We’re All Florida Men

Google Earth imagery of a suburban area in Parkland, Florida, United States. Image taken from r/SuburbanHell.

Yesterday, as of the time I’m writing this, somebody posted the above image on the subreddit titled SuburbanHell. They posed the question about whether it would be calm or creepy living in the last home prior to the swampland in this part of southern Florida. 

Now, the image above is of the city of Parkland in Broward County. It’s an affluent suburb of Miami. According to its Wikipedia article , Parkland’s zoning laws were designed in a way so that the city would keep living up to its name. Apparently, there were no stores or even traffic lights there until the mid-1990s to early 2000s. Some would call that an example of why it’s  suburban hell, but it’s the sort of Florida many people dream of.

It needs to be said that Parkland, like so many other places in the United States, is now known for a horrific tragedy. In this case, it’s the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that spurred the March For Our Lives movement against gun violence in the United States. David Hogg, who served as a DNC vice chair for a few months ending last month, survived that shooting. But this blog post is not about gun violence, but rather something equally tragic that cities like Parkland risk. We’ll get to that later.

Florida has a lot of nicknames. Sometimes it’s called “America’s wang” or something to that effect. Other times, it’s become infamous for the “Florida Man” meme. You can literally search your birthday and you’ll find a list of insane “Florida man” headlines that happened on that day in history. It’s a pretty wild place.

Until relatively recently, Florida was the swing state in American politics. Whatever party garnered a plurality of the vote in Florida would almost always win the presidential election. No doubt the most infamous example of this is the 2000 election, during which the margin was hundreds of votes and the Supreme Court issued its controversial decision to halt the recount and declare George W. Bush the President-elect. 

But 2000 is hardly the only time Florida proved itself as a swing state. In 2016, as Donald Trump lost the popular vote nationwide by about two percentage points, he carried Florida by a 1.2% margin. And two years later, despite a blue wave nationally, three-term incumbent Democratic Senator Bill Nelson lost to Republican Governor Rick Scott by 10,033 votes out of over eight million. At the time, it was easy to blame the loss on Nelson’s age and the perception that he was “asleep at the wheel.” He looked like they took a skeleton, draped some skin over it, and said “let’s call him Bill Nelson.” But that’s beside the point.

In addition to its reputation for being razor-thin, Florida also counts its votes incredibly quickly. Early and mail-in votes can be counted by election officials as soon as they’re received. Even in the 2020 election, infamous for how slowly votes were counted due to the COVID-induced mail voting surge, Florida had 99 percent of its vote in within a few hours. In Florida, you’d know your fate in a hurry. And you still do, not least because of what I’ll say in the next paragraph.

Nowadays, Florida is a bona fide red state, which is made clear by the fact that Rick Scott won reelection last year by nearly 13 percentage points. Donald Trump won the state by roughly the same amount, and it really serves as a testament to how many Republican voters have been flocking to the state in recent years. Yes, the state that gave us politicians like Ron DeSantis and musicians like Forgiato Blow is now firmly MAGA-coded.

And honestly, I don’t blame Democrats for refusing to move to Florida. If I lived there, I’d get the hell out ASAP. Electoral politics isn’t even the only reason why.

Contrary to popular belief among the MAGA movement, climate change is real and caused by human activity. In other countries, it isn’t a political debate; it’s just a fact of life that needs to be dealt with via reducing our carbon emissions and adapting to what climate chaos we’ve already locked in. But Florida, being a state that’s attracted so many Republican voters, is a hotbed of climate denial. 

Florida has been dubbed the country’s “riskiest peninsula.” And I want to be clear: There’s no place on Earth that is not and will not be severely affected by the climate crisis, either eventually or immediately. That being said, Florida is basically the perfect storm, no pun intended.

The state is incredibly vulnerable to sea level rise, given that so much of its population is located so close to the ocean. They say the sea is rising by one inch every three years. It might rise two feet, or a little more, in the average lifetime, and that might not sound like much, but it’s not just about the baseline sea level. Not only that, but this has major implications for urban policy in the state. (Or at least, it would if so many of the state’s officials weren’t climate deniers).

According to a study from a few years ago, about one million Florida properties could become “chronically flooded” in the coming decades. Financially speaking, this means that the state would lose about $600 billion this century. And I’m not really a fan of putting a dollar value on human livelihoods, because it’s so much more than just money. But it’s what I’ll go with in this case.

Yesterday, upon browsing that Reddit thread about Parkland, I saw that someone recommended an episode of the podcast 99% Invisible. This podcast basically explores the way design impacts our lives in ways the average person doesn’t appreciate. Perhaps they’ve got an episode about supposed “riot-proof” architecture, but I’ll have to look for it myself if so.

The podcast episode in question, a transcript of which I’ll link here talks about the Florida city of Cape Coral. And honestly, it might have been even more poorly thought-out than Phoenix. At least indigenous peoples had managed to make Phoenix work in the past!

In 1961, game show The Price Is Right ran an episode in which players bid on a home in this new city called Cape Coral. You might call it Florida’s version of Levittown, a “perfect” suburban community that gave every household its little slice of paradise. Of course, Levittown has its own ugly racial history that I won’t get into here. The price for the house, or at least the value that would earn you the prize if you bid closest to it, was only slightly over $15,000. While that would be a lot more nominal money in 2025 terms, it’s still pretty insane that homes were being sold for such a low price.

At the time this episode aired, the words “climate change” had not yet entered the public consciousness to a major extent, even if Big Oil already knew the destructive impact their industry was having on the environment. Getting your own slice of “paradise” in Florida was probably pretty enticing back then, especially at such a low price. 

The podcast episode linked above even talks about how they’d fly you over Cape Coral in a Cessna bushplane and show you the land you’d purchased from above, dropping a bag of flour or sugar onto said lot. You gotta wonder if those bags ever missed their target - or, for that matter, hit someone on the ground. 

