the author has provided an accurate description of the existing state of "new urbanist" hype in Southern California. Those developments never end up as originally planned. They only exaserbate the problem in which they are intending to solve.
However, I would like to comment on one of the main counterpoints in the author's suggestion that revitalized neighborhoods in San Diego offer a welcome alternative to the typical auto-oriented new urbanist OR greenfield development. First of all, Little Italy or Uptown San Diego are not in fact "wildly" successful, or even that walkable for that matter. Real estate values have tanked in San Diego recently, which has resulted in a reversal of the hyper-speculative gentrification that has taken place in "America's Finest City" over the past five years. Foreclosures have reached to the point of epidemic in these condo-glutted "urban infill" neighborhoods. Sidewalks are empty, and "reduced-price" for sale signs abound.
The street grids, of which are one of the most important criteria for walkable neighborhoods, lack one important element in San Diego's first ring suburbs (built primarily after the turn of the century). That is, they offer few alternatives for public transit connections to the surrounding neighborhoods, or the central business district in San Diego. Most people who either live or shop in these touted neighborhoods rarely ever take public transit to travel either to or from these neighborhoods to surrounding districts. In short, these "revitalized neighborhoods" are literally just as auto-oriented and gentrified (on a regional level) as the developments the author criticizes in Mission Valley and North San Diego County.
Perhaps the author indeed has extensive experience in living in and experiencing "walkable communities" in other parts of the country. However, when it comes to San Diego, the author fails to realize that San Diego is a city which (just like Los Angeles) has developed an incestuous love affair with the automobile, and refuses to give up that lifestyle, no matter what new TODs, TNDs, or neighborhood revitalization projects are proposed by Calthorpe, et. al.
Remember what happened to "City of Villages", the smart growth strategy which was proposed by the City of San Diego Planning Department as an effort to update their General Plan? Unlike what San Diego Planning Director Bill Anderson (or even "visionary architects" Teddy Cruz and Mike Stepner) would like to admit, the entire plan went down in flames, due to a resistance by San Diego's infamously NIMBYist and balkanized residents. Therefore, the very strategy which was being proposed to serve as a guiding framework for future smart growth/new urbanist/walkable development and revitalization in San Diego was turned down by its own residents, ending up in a few "pilot villages" and intentionally morphed by short-sighted developers into watered down, over-hyped, faux TODs (like Rio Vista).
Little Italy is a success
For one, it is a real neighborhood, not a "development".
It also is one of the best public transit hubs in the city, with connections to downtown, the airport, outer suburbs, and even Amtrak's Surfliner through southern California.
One may also walk from Little Italy to other downtown areas, including hotels, the harbor, the Gaslamp, Seaport Village and the Convention Center. Some of the downtown city blocks bordering little Italy could use improvement, but that is just a matter of time.
I'm not sure how you can contend that Little Italy's sidewalks are "empty". I am there every day and they are far from empty. There is almost no parking, so I'm not sure how people are getting there if they don't take the train, walk, or already live there.
As for Uptown, the number of grocery stores and restaurants in Hillcrest can keep anyone happy for a long while.
I think the author's point about revitalized neighborhoods is that the bare-bones basics are there - the street grids. If you don't have at least that, then you can forget about walkability. Arterials are not walkable, period.
Little Italy is a successful development, not a neighborhood.
For all intents and purposes, Little Italy in its current form is in fact a planned development built upon a traditional urban grid, and not a real "neighborhood". This is due to the fact that after Caltrans built Interstate 5 right throught the heart of the REAL neighborhood in the 1950s, nearly most of the residents and Italian and Portuguese tuna fisherman moved out, taking away most of the economic vitality which gave Little Italy it's name in the first place.
Through a deliberate, corporate-directed redevelopment scheme led by Pete Wilson and the CCDC in the 1970s, Little Italy was transformed from a vacant, vestage of a neighborhood, into a systematically designed, tax-generating gentrification plan for the area north of downtown. This was not the "organic development" which the author speaks of, as seen in most neighborhoods, but a clearly real estate-driven approach to maximize residential profits as land values began to skyrocket in California. Certainly not a living, working neighborhood in the strictest definition of the word. In terms of pedestrian activity in Little Italy, most of those people DO drive into the neighborhood to frequent the shops and restaurants, and there is quite a surplus of surface parking located just to the south of the neighborhood. And a majority of the people who do own properties in Little Italy (like East Village, Marina, and Cortez Hill) are actually speculative investors, who sought to make a quick buck by flipping their properties in a short period of time. No real neighborhood there.
