Take me 'way to nowhere place

RustedRobot's post about Maynard, Massachusetts gets me thinking. (This was almost a comment on your blog, Jeff, but I elaborated further, and went with this method instead.)

I grew up in a real nowhere place in New Jersey. It wasn't really a town at all -- just a bunch of unincorporated farmland past the remote exurbs of NYC that eventually filled up with tract housing and had to become a town. The community leaders constantly struggled with ideas for how to make the place seem more like a real town. They toyed with the idea of building a little fake downtown somewhere in the middle, but it never got off the ground because the access roads just aren't built for that level of traffic. The only road that can handle substantial traffic is a state highway that is almost completely choked with strip malls. There's one medium sized indoor mall too, which continues to be quite busy on Friday nights. So are the diners. There aren't many interesting restaurants, and if you want to sit at a bar and watch a ballgame with your neighbors, you're doing it at Bennigan's.

It's amazing how quickly someone's American Dream ("a twenty-inch tube and a fenced-in yard," as Robbie Fulks once wrote) resulted in places like this. Amazingly, quite a few of my high-school friends still live there.

I graduated high school at 16. You can't drive a car in New Jersey until you're 17. Is it any wonder I wound up with a fabulous record collection?

I've long believed that the explosive population growth and sprawl around places like Las Vegas and Phoenix will soon result in some of the nastiest places in the country. Today much of the land in those cities and their suburbs is dotted with ugly, rapidly-built houses that don't really hang together; I believe those brand-new neighborhoods will be half-vacant and considerably more violent within a generation. Think of it this way: why would a person (in 2025) buy someone's twenty-year-old house in one desert glen instead of a brand-new one that barely costs more, just on the other side of the artery road? If the construction trends continue, you'll have places that turn from new housing to rough parts of town faster than we've ever seen before.

Factor in the high number of retirees in the area. Add, in the case of Vegas, no real reason for the place's existence outside of the tourist/sin industry, i.e. no docks, railroad industry, shipping, river, etc. Consider, for goodness sake, the potential for a water-related disaster that would destroy those cities' lifelines; or perhaps, high demand causing utilities to become expensive, driving people out of the area once its resources are stretched. You have a recipe for one big suburban slum, and Vegas and Phoenix could be only a couple of decades away from that point.


FMFM: Ellington's 1947 concert in Carnegie Hall, along with the Giants-A's game.