In recent years, of course, the climate crisis has gotten worse, and indeed accelerated. And again, everywhere in the country is affected by this. In my home state of Massachusetts, it doesn’t snow as much as it used to when I was a kid, and we have more days of severe heat in the summer than we once did. The loss of winter is of course depressing (indeed, it makes me sadder than I can really say here), whereas the heat waves are just unpleasant to live through. During the one a few weeks ago in which temperatures reached about 105°F (40.6°C) one day, I kept telling myself that if I lived in Phoenix it would be like that for possibly weeks at a time.

That’s the thing: Even if there’s no such thing as a “climate haven”, as Hurricane Helene reinforced, some places are riskier than others. 

Insurance companies are hardly progressive, at least politically speaking. The health insurance ghouls are, well, ghouls, to the point where lots of people celebrate Luigi Mangione for killing Brian Thompson this past December. (Given that United Healthcare has changed some policies, it’s quite possible Mangione saved a few orders of magnitude more lives than he took, but that’s not the point here). 

Home insurance companies aren’t some woke climate activists either. The fact remains, however, that even if you don’t believe in climate change, your home insurance company certainly does. That’s why home insurance premiums are so high in Florida, if you can get home insurance at all. It’s kind of ironic, not to mention tragic, that a state with so many climate change-impacted disasters has seen so many climate deniers take power. Again, though, you can blame it on the sheer number of people who’ve been moving to Florida in recent years.

It’s a common trend in this country that honestly serves as an exhibit of the phrase “American Idiot” that’s best known as a popular song by Green Day. Many Americans, even as climate change gets worse, have been moving to Florida (a state that’s been battered by hurricanes that keep getting more severe on average), as well as Arizona (a state that’s literally running out of water as it gets hotter and hotter). Both states rank in the top ten for population growth rate , and in the top five in terms of internal migration (that is, people moving there from other states). 

Cape Coral might have been paradise once thanks to its numerous canals. Some might call it the Venice of Florida, but it’s sinking even faster than the original Venice. Whenever homes are rebuilt thanks to the ultra-expensive home insurance that the owners managed to take out, they’re usually rebuilt on stilts, and that costs even more money. And ultimately, the stilts only put a Band-Aid on the problem - they aren’t going to fix it entirely.

In the long run, what this country truly needs is a reckoning. And I’m not just talking about a reckoning in terms of deciding where to live based on a scientific understanding of the climate crisis and what places are most affected by different climate-related hazards.

Rather, we need to address this country’s culture. More specifically, the biggest problem with American political culture is that unlike other countries, we don’t solve problems when they arise. We just stick our heads in the sand and prefer to pretend they don’t exist.

 I’ve brought this example up so often that it’s like beating a dead horse at this point, but if Sandy Hook didn’t motivate us to pass actual gun control at the national level, nothing will. Before the bodies were even cold, the NRA media machine knew they’d need to use every trick in the book to draw any conclusion other than “pass gun control right away”. Therefore, Alex Jones et al promoted conspiracy theories that the children and teachers were actors, that the attack was a false flag, or that the people involved had never existed at all. 

Sandy Hook isn’t the only example. Even after our horrific COVID response - really, the word response is a bit of a stretch - we didn’t pass universal health insurance. Nor did we do anything to prevent the same genocidal maniac from taking power again to possibly let millions more die from bird flu. More people will be stripped of their health insurance even as most other countries debate over serious issues like whether the families of hospital patients should be charged for parking. 

And, of course, the climate crisis is the most egregious example. Gun violence and medical bills mostly only affect American citizens, but climate change is going to kill all of us if we don’t do anything about it. The American public had no right to elect Donald Trump, and the whole world is going to pay for it. 

Scotland vs. Phoenix: Par For The Course?

View of the Old Course in Saint Andrews, Scotland. Image taken from the St Andrews links website.

Golf. It’s Donald Trump’s favorite sport, which is probably adjacent to at least some of the reasons why it’s one of the most controversial sports in today’s world. Indeed, do I even need to add the “probably” qualifier? Probably not.

On the surface, the sport is as simple as they get. All you need to do is hit a ball into a hole in as few “strokes” as possible. Seriously, could they not have chosen a less unfortunate word for it? To some extent, the sport is seen as “elitist” - a lot of people say that only rich people play it. 

Now, I might get some hate for this from my fellow progressives, but I’m not inherently against golf. If you don’t use a cart, it’s a good source of exercise, and it truly is a game of patience. These days, a lot of us could use more patience. But that’s not why the continued existence of the sport is so contentious.

Rather, the reason is due to its environmental impact and resource use. It’s no secret that in order to keep all that grass green, country clubs need to use a lot of water. Lots of Redditors complain about perfectly manicured lawns and how wasteful they are, but golf courses take up far more land and water than the average lawn.

It wasn’t always this way. You see, golf is considered to have begun in Scotland in the 15th century, and one of the oldest and most famous courses is the Old Course in the town of Saint Andrews. Now, because this was more than five hundred years ago, technology wasn’t nearly as advanced as it is now. It was not yet possible to grow tomatoes in Norway, since greenhouses weren’t a thing. Likewise, it was far more difficult to make land something it wasn’t.

Much of Scotland’s coast is made up of linksland, a type of gently rolling sandy terrain with light elevation and short grasses throughout most of the surface area. At first, the coast was the only place where golf could be played, but as the game grew more popular, demand grew for more courses inland. But in order to understand why so many courses emulated the design of the linksland (though, since it’s naturally occurring, can we really call it “design”?), it’s helpful to understand what makes this landscape so ideal for golf.

As of October 2023, according to Scottish governmental sources, Scotland had nearly seven million sheep. This number is greater than Scotland’s human population, but is a slight decline from the previous year. The northernmost part of the United Kingdom has always been fertile ground for these adorable woolly creatures, and these creatures in turn made Scottish linksland into fertile ground for golf.

You see, sheep eat grass. This act is fancifully known as “grazing”, and it’s necessary for the sheep to survive. With so many sheep feasting on the verdant linksland near the ocean, this ensured that the grass would never grow extraordinarily high, certainly not prohibitively high for golf. No industrial-strength lawn mower would be necessary to keep the grass at the proper level - the sheep would take care of that!