As for being one of the "best public transit hubs" in the city, this is all relative. When one compares the poor ridership levels on all public transit offerings in San Diego (Trolley, bus, Coaster, NTC, etc), and how those factor in socioeconomically, one begins to see that a majority of the riders in San Diego are the poor and disenfranchichised. Not the "enlightened" folks who made the deliberate choice to "go urban". This is in addition to the fact that the San Diego Trolley happens to be the most under-funded, least-reliable, and most poorly-maintained public light rail systems in the nation. Of course, you have your upper middle class executives who take the Coaster every morning from places like Carlsbad and Encinitas, however, this is such a small segment of the population which travels to and from Center City every day for business or pleasure, that it makes a realtive little dent in the auto-dependancy of San Diego.
It's actually NOT a matter of time until the downtown city blocks bordering Little Italy see improvements, because real estate values and inventories have become saturated, to the point of being unsustainable. This of course runs counter to what all the snake oil salesmen-type civic boosters have to say with regards to downtown development. Of course, they were the same ones to create this extreme boom and bust economic cycle which San Diego has continuously experienced for the past century.
Uptown San Diego is a totally auto-oriented development. There is really no way to access the shops and services there without parking your car in the interior lots and walking around.
A few points
Believe it or not, there are Italians still living in Little Italy. I agree that it is a terrible shame that I-5 literally destroyed the neighborhood in the 1950's. But thank goodness it is coming back. I hear real Italians speaking on the streets there all the time.
The new downtown plan from the CCDC is quite impressive. Have you seen it? It will move San Diego toward a real living and working hub.
You can walk to Uptown from other parts of Hillcrest. The Uptown TND fits right into city blocks between Vermont and 10th Streets. Other parts of Hillcrest need serious work -- most of Park Ave, Normal Street, etc. They've got sidewalks, but not much else.
CCDC Downtown Community Plan is a joke.
Most professionals and academics in the urban planning field (including myself) have concurred that the CCDC Downtown Community Plan (as developed by urban design consultant Dyett and Bhatia, from San Francisco) is a sustainability nightmare.
The plan allows for little new open space, provides for few if any new public services or amenities, no affordable housing (thanks to the BIA) and basically proposes to flood the downtown area with 30,000+ additional speculative condo units, without providing for infrastructure or transportation improvements. This is in addtion to the fact that the downtown plan has not gone the extra mile to encourage additional commercial and employment development, to provide for a healthy jobs/housing balance.
What CCDC is proposing is essentially a downtown suburbia. Basically, more luxury units for executives are to be constructed downtown, and those "urban" professionals will end up flooding the freeways on their commutes to jobs in Sorrento Valley, UTC, and Mission Valley.
And yes, the construction of I-5 DID in fact destroy Little Italy in San Diego. It is a kitchsy, stylized, upscale facade of what it used to be (unlike Chinatown in San Francisco, for example).
You're awesome
I love how every development that doesn't meet you're organically developed, completely transit dependent, highly dense urban development utopia is just a corporate-minded, auto-loving yuppie paradise. Little Italy's not a "real neighbohood" because the people that live there now are just "real estate speculators" and victims of a "real estate-driven approach to maximizing residential profits", or the people that go out there...heaven forbid...actually drive, park nearby and walk...oh the horror. There's plenty of people down there bringing the place back to life, they might no be Italian or Portuguese, but they're people buying goods from local shops or living there. And yeah, they're plenty of for sale signs and condo prices are falling, but that's a good thing for the majority of the region as it might open up places to live for those with a long-term commitment who are actually looking to live downtown instead of invest there.
Every single one of your arguments can be made about every single place in this country when you compare it some utopic ideal.
But people AREN'T going to live in those speculative condos
San Diego (and Los Angeles) ARE unique with respect to the rest of the country and even the Sun Belt in that neither of those cities have ever had a sizeable residential population who live AND work downtown.
Just because the market was literally dumped with thousands of condo units in downtown San Diego (and just because their values have dropped dramatically over the past six months) doesn't mean that over the long term, these places will in fact ever develop into sustainable urban communities.
More realistically, the "urban" suburban novelty in downtown San Diego will die off, and these empty units will be developed once again into "highest and best use", with totaly disregard for the long term viability of the region.
It's happened before in San Diego and it will definitely happen again and again.
