This Saturday, all over the nation, in every major city in America, there will be a protest held against the passing of Proposition 8. This is your chance to stand publicly amongst your community (even if you're not gay! You support us, you're family!). This is your time to tell Ohio that you are not ok with an entire class of Americans standing as separate and still not equal. This is an incredible time to be gay in America.
He taught me how to slow-dance. He took me out to dinner. We would lie around for hours talking, staring into each other's eyes. We would walk through the park singing, holding hands. When we would gather with friends the energy would spread rampantly throughout the room. When it was just the two of us, I could feel the Earth slowing down just to give us a few extra minutes before the sun would set.
Sometimes I wonder what I would be like if I still lived today so free from inhibitions. I am so far removed from loving another that when I say goodbye to someone, it’s almost as if they were never there in the first place. I live with no concern but for my own. And yet sorrow over an ordinary love affair clings to me stronger than almost any other memory in my vast repertoire of experiences.
His eyes. Oh, it was his eyes for certain. I yearn for the time when eyes alone could love me, mold me, complete me…and destroy me. I yearn for just one more time when I would allow myself that most unusual predicament called love. Just one more time.
I'm single. I like noise. I like Urban life. But I'm not too sure if I'd willfully sign up to live in place where nearly 100,000 people show up on my lawn once a week.Vancouver has never seen a neighbourhood like this. While the city has managed to balance residential and entertainment land uses in areas such as Robson and Davie streets, Vancouver city planning director Brent Toderian says that the future housing development at B.C. Place Stadium will break new ground in redefining livability.
Some 1,200 residential units are expected to rise at the stadium’s site at the northeast end of False Creek, a district that Toderian noted will become an entertainment, sports, and cultural centre. At present, this area houses GM Place, the Edgewater Casino, and the Plaza of Nations, which will soon be the new home of the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Noise, traffic, and lack of community amenities are some of the challenges future residents will face. Obviously, these housing units aren’t for everyone.
Props to the shout out to my hometown, Washington D.C.! I can say that Washington D.C. is entirely walkable, and most my friends who live in the city live car-free. While I grew up just outside of the city and had a car, if I ever moved back I'd most likely forgo owning a car. It's just not worth the hassle considering the efficiency of The Metro.We are witnessing the beginning of the end of sprawl. Like much of the rest of the country, the overproduction of automobile-driven suburban development at the fringe of the Atlanta metropolitan area has reached its limits. The combination of outrageous commutes, environmental degradation and the increasing number of consumers preferring a “walkable urban” way of life have combined to start the end of the geometric increase in land consumption of the past half century.
The subprime crisis and the energy price spike of the past 18 months have just accelerated an underlying market trend.
Evidence of this structural change comes from many sources:
> The city of Atlanta had been losing population since 1960 in spite of rapid metropolitan growth. That changed in the 1990s and has phenomenally accelerated this decade. The city is now among the top 10 fastest-growing cities in the country.
> The city of Atlanta’s share of office market demand had been falling for at least a half century; it stabilized a couple of years ago. If you follow trends from other metro areas that are ahead of Atlanta, the office market share and the employment that comes with it should start gaining on the suburbs during the next upturn.
> While the national housing depression has not affected metro Atlanta quite as badly as many other regions, it has followed national trends in one important respect: Homes in the center of the region and close to job centers have not suffered much, if any, price declines. Prices on the fringe are down twice the regional average, losing on average at least 14 percent of value. The highest-price housing on a per-square-foot basis is now in the city and close-in suburban job centers, a fundamental change from 20 years ago.
Metro Atlanta is following a national trend in creating and growing high-density, walkable urban places. The two-week party that was the Olympics in 1996 first showed you how exciting a temporary walkable urban place could be, and you set out to make it permanent over the subsequent decade.
But it definitely is not confined to downtown.
Midtown, Atlantic Station, Virginia-Highland, Buckhead, Vinings and Decatur have also emerged as walkable urban places. There will be many more.
The metro area that has the most walkable urban places, per capita, is the region surrounding Washington. It has 20 such urban communities today and 10 more are emerging; 20 years ago there were just two. Given that metro Atlanta has exactly the same population as metro Washington, if you follow the Washington model, you will be growing 15 to 25 more walkable urban places in the next decade. This represents tens of billions of dollars in investment over the next decade and will be home to thousands of jobs and housing.
There are a lot of pretty shots of New York. For the video, scroll down and it's on the left side of the page. Good stuff.Gone are the days when cheap electricity, primitive lighting technology and landlords’ desire to showcase their skyscrapers kept floor after floor of the city’s highest towers glowing into the night. Now, rising energy costs, conservationism, stricter building codes and sophisticated lighting systems have conspired to slowly, often imperceptibly, transform Manhattan’s venerable nightscape into one with a gentler glow.