Additionally, if you’ve ever been to a golf course (or even if you’ve merely seen a picture of one), you’ll know that there are pits known as sand traps. Golfers strive to avoid hitting their ball into these hazards, but they actually formed naturally at first. Whenever a storm hit in the oceanic climate of Scotland, sheep would burrow into the ground in order to escape the wind. The resulting holes in the Earth would become today’s sand traps, which is why they’re also referred to as “bunkers.” And whenever a golf bunker is brought up, I always picture this.

I’m not the sort of person to say that everything is preordained. Perhaps everything happens for a reason, but sometimes that reason is because you’re stupid and make bad decisions. In the case of golf, there’s an important reason as to why it originated where it did. And there’s a time and place for everything.

Now, I’m not naïve to the fact that climate change poses an existential threat to the future of skiing. But you’ve never been able to ski in Florida. 

The reader is probably wondering: Why the hell is he using such a ludicrous example to prove a point? And what point is he trying to prove, anyway?

In all my time on this planet, I have never seen or heard anyone complain, at least unironically, that you can’t ski in Florida. In all probability, I will pass from this Earth without ever hearing that. Florida is a popular destination for domestic tourists even in the face of Ron DeSantis’ horrific policies; the mass boycott of it, at least among Americans, is far more prominent online than it is in real life. 

But when it comes to skiing in Florida, everyone just accepts that it’s not the place for that. Nobody’s talked about building mountains on the Gulf Coast and trucking in boatloads of snow to create pistes. That’s just not something any serious person even brings up. If you want to ski, you don’t travel to Florida.

Golf in Arizona is a different story.

A Google Maps screenshot of some golf courses in Greater Phoenix, Arizona, United States.

The Phoenix metro area, also known as the Valley of the Sun, has a lot of golf courses. In fact, some estimates say it’s as many as two hundred. This would mean that the courses featured in this Google Maps screenshot are a fraction of the total, the ones who were able and willing to pay their “Google dues” to be featured more prominently. 

The mild, rainy climate of Scotland is an ideal location for golf. Yes, with climate change upon us, droughts will become more frequent in Scotland, but they’re still abnormal. Most of the time, it still rains enough to keep the courses relatively green without needing to water them an absurd amount.

Contrast this to Greater Phoenix. Yes, I am aware that the fifth-largest city in the US, with a metro area of about five million people, experiences a monsoon season. I’m not denying that. However, for most of the year, it’s dry enough in general that the word drought hardly means anything. If it’s a desert, to what extent can it really be called a drought as opposed to the way things are? 

That being said, as climate change gets worse, Phoenix will get dryer, and the continued maintenance of these two hundred golf courses will become increasingly difficult to justify. It’s already causing lots of problems, as this ArcGIS article explains.

I’ll confess that whenever I’m on Discord and talking to someone in Europe, a continent that largely designs its cities far more sustainably than the United States, I love telling them about Phoenix. It’s so insane that they can’t believe it! Or at least, they’re so shocked that it exists the way it does. And I realize that I have only so many stones to throw, given that I live elsewhere in the United States, one of the world’s biggest climate villains. But as shocking as most American cities are for Europeans, Phoenix is a particularly egregious example due to its sheer number of golf courses.

I talked to a friend of mine from Spain not long ago. I’m not going to name names, but he literally told me that whenever there’s a drought in his autonomous region, they aren’t even allowed to fill swimming pools. Meanwhile in Arizona, they keep the golf courses green no matter the weather, which has led many to brand Phoenix as the world’s “least sustainable city.”

Now, the problem isn’t so much building a city in the desert. There have been desert cities before - indigenous peoples lived in the area we now know as Phoenix for many centuries. But as far as we know, they didn’t have massive lawns and golf courses. 

Aerial view of a golf course in suburban Phoenix. Image taken from Meridian CondoResorts.

A different Native American group, the Iroquois, practiced the “seven-generation sustainability” principle. Decisions on environmental policies, particularly those related to natural resources, were meant to be filtered through the lens of making sure these resources could remain extant through seven more generations of such policies. As this blogger on indigenous issues in Canada notes, it was rather ironic that the authors of the U.S. Constitution referred to the indigenous peoples as “savages”, or maybe projection is the better word here.

To be clear, Phoenix is far from the only American city that can’t environmentally sustain itself. It’s only one instance of the suburban sprawl that swept the nation following its victory in World War II. Now, if anything, the United States wasn’t as helpful as some other Allies in defeating the Axis powers, but that's a separate conversation. 

But it is my belief that this country got too big for its britches after winning history’s deadliest armed conflict to date. Uncle Sam, the personification of the United States, probably thought: If we could beat the Nazis, we can build a giant, sprawling metropolis in the desert! 

Here’s the thing, though. Phoenix serves as an important exhibit in the following lesson: Just because you have the money to do something doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.

Trapped In The Drive-Thru

The meme posted above has been thrown around so frequently that it’s practically in the public domain at this point. I’m not sure exactly who created it, but in the highly unlikely event that this person reads my article and brings their identity to my attention, I will credit them. I think I’ve covered my bases here.

In any case, take a look at that photo. The caption is typically something along the lines of “30 American people waiting for coffee” versus “30 French people waiting for coffee.” It’s often used to mock either American urban planning or American café culture. 

Now, I should probably make clear that the specific images chosen for this meme are somewhat misleading. The “30 American people” photo of a suburban drive-thru in Anywhere, USA was taken in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Even though the United States had far fewer pandemic-related restrictions on gatherings than most other countries (and our death rates speak for themselves), the photo isn’t inherently reflective of how it always looks here. Most restaurants were closed for indoor dining, making takeout or the drive-thru the only option.

Conversely, the “30 French people” photo is of a famous café in Paris. Of course, Paris is and remains one of the most-visited cities in the world, and the café in question is a well-known tourist trap near the Louvre. You can probably get considerably better coffee at a considerably lower price just a few blocks away. Additionally, given that it’s a tourist trap, some of the people in the photo are probably Americans. So the “30 French people” part is likely not true.