Except lots of people do actually live there now
Not as many people as there would be without all of the speculators, but people do live there now...mostly the type of people who are attracted to condo type living (empty nesters and young people)...so it definitely can be a "sustainable" urban neighborhood, but I doubt that it will ever be a family-type of destination (not that there's any real urban neighborhood in America that's a middle-class family neighborhood anymore)...maybe our definitions of sustainbility are just different though? It could be exactly like Vancouver, which has nearly an entirely residential downtown with very few families....is that sustainable? What do you consider providing for the long-term viability of the region?
Plus, it hasn't even been a decade since the fist of this wave of condo towers went up (the Ballpark inspired wave)...Rome wasn't built in a day, and developing whole neighborhoods take time...look how far it's come since the 70s.
My only response to your unbridled, boosterist optimism is...
Read my comment upthread entitled "CCDC Downtown Community Plan is a joke". That will explain what is actually anticipated for downtown San Diego, and how the bottom is going to fall out.
An artificially contrived "suburban" downtown.
Heck, that's what it is already!!! You can wait 50 years, it still won't have a true sense of community (compared to lower, middle, AND upper class neigborhoods in New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, etc etc.) More than likely, it will become the urban detritus which countless failed large-scale (modernist and new urbanist) urban interventions have given us.
That is, future generations will be left to recycle the disconnected parcels of short-sighted investment opportunities and attempt to piece together a true sense of community (certainly not counting the mid-to-high rise luxury condos constructed in San Diego after Petco Park, which are pathetically referred to as "community" in the incredibly upbeat and glossy articles in Urban Land and San Diego Metropolitan magazines).
You are ridiculously (and misguidedly) optimistic about the future vitality of downtown San Diego. I don't believe you have done your research with regards to understanding the big development picture of what's really going on behind the scenes at CCDC (and what's in store for "America's Finest City").
Evolution
Thank goodness vtboy wasn't living in those "lower, middle, AND upper class neighborhoods in New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Chicago" during their formative years. He likely would have been hard at work with quill and inkpot disparaging them with equal vehemence and vitriol.
Unfortunately we haven't learned much from his postings. If all of mankind's efforts ("modernist and new urbanist") have been absymal failures in their quest for establishing "a true sense of community", then what, pray tell, would he offer as alternatives? We could all profit from some POSITIVE insights from one so sagaciously gifted.
Vehemence, Vitriol, and Venom: Deconstructed
Don't worry all, I've been give the proverbial boot!
For everyone's information, Christian Peralta, Editor of Planetizen, PERSONALLY e-mailed me yesterday indicating that I "attack" other commenters and somehow my postings need to be more productive.
Therefore, I refuse to comment any further in a forum which is obviously politically slated and does not recognize that all parties at one time or another "personaly" attack others, which happen to be the beauty of personal opinion, free speech, and the basis for our democratic constitution.
Therfore dano, charles siegel, ricardo, zeenut, and all the others who have personally attacked me, I forgive you. I will now take a step back to let others in this forum keep thinking alike and not providing an intelligent, insightful opinion to counter all of the like-minded planners. These are the same planners and followers of the "urban visionaries" who think Peter Calthorpe is the second coming of Christ, San Diego is god's country, the Louisiana Recovery Authority will bring back the state to a time of preeminence before the civil war, and Los Angeles WILL develop into the Polycentric City which Stephanos Polyzoides arrogantly envisions for the City of Angels.
Mr. Christian Peralta, please remove my user account IMMEDIATELY from this highly censored, politically homogeneous, and repressive forum. And no, I now have no intention of EVER writing an op-ed or "feature" for this so-called e-publication (like Diana DeRubertis' belatedly casual epiphanys on what residents in San Diego have known all along about Rio Vista West).
Goodbye dano, charles siegel, ricardo, and zeenut, it's been real, frustrating that is!
Actually...
The rules of free speech do not apply to internet forums, nor should they. Commenters are guests of the website or blog owner. If the owner decides a user is out of bounds, he or she is free to delete comments or ban that user altogether. It happens every day across the blogosphere -- any posts deemed abusive or unproductive are automatically deleted by a moderator or by the community itself.
You've made some valid points, but your last comment really would not last very long on most other sites. Calling out editors and other users by name is a big no-no in the blog world.
The departure of vtboy.
His parting shot notwithstanding, it would appear that vt boy was NOT "booted from the site" but only asked by the moderator to make his contributions more civil and productive. Thus, it should be noted for the record that his exile is self-imposed and was NOT an act of censorship by the host.