Instead of tower after tower shining at all hours — the World Trade Center stayed aglow long after its occupants went home — the skyline is becoming a patchwork of sparsely sparkling buildings decorated with ornamentally lighted tops.
“The tall tower with the illuminated floors on all night long is probably a thing of the past,” said Randy Sabedra, the owner of RS Lighting Design, who is helping to create a new map of the city’s most prominently lighted buildings. “You’re not relying on the glowing floors to have the building presence. It is relying on the crown of light.”
Spain to help build Russian railways.
Russian Railways is seeking Spanish expertise in a multi-billion dollar investment project. Spain is ready to help build high-speed railways in mountainous areas and supply trains with an automatic gauge changing system.Welcomed by the King of Spain and the country’s top officials, the head of Russian Railways, Vladimir Yakunin, went to Madrid as an old friend and a trusted partner.
Russian Railways has a multi-billion dollar investment plan for rail infrastructure - a vital project in times of economic turmoil, according to Yakunin.
“The problem is not only the liquidity of banks, but also the support of the demand – the market, the real economy. So, because of that, we consider it is absolutely essential to keep the infrastructural investment programmes in tact,” he says. Russian authorities are considering co-operation with Spain’s INECO to build a high speed railway that will carry passengers from Moscow to Sochi in less than 24 hours.
As for international cargo, even high-speed trains have to cope with a variation of track gauge among different countries. Spain has a solution - Talgo carriages that can alter the gauge on the go.Mario Oria, Talgo’s export and marketing manager says: “We are hoping that the Russian market becomes the biggest in that share. Ideally, we’d be talking about 20-30 % of overall sales.”
Talgo’s trains can boost cargo volumes from Russia to the EU countries and significantly cut delivery times. Russia has already finished testing the Talgo system and is likely to buy the first ten trains, worth 15 million euros each, as soon as 2011.
Wow, if Moscow gets High-Speed Rail before Los Angeles or San Francisco, I think Ronald Reagan will dig himself out of his grave and begin writing an apology to the American people. (As if he shouldn't already do that, but that's another story...)
(Via Trains for America)
A neighbor at the Bridgewater recently noticed that someone removed the letter “P” from the large sign and flipped it upside down so the sign read “GOLD MEDAL dARK.” Then the letters “P” and “G” went missing, leaving the sign to read “OLD MEDAL ARK.” Yesterday an “A” disappeared as well.
Minneapolis Planning Commission President David Motzenbecker, a landscape architect who helped design the park at 2nd Street and 11th Avenue South, said the Park Development Foundation’s maintenance company is now repairing the missing letters and they should be back in place next week. The architects are researching a more vandal-proof attachment method for the hollow aluminum sign.
Motzenbecker said this type of vandalism has happened before. Soon after the park opened last year, someone removed a letter, apparently by rocking it back and forth until it broke off its stand, and left the letter on the ground.
Don't worry, the wingnuts have already claimed that Barack planned this one. And they're the party of "value" voters. What a bunch of fuckers."Some of you heard that my grandmother who helped raise me passed away early this morning," [Barack Obama] said. "I'm not going to talk about it too long because it's hard for me to talk about."
He went on to tell the crowd that Ms. Dunham was born in 1922 in a small Kansas town. He said she lived through the Great Depression and two World Wars.
"She was one of those quiet heroes that we have all across America, they're not famous, their names aren't in the newspaper but each and every day they work hard, they look after their families, they sacrifice for their children and their grandchildren," he said.
In the statement, Sen. Obama called his grandmother "the person who encouraged and allowed us to take chances" and said his "debt to her is beyond measure." Last month, as his grandmother's health deteriorated, the Illinois Democrat took time off the campaign trail to visit her in Hawaii.Sen. Obama, the son of a Kenyan father and a Kansas-born mother, was largely reared by his maternal grandparents. He called his grandmother "Toot," short for "tutu," the Hawaiian word for grandmother. Sen. Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, died of ovarian cancer in 1995 at the age of 57, and his grandfather, Stanley Dunham, died in 1992.
Rising frustration over Santa Monica's congestion has led a group of citizens to qualify a ballot initiative for the November general election that would fight what they argue is the root of the problem: commercial development. The bill would cap the amount of commercial development allowed per year in the city at 75,000 square feet for the next 15 years. This is the equivalent of about two acres, or like building a new supermarket and a handful of fast food restaurants. This is a significant cut for a city that sees an average of 160,000 square feet of commercial development each year.