But let’s also be clear about something else: It doesn’t really matter that the photos are misleading. The overall point is still a very salient one.

It’s no secret that American suburbs, generally speaking, aren’t the best places to live if you don’t love driving. Then again, even if you do love driving, plenty of urbanists have argued that it’s more pleasant to operate a motor vehicle in a place where not everyone has to do it. Let’s have a look at that photo again.

According to the original source for this image, the location is Hicksville, New York. It’s in western Long Island, not far outside of America’s biggest city. But if I didn’t tell you that, you’d have no idea, because a lot of it looks the same as anywhere else in the USA.

Let’s talk about how depressing a drive-thru is. Basically, you get in your car and drive to the nearest fast food restaurant. Maybe there’s a lot of other cars, or if you’re lucky enough, you may escape bumper-to-bumper traffic. But if you’re getting dinner after a long day at work, that’s a big if.

Once you arrive at Mickey D’s, Burger King, or Wendy’s, or whatever other chain dominates your metroplex, you sit idling in your car as you pull in next to the restaurant. In the past, drive-thrus invariably had a human being working them, meaning that you at least had that modicum of interaction with another living thing. In fact, this is still largely true today, but McDonald’s briefly tried using AI voices for their drive-thrus last year. If anything, that makes it even more dystopian.

You wait in a line with several other cars. Again, if you’re lucky, several means seven just like David Jelinsky teaches us. If not, you could be stuck in a considerably longer line as they prepare your “food.” Even though Google Docs gave me a blue squiggly line here, I’m not removing the quotation marks, as I use the word “food” loosely here.

Once you get your Happy Meal or whatever they call them these days, you either drive home through even more intense traffic to enjoy it, or you just eat in your car while questioning your life decisions. If you went to a specific location in suburban Philadelphia on a specific day in October 2024, your non-biodegradeable fries might have been served to you by one Donald Trump. Remember that?

Now, look: They say McDonald’s is better in Europe than in the United States. Given the ingredients they put in the food here that they don’t use in Europe, not to mention the fact that other countries have unique menu items that aren’t found in America, I don’t doubt that this is the case. But is it really so much better that it’s worth skipping a meal at a far more authentic restaurant just to get a Big Mac? Quite frankly, I can eat as much fast food as I want on this side of the pond (and for the record, “as much fast food as I want” is “very little” for me).

Compare that to the café culture in many European cities. It’s perhaps ironic that the volume of your coffee in fluid ounces (or rather, milliliters) is a lot smaller in Europe, because people tend to linger over it for a far longer time. In America, most people just chug their coffee or soda and then toss it into the garbage can. Or, if you’re Morgan Spurlock, you toss it a different way.

By contrast, European coffee culture is about sitting at a table or bench beside a street lined with picturesque old buildings. You’ll take sip after tiny sip, possibly reading the newspaper (not that very many people do that nowadays in the United States or elsewhere - “possibly” might be doing some heavy lifting). If you’re the more outgoing type, maybe you’ve got a friend with you. You might discuss the events of the day, both in the wider world and in your personal lives. And of course, ordering your coffee and possibly a pastry actually entails looking at another person’s face.

Of course, I’m not going to say that everyone in Europe engages with this culture in its most complete form. Plenty of people there stare at their phones too - if anything, more people do while ordering because they don’t need to focus on other people in their cars. But the American drive-thru is truly one of the most isolating experiences a person can have in this country.

Think about that for a moment. The car in front of you might have anywhere from one to five or six occupants. Depending on the identities of the people within the vehicle, their stories and reasons for being there could vary wildly.

Maybe it’s a family on a road trip that happens to pass through your suburban area. In that case, perhaps the parents are exhausted from driving all day and don’t want to take the time to look at a potentially unfamiliar menu. Instead, they’d rather go to Burger King in Anywhere, USA (which has the same menu as Burger King in Anywhere Else, USA) and know exactly what they’re getting. It’s by no means gourmet, but it’s probably not horrible either. It’s consistent mediocrity, a “reliable level of shitty” just like Ryanair.

Or maybe the family isn’t on a road trip. Maybe they’re just tired from a long day at work or school, and the children disagreed about what they wanted to eat, and the parents didn’t really feel like cooking. So they aim for consistent mediocrity, figuring that if it’s a reliable level of shitty, it’s not that shitty. They’ll eat fast food that night and maybe cook the next day.

Or, perhaps, there’s only one person in the car. Maybe they’re on their way home from work and, like the hypothetical parents in our hypothetical family from the previous paragraph, they aren’t eager to whip up something edible. It could be a total stranger, or it could be the next-door neighbor whose name you’ve never bothered to learn because you’re too overwhelmed by the daily grind to form relationships with the people in your next pod over. 

If you stopped to talk to this person (even if only for a few minutes), it’s possible that you could learn a lot about them. Maybe they watch the same TV show as you. Maybe they’re fans of the same sports team, or maybe they play the same video games. Maybe there’s some other hobby that you two have in common, or at least would have in common if both of you had the energy for hobbies after such a commute. 

In order to truly form a bond, it would help if you two could leave your cars and find a place to meet. Even if it’s just a picnic table beside the parking lot, that’s still better than nothing. And once you spoke for a few minutes, and potentially established that you have some common interests, it could be that you’ll become close friends. In a different world, the person in the next car could have been your best friend. Or maybe you’re just completely different people with nothing remotely resembling compatible personalities. 

But if you never try (and in a drive-thru, you can’t try), you’ll never know. You’ll never know.

How Reality TV Explains European Grocery Shopping

Phil Keoghan, host of “The Amazing Race”, demonstrating a task in Naples, Italy.

Now, for those of you who don’t know, The Amazing Race remains one of my favorite TV shows. Even in this day and age, it astounds me that the show’s production goes as smoothly as it does, considering that the premise is a race around the world.

 Admittedly, as is the case with the great majority of TV shows that air at a discrete time, viewership is a fraction of what it used to be. Therefore, not as many people are still talking about it. Which is why I’m going to talk about it here!

 There are plenty of details behind the scenes that the average casual fan doesn’t necessarily know, such as the fact that each team has a two-person camera crew. The team must always be able to travel with their crew, including when vehicles are provided by production for self-driving. 

Of course, teams must also complete various tasks themed after the location they currently find themselves in. According to the show’s Wikipedia article, production tends to select tasks based on things residents of a given location would do as opposed to those merely visiting as tourists. And as a viewer, I believe the show is at its best when it shows what life is like in the given destination. So if that’s their goal, keep ‘em coming.

The Amazing Race has held some pretty insane challenges from a thrill-seeking perspective. The most recent season contained camel riding, skydiving, and scuba diving all in the same episode. Visually speaking, they’ve been to stunning locales all over the globe. And then there are those moments when they trick contestants, which are even better.

But one task from the most recent season of the original American edition that I think is highly underrated, if for no other reason than it tickles the ‘tism as far as urban planning is concerned, was in the ninth episode.

Here’s some background. Teams had traveled to Naples, Italy and were in the city’s historic center. I don’t want to deny that the historic center of Naples is probably gentrified beyond belief at this point, and that AirBNB is a driving force behind that gentrification. This was the same episode that contained a challenge involving folding mozzarella twists and making Margherita pizzas from scratch.

Married couple Jonathan and Ana Towns shopping for groceries in Naples, Italy on “The Amazing Race 37.”

There was a Route Info task in this neighborhood that involved shopping for locals. Teams had to purchase zucchini, bread, sausages, and one other item I forgot from a list that had been lowered to them in a bucket. (Teams were given money to use specifically for this task; perhaps begging locals for cash has fallen out of favor). The shopping list was written in Italian, which led to some teams facing a language barrier. 

On a side note, for what it’s worth, of the places I’ve been to within Europe, Italy had probably the lowest percentage of locals who spoke fluent English. At least, among the people I talked to. And to be clear, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Italy has 59 million residents to make life convenient for, and there’s nothing wrong with putting them before temporary visitors, particularly those tourists who act like Ugly Americans™. Besides, it’s always more fun when they make challenges difficult for the contestants.

 Here’s the thing that struck me about this task: The four items teams had to purchase could be found at three different stores, all within reasonable walking distance of the clue box.

Now, to those of us living in most of the United States and much of Canada, this is something you only experience if you’re visiting a different country. If you’re talking to a friend who lives in a European country, something made easier by the advent of digital technology, you might have a conversation like this:

EU: Where do you go to get your vegetables?

NA: Uh…the produce aisle at Market Basket.

EU: You mean, the vegetable store? Where is that?

NA: It’s a section of the store.

EU: Really? There’s no vegetable store?

Now, it is true that for most people, your needs as a tourist are different from your needs as a resident. If you’re eating at restaurants, you probably aren’t spending a lot of time in grocery stores.

However, the hypothetical interaction I describe above isn’t actually hypothetical. A family member of mine told me about discussing this with a friend who lives in Europe, and their exchange went more or less as shown above. Honestly, I find this an interesting cultural difference between North America and Europe, and it’s an area where I think Europe has North America beat by a light-year. (Yes, those measure distance rather than time.)

I believe one of the most important reasons for this cultural difference is related to the far higher degree of car dependency in North America. You see, car dependency seriously hinders the ability of small businesses to exist if they don’t have their own parking lots. And maintaining all the asphalt needed for a parking lot is an expense that a business that’s just starting out will have a hard time covering. In practice, it turns into a catch-22 situation.

It might not be totally impossible for a small business to survive, or even thrive, in this environment, but it’s certainly a pretty steep uphill battle. 

This is, to some extent, intuitive. When you're driving, even if it's not on a horrendous six-lane stroad, you're paying little or no attention to what's beside the road. You simply aren't. To be fair, you really shouldn't be, because you need to focus on what's actually on the road so that you don't crash. But that also means businesses beside that road aren't going to catch your eye, and they won't get as many, for lack of a better word, "impressions." Even if a high percentage of drivers who notice the business decide to patronize it (or, within the bounds of my analogy, that business garners a high "click-through rate"), most drivers aren't going to notice it, and that's a major threat to that business' profitability.

Married couple Brett Hamby and Mark Romain inside a small Italian grocery store on “The Amazing Race 37.” I posit that it’s very difficult for such stores to exist in the United States these days.

In the long run, big-box chains and supermarkets people already know about are going to dominate, because they have the biggest parking lots. If my countrymen wanted to deal with the increasing monopolies in the grocery market, changing our zoning laws (at least on new developments) would be a good start. Since it's the United States we're talking about, a country that’s become infamous for never fixing its problems when they arise, it's an open question whether that'll ever happen at any significant scale. Certainly not anytime soon. But it is at least theoretically possible.

While the contestants racing this particular leg (Season 37, Episode 9, also titled  "La Pizza d'Resistance" for anyone curious) seemed to enjoy this task, nobody commented on the urban planning principles used in most of Europe that make it possible for small grocery stores to turn a profit. Or at least, if they did comment on it, said comments were not shown in the episode. Even if European tourism to the USA is down markedly from last year (not that I think of this as a foreign tourist-friendly country even at the best of times, but that's another rant entirely), American tourism to Europe is not. 

I'm far from the first person to observe that plenty of Americans love the dense, walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods they visit in Europe. Americans spend at least six hours, and often thousands of dollars, to travel to popular European destinations in the hundreds of thousands. There’s a sort of novelty to cities like London, Paris, and Amsterdam that people from all over the United States enjoy. But even plenty of those people don’t realize exactly why they enjoy visiting such places as tourists.

I posit that the reason is simple. Demand for housing in walkable neighborhoods, even in a country infamous for its obesity epidemic, is far higher than the supply. This is evidenced by the fact that the few remaining such neighborhoods in North America are getting more expensive to live in. That’s not a conspiracy theory, that’s just the most fundamental principle of economics; supply and demand, as they say.