The proposal is on the Santa Monica ballot as Measure T (as in "Traffic"), but around town and throughout metropolitan L.A., the development cap is known as RIFT. The acronym is especially apt, as the proposal has caused a major divide amongst residents, officials and developers. It stands for Residents Initiative to Fight Traffic, and its authors assert that the city needs to more actively prevent traffic from getting even worse. Opponents argue that the name itself highlights the proposal's two main problems: one, it's a residents initiative, and two, it won't fight traffic.
The prospect of counteracting the city's gnarling traffic was enough to entice more than 10,000 residents' signatures, nearly double what was needed to qualify RIFT for the election. Authors of the bill say this overwhelming support underscores the need for action – action they're not seeing from local government.
"We don't believe that this commercial development serves the residents," says Ted Winterer, a co-author of RIFT and a candidate for Santa Monica City Council. "It begins to just become an engine for revenue growth." And more jobs. And more traffic.
It just makes my day when I hear Columbusites complain about traffic. "Why, I had to sit on that highway for fifteen minutes. It was insane!" While I understand city traffic always sucks, compared to the congestion in Chicago, Miami, Washington and LA, Columbus traffic is essentially non-existent. In fact, the highways here should be praised that when big events such as "Red, White and Boom" (which usually attracts 500,000 people) come, the events go off so smoothly. In my opinion, it's one of Columbus' finer attributes, its ability to orchestrate huge downtown events with stellar efficiency.
Barack Obama leads John McCain by a 52% to 36% margin in Pew’s latest nationwide survey of 1,325 registered voters. This is the fourth consecutive survey that has found support for the Republican candidate edging down. In contrast, since early October weekly Pew surveys have shown about the same number of respondents saying they back Obama. When the sample is narrowed to those most likely to vote, Obama leads by 53% to 38%.
A breakdown of voting intentions by demographic groups shows that since mid- September, McCain’s support has declined significantly across most voting blocs. Currently, McCain holds a statistically significant advantage only among white evangelical Protestants (aside from Republicans). In addition, Obama runs nearly even with McCain in the so-called red states, all of which George W. Bush won in 2004.
Just as ominous for the Republican candidate, Obama holds a 53% to 34% lead among the sizable minority of voters (15%) who say they have already voted. Among those who plan to vote early but have not yet voted (16% of voters), 56% support Obama, while 37% support McCain.
Well, that handsome fellow, whose name is Jason Dottley, somehow found this site and guess what--he said yes! Now, minor detail, he didn't acutally say yes to my marriage proposal, he instead said yes to his (now) husband's. Ironically, they were just married yesterday. Looks like my plee for marriage was just a day shy! But who cares?! He said yes to someone, so if he's off the market that's better than him flat out rejecting me. Success! Chris wins the day!By this time next year, Hennepin and 1st avenues will be morphing into two-way streets. What those streets will look like is far from settled, however.
Different layouts under consideration could have bike lanes running down the center of the road, running next to buses near the curb, or sharing left-turn space with vehicles at each intersection. Instead of two bike lanes on Hennepin, one of them could run on 1st Avenue. The streets may or may not include left-turn lanes, and some layouts could create situations where cars are backed up for blocks. Drivers aren’t getting much sympathy in the current plans — they will undoubtedly travel through Downtown at a slower pace on Hennepin and 1st. City officials say that’s welcome news for area businesses because slower traffic will boost their visibility.
One major focus for the project is the bicyclists that have adopted Hennepin Avenue as a cycling highway — 500–1,000 cyclists travel down Hennepin in a single day, and bike traffic in the city has increased at least 30 percent in the past year alone.
[snip]
City planners have already ruled out many layout options for Hennepin and 1st, largely because of the streets’ limited space. The curbs will remain intact in order to conserve the sidewalk space and keep the project on track for completion by early 2010. Here are the remaining options on the table for Hennepin and 1st. To send in feedback, visit [this site here].
[Writing in the New Yorker] "To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”
"To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked."
This is my 303rd post at Fabulously in the City! I feel rather productive. Thank you to all 13 of my dedicated readers! I would be lost without you. ;-)
Makes you really appreciate our great parks here in Columbus. If you haven't checked them out, all the info for the parks in the Columbus metropolitan can be found here. My personal favorite is Sharon Woods, but they're all great. Take advantage of them!The Grove, the Americana’s spiritual antecedent, is the most prominent, and successful, 21st-century attempt of the private sector to fill the void of public life in Los Angeles. Its critics, like those of Disney before it, dismiss the Grove as a manufactured universe free of the gruff realities of urban life. Yet the Grove attracts more people than even Disneyland, while the withered Pan Pacific Park, right next door, offering all the opportunities one could want for “real” public interaction, is barely used.