The Amazing Race task described above showed what is possible with the help of a nuanced zoning policy. Now, zoning exists for a reason. In the early days of the Industrial Revolution, cities were notoriously polluted thanks to the sheer number of factories popping up. For obvious reasons, having a heavy industrial zone next to a densely populated residential area isn’t a good idea unless you’re a big fan of environmental racism. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have commercial properties located near to peoples’ dwellings, and in so doing find a “happy medium.”

It’s not just the economic health of small grocery stores that is hindered by American zoning practices, however, but also the physical health of many of its residents. You see, in a location with several small grocery stores spread throughout the neighborhood, one can purchase whatever they want or need for that particular day. It doesn’t feel like a chore, and it can be done in ten minutes or less if the store’s not terribly crowded.

By contrast, in the typical American suburb, because shopping is such an event, most people only do it once or maybe twice a week, buying their groceries in bulk each time. This puts pressure on those people doing the meal planning for the household, because they have to think about what they’ll cook every day that week. It can be overwhelming, and it’s not hard to understand why plenty of people go for the more “convenient” option of either nonperishable processed food or ordering takeout more often than is healthy. People have free will, yes, but that doesn’t mean their decisions aren’t influenced by external factors. 

And consequently, it’s not hard to see why the United States has a higher obesity rate than its peer nations. It’s just like my recent essay about loneliness: There are plenty of fat people in Europe, just as there are plenty of lonely people there. But exclusionary zoning is a systemic factor exacerbating this issue that just isn’t present in Europe, at least not nearly to the same degree. 

Thank you for reading. I can’t say I really know how to end this article, but I would really appreciate any and all comments. Take care.

On Community And Loneliness

It’s no secret that we need community in order to properly function.

Okay, that’s not exactly ground-breaking, but it’s true. The effects of loneliness on one’s mental and yes, physical health are well-documented. According to a report from the U.S. Surgeon General at the time, Dr. Vivek Murthy (back when we still had qualified people in charge before the voters had to ruin it again), chronic loneliness can be as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

Think about that for a moment. Being lonely on a long-term basis might be as hazardous as smoking almost a pack of those cancer sticks daily. Even if the smoking rate has declined pretty quickly in America, the loneliness rate has, if anything, risen. There are a number of reasons for that, not all of them unique to the USA.

Today I walked to a nearby park and participated in an exercise class with a handful of other people. Let me tell you: Although most of them were probably at least twenty years older than me, they’re fit. I struggled to keep up with them. Now my arms are a tiny bit sore, but it would be well worth it even if the after-effects were far worse.

Obviously, exercise such as this is good for you. Unless you live in Tehran, that is. But in all seriousness, people who stay active, especially the older they get, are more likely to live longer, healthier lives when all else is equal. Again, that isn’t a revolutionary observation. 

However, what occurred to me more than once as I was lifting weights and jumping over hurdles is how much of a community this exercise class was. You could pay a small fee for each session, but many of the same people go there every week, to the point where they consider one another good friends. And yet somehow, it didn’t feel “cliquey” the way some friend groups do, even when the preponderance of the members are on the wrong side of middle age.

If we are to believe that chronic loneliness is this dangerous for your health, then it might be a reason why the average life expectancy in the USA lags other wealthy nations. Obviously, there are other factors at play here, such as income inequality, a higher obesity rate, and the lack of universal health insurance. Perhaps these factors are interrelated, but the point is that loneliness is not the only reason our health outcomes aren’t what they could be. That being said, I think it’s a significant enough factor that it deserves to be discussed more, particularly in light of the way our infrastructure lends itself to social atomization.

Stock image of suburban tract housing (from iStock). This could be Anywhere, USA, but wherever it is, it’s very hard to have spontaneous community here.

I want to be clear that loneliness is not unique to the United States. Like obesity, it might be worse here, and there might be more systemic factors leading to it than in, say, most of Europe, but there are plenty of lonely people in other countries too. 

Last month, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the Labour Party gave a controversial address that’s often referred to as the “island of strangers” speech. Now, I’m not going to delve too deeply into this, because it's about glass houses and whatnot. However, while I do not know if this line was meant as a dog whistle, quite a few progressives interpreted it as such.

I read a fascinating article, which I’m going to link here, about the very real issue the Prime Minister brought up; namely, a lack of social cohesion. People aren’t spending as much time with one another as they used to, and many feel lonely or like they don’t know their neighbors as a result. 

This is a legitimate problem, but as the author of the linked article argues, immigration isn’t the cause of it. A national identity can change over time; just because someone is British by choice instead of by chance doesn’t mean they can’t or shouldn’t be considered part of British society. It’s a different world than it was some decades ago.

Rather, the author points out that numerous community centers, locations that might be considered “third places”, have closed in the years since the COVID-19 pandemic began. A public service union in the UK is quoted as saying that roughly two-thirds of council-run youth centers had closed in England and Wales since 2010, largely due to funding cuts. If Prime Minister Starmer truly wanted to alleviate this problem, he might be wise to push for increased funding for such programs. 

Again, I realize that I’m one to talk, given that I’m from the USA and the problem of societal alienation is likely even worse here. There’s a reason young men outright voted for Trump in last year’s election. And most of the United Kingdom is a pedestrian paradise relative to most of the United States. Car dependency isolates people, particularly those who don’t or can’t drive. 

The latter group frequently includes the elderly. Once your doctor advises you to stop driving and you give up your license, your quality of life is going to drop precipitously if you live in a car-dependent place. Now, no country is perfect about integrating the elderly into society; even the Netherlands, every urbanist Redditor’s favorite country, isn’t amazing in this regard. But not having other transportation options is going to exacerbate loneliness for old people who can’t drive anymore. If you didn’t or couldn’t save for a retirement community during your working years, tough luck. 

And even if you can afford to live in such a place during your “golden years”, it’s mostly other old people you interact with. That seriously hinders one’s chances for intergenerational friendships, which have many benefits.

In any case, note the earlier statistic about youth centers, which are presumably places for relatively young people to get to know each other. They’re withering away in both the UK and USA.