The Grove is safe and clean because, as a private development, it has control over who and what to allow. Unlike a public park, the Grove can legally toss the overtly political, the intoxicated or the indigent out — eliminating the fringe and ensuring a beigist medium for safe social and commercial interaction among the majority.
Though critics continue to spew impotent rage at the Grove, the space is what it is — a fancy outdoor mall. The Americana, however, while aesthetically and conceptually similar to the Grove, is a much, much different story. It is a strange and uncertain hybrid.
When Rick Caruso agreed to develop the 15.5-acre plot of city land in Glendale that would become the Americana, he assented to creating a new town center — replete with housing, retail and public space. The selling point of the project was the development of a new, 2-acre park at its center, which would be open for public use. Glendale agreed to provide the land for the entire development, free of charge, with the condition that the city would retain ownership of the park. Caruso Affiliated would be responsible for its design and maintenance.
The result is what L.A. Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne describes as “a public space masquerading as private space that is masquerading as public.”
Or, as Hemingway might have said, the park is a park is a park is an onion.
"The study (by University of Pennsylvania planning professor Rachel Weinberger), "Guaranteed Parking, Guaranteed Driving", compares parking and commuting habits in Park Slope, Brooklyn and Jackson Heights, Queens. The study finds that despite having the same car ownership and very similar access to public transit to the Central Business District, Jackson Heights residents are 45% more likely to drive to work in the Central Business District and 28% more likely to drive to work in general.
The study concludes that Jackson Heights car owners are more likely to drive to work because of guaranteed, off-street parking spots to return to at the end of the day."
I would never have guessed this! Who would have ever thought that as you build more parking lots, it encourages people to drive more? No one could have seen this coming!
Ty, will you marry me? I'm a great cook and I play piano! I'll make your coffee for you every morning and I'll even wash your clothes. I sure suck at ironing, but for you I could learn! What other important matters are there in marriage? Oh, yeah, my name is Chris! I have curly hair and I've got wit for days! I really never was an eater, so for you I'll always stay thin, which I know is important for a STAR like you in Hollywood. We'll be perfect for each other! (Once we get over the "what's-your-name" dilemma).I'll let you guys know what he says when he gets back to me. I have high hopes! *giddily crosses fingers*
In a survey of 120 major cities, New York was found to be the ninth most unequal in the world and Atlanta, New Orleans, Washington, and Miami had similar inequality levels to those of Nairobi, Kenya Abidjan and Ivory Coast. Many were above an internationally recognised acceptable "alert" line used to warn governments.
"High levels of inequality can lead to negative social, economic and political consequences that have a destabilising effect on societies," said the report. "[They] create social and political fractures that can develop into social unrest and insecurity."
According to the annual State of the World's cities report from UN-Habitat, race is one of the most important factors determining levels of inequality in the US and Canada.
"In western New York state nearly 40% of the black, Hispanic and mixed-race households earned less than $15,000 compared with 15% of white households. The
life expectancy of African-Americans in the US is about the same as that of people living in China and some states of India, despite the fact that the US is far richer than the other two countries," it said.Disparities of wealth were measured on the "Gini co-efficient", an internationally recognised measure usually only applied to the wealth of countries. The higher the level, the more wealth is concentrated in the hands of fewer people.
"It is clear that social tension comes from inequality. The trickle down theory [that wealth starts with the rich] has not delivered. Inequality is not good for anybody," said Anna Tibaijuka, head of UN-Habitat, in London yesterday.
The area shows evidence of several large lakes that formed after Noah's Flood.
"I lost count of how many times I read claims such as, "The evidence suggests...", yet none of the supporting evidence was shown. For example, a claim was that, "The Evidence suggests Lake Hopi was formed after The Great Flood". Yet, after searching the whole museum, there wasn't an inch of this so-called evidence, not even a reference!"
The Republican National Committee has spent more than $150,000 to clothe and accessorize vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and her family since her surprise pick by John McCain in late August.
According to financial disclosure records, the accessorizing began in early September and included bills from Saks Fifth Avenue in St. Louis and New York for a combined $49,425.74.
The records also document a couple of big-time shopping trips to Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis, including one $75,062.63 spree in early September. The RNC also spent $4,716.49 on hair and makeup through September after reporting no such costs in August.
The cash expenditures immediately raised questions among campaign finance experts about their legality under the Federal Election Commission's long-standing advisory opinions on using campaign cash to purchase items for personal use.
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