As a current 25-year-old, I’m well aware that a person’s twenties can be a very formative decade indeed. The habits one sets or keeps now will very often matter many years down the line, both in terms of your actual well-being and the habits you keep holding in later stages of life. If you eat healthily in your twenties, you’re more likely to keep doing so in your forties. Again, that’s not rocket science.

I found it notable that the crowd at the aforementioned exercise class skewed on the older side. It could be that people under age 40 were too busy looking for a job in today’s economy and didn’t have time to attend a Saturday morning exercise class. Or maybe it was just this week and it’s not necessarily representative of what happens every week. Sure. It’s possible.

But exercise classes aren’t the only community event that’s mostly older people. Whenever I’ve phonebanked for Democratic candidates, most of the other people on the Zoom call look to be over 60. From what I’ve heard, it’s the same way at in-person civic gatherings. Hell, say what you will about religion, but churches have served as a “third place” before, and as Reddit will love to tell you, nobody under 60 goes there regularly anymore. And church attendance is one institution that’s declined a lot faster in Europe than in the USA.

We’re constantly told that young people are our future leaders. Strictly speaking, this is accurate. But in the age of online socializing and declining community engagement in general, political leaders in the United States and elsewhere haven’t been fostering the policies necessary to make sure today’s young people have community. 

This matters for two reasons. One is that if young people, who’ve already lived through a decade of Donald Trump in some of their formative years, grow accustomed to a lack of social cohesion, that’s going to make us a world of strangers. It will seriously damage the community. In some ways, we’re already there. 

The other reason is that if young people are used to isolation, they’ll eventually be old people who are incredibly lonely. Worse yet, if former Surgeon General Murthy is right about the health hazards of loneliness being as serious as he said they are, many of them might not grow old. 

Let’s not let that happen.

“Americans Don’t Want Walkable Cities”

The title of this essay is an argument you’ll frequently hear from well-meaning people. Both Europeans, who generally live in communities that more closely approximate what Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo calls a “15-minute city”, and Americans, who very often live in car-dependent suburbia, will say this. 

Americans have a reputation for being fat and lazy. And people who say this aren’t entirely wrong, but in some ways you could call this a “chicken or the egg” situation. Are many Americans obese because they protested against walkable cities, or is the lack of walkability (as well as diet-related factors) making us fat and lazy?

I tend to think the latter is closer to the truth. But again, both these possibilities can reinforce one another in a sort of “doom spiral”.

The argument is that because Americans don’t want to walk anywhere, their cities aren’t built for that. Because we’re not environmentally conscious, we like our gas-guzzling vehicles and getting stuck in traffic on the freeway. 

To be clear, the Republican Party in the USA is the only major political party to deny that the climate crisis is caused by human activity, or even that it exists at all. I’m not going to dispute this. However, the problem of walkability (or the lack thereof) isn’t strictly a “left versus right” issue. 

In this essay, I attempt to refute three common arguments that Americans don’t want their cities to be walkable.

The first argument, which is probably especially poignant if you’re an American over age 30, is that many people in my country look back on their college years with considerable nostalgia. If you’re from Europe or any other place that has walkable cities, you might find this ridiculous. After all, earning a post-secondary degree is a stressful process that for many involves late-night cram sessions, research papers, and high-stakes exams that can make or break your grade. This isn’t unique to the United States at all.

What is far more unique to the USA, however, is the way we design most of our cities.

Sprawling Detroit suburbs, taken from Reddit.

Ann Arbor, Michigan, home to the University of Michigan. Image taken from Reddit.

Look at these two photos and tell me which looks like a more appealing place to live. Yes, some on the right demonize higher education and avoid sending their children to college on “principled” grounds. But not all of them. Not remotely.

It’s often been observed that when you grow up in an American suburb, you don’t get a whole lot of freedom. Until about age 16, there’s no chance for you to acquire a driver’s license, and until you have one, you can’t go anywhere on your own. Some of these suburbs have been described by Redditors as “luxury prisons”. In fact, some might literally rather live in one of those Norwegian prisons that look like college campuses - at least there, you have community even if you lack freedom.

Anyway, college. While you still have to attend classes, you generally have a lot more choice in terms of which courses to take than you did in high school, let alone middle school. More importantly, the majority of American college towns are built with students in mind, and not all students bring their own vehicles to campus. As such, they need other ways to get around, so the cities have these methods in abundance.

While the stereotypical American suburb inhibits chances to form a community, college is the opposite. There’s a reason Greek life is popular at American universities and why there’s so much emphasis on social events. 

Anecdotally, even as someone who grew up in a walkable suburb by this country’s standards, my parents kept hammering into me that I needed to join some club activities to make the most of the college experience. Even now, I regret not attending more such events due to my autism-induced lack of social stamina. But that’s a story for another day.

Cinderella mascot in front of the castle at Walt Disney World. Image taken from the Visit Orlando website.

Now let’s talk about something else. Although international tourism to the United States is currently in freefall, understandably so, one of the most popular attractions for such visitors (as well as millions of domestic tourists per year) is Disney World. And honestly, I see that as a national embarrassment. It’s far from the most important shame related to my nationality, but it’s still there.

I understand that Reddit is hardly a scientific source, but this thread from last year is just perfection. Disney World, after all, has a monorail connecting many of the parks and very little car traffic. Literally, when I looked up “are there any cars in Disney World” for this essay, most of the top results related to the movie featuring Lightning McQueen rather than parking.

But my point still stands. For many Americans in the middle class, Disney World is the ultimate family vacation. Personally, as someone who went there as a child, I have no desire to go back for a number of reasons. The food’s probably awful, it’s ridiculously humid and pretty hot all year round, and they say the lines for rides are insane these days. And that’s not an exhaustive list. 

Even so, plenty of people spend thousands of dollars on such trips. It’s not just the “Disney Adults” who make loving the mouse their whole identity. On some level, people want to spend time in a place where they don’t need to drive. Half As Interesting, a YouTube channel whose videos are narrated by Sam Denby of Wendover Productions, recently made an excellent video about how this transit does not extend outside of the resort’s boundaries to the actual city of Orlando. 

Disney World isn’t the only domestic tourist destination that’s notably more walkable than most places in America. There are also plenty of small towns all over the country that get seasonal visitors depending on what recreational activities are near it. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, but most walkable small towns in the United States are in one or more of three categories.

1: Places built prior to the wave of suburbanization that came to the United States in the aftermath of World War II.

2: Places that get a lot of seasonal tourism, particularly from domestic visitors.

3: Places that have become prohibitively expensive for all but a relatively small percentage of the population to live in.

Of course, as stated above, these three categories are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they frequently reinforce one another, and that leads into my third rebuttal to the claim that Americans don’t want walkable cities.

Corporate greed is very often blamed for many of America’s ills. Our for-profit health care system, for instance, is due to the greed of insurance companies. You won’t see me defending said system on this blog, that’s for sure.

 But not everything is a grandiose corporate conspiracy to swindle us. Sometimes it’s just supply and demand. If more people want a commodity than the amount of that commodity that exists, we should expect that commodity to become more expensive. (Yes, in a perfect world, housing would not be seen as a “commodity”, but rather as a “human right”, but that’s not the world we live in).

As stated above, many of America’s walkable communities, often referred to as “streetcar suburbs”, were built prior to World War II. By the USA’s standards, these are ancient places that existed before the advent of single-use zoning in the country. 

Commercial building beside a home in Roland Park, Baltimore. Like many modern-day “streetcar suburbs”, it’s unaffordable for most Americans. Image taken from the website for Long & Foster Real Estate.

Single-use zoning basically means that a given tract of land can be used for strictly commercial use, or strictly residential use, but not both. This is why so many American cities have suburbs where there are several square miles of homes that all look nearly identical to one another and you can’t walk to anything that isn’t someone else’s house who happens to live nearby. (And even then, if your subdivision has no sidewalks, you’re out of luck).

One of the most prominent streetcar suburbs in the United States is relatively close to me: Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. This sounds like it should be an ideal place to live if you don’t want the hustle and bustle of a densely urban neighborhood, but also don’t want to rely on your car for every little thing. There’s just one problem.

If you go to the Chestnut Hill, MA page on Zillow today, you’ll find that the cheapest real estate available is a one-bed, one-bath condo for more than half a million dollars. And that’s the bare minimum of what you’ll need. Even that’s out of the price range for probably more than half of Americans. Basically all of the single-family homes for sale in Chestnut Hill will run you a million or two, or more. 

Many of the other “streetcar suburbs” are just as costly. On some level, it makes sense that it would be expensive, because such neighborhoods have high demand and relatively low supply. But the fact that high demand exists would seem to imply that many Americans want to live in an area with accessible amenities.

Overall, the narrative that Americans don’t want their cities to be walkable because they’re addicted to their cars is a convenient one. I can understand why many people believe it, and to some extent, some people here are addicted to their cars, and some are too lazy to walk anywhere more than a couple blocks away.

But to act like “car addiction” is universal among Americans misses the point. There are numerous factors that make our cities car-dependent, and keep our cities car-dependent, systemic issues that won’t be solved overnight. Public desire, including those conspiracy theories about “15-minute cities”, is far from the most important factor.

I’m under no illusion that even my relatively progressive home state is going to be as urbanist-friendly as, for instance, the Netherlands within my lifetime. But the myth that everyone in the USA, or even a majority of the American population, wants to live in sprawling suburbia, is just that. It’s a myth. And it needs to end. 

Los Angeles Is Paradise Lost

Let me paint you a picture of a certain city.

Imagine a community situated between the ocean and mountains, both of which provide recreational opportunities for residents and visitors alike. This geography significantly moderates the climate so that it’s warm, but generally not dangerously hot, all year round. For a plurality of the global population, this is considered the ideal climate.

Imagine that this community is highly multicultural. Settlers from Europe, and later immigrants from various parts of Asia and the Global South, have elected to make their homes here. Consequently, the city is home to restaurants featuring many cuisines from all over the world. If you ate out one meal a day and never patronized the same establishment twice, it would take you about 18 years to run out of restaurants.

Imagine that this city’s activities do not stop at dining, either. The city is home to many institutions related to the arts, as one of the “creative capitals” of the world. It’s also among the most high-profile cities in the global film industry, and many celebrities from all over the country (and some from other countries) live there on either a temporary or permanent basis.

If you are moderately informed about geography, you’ll probably have guessed that the city I’m referring to is Los Angeles, California. If so, you are correct. 

Everything I’ve said above is true of Los Angeles. It’s got ideal geography and what many people consider “perfect” weather (droughts and wildfires notwithstanding - we’ll get to that later). People from all over the world have lived there, and the culinary offers are wildly diverse. And of course, it’s home to numerous film studios and other cultural institutions that mean you’ll seemingly never run out of things to do.

Now, if I ended this post there, and the reader had no access to outside information, you’d probably come away with the impression that Los Angeles is the best city in the world. Doesn’t all that sound like paradise?

A beautiful picture of Los Angeles with the San Gabriel Mountains in the background.

Unfortunately, thanks to poor urban planning, it’s more like “paradise lost.”

A very smoggy view of the same city. Image taken from the Los Angeles Times.

Los Angeles is infamous for its car traffic. As my beloved YouTuber Not Just Bikes always reminds us, there is no solution to car traffic other than viable alternatives to driving. He’s argued that car dependency is bad even if you do enjoy driving - this video explains many of the reasons why.

Speaking of American cultural institutions, one such institution is the late musician Tom Petty (1950-2017). One of his most famous songs is “Free Fallin’”, which contains lyrical references to locations in Los Angeles such as Reseda and Ventura Boulevard. At one point, the song states that “there’s a freeway runnin’ through the yard.”

Think about that for a moment. Obviously, this is an exaggeration to some extent - highways normally aren’t built right through backyards. Except sometimes they are.

You see, there’s a little something called “eminent domain” that allows the government to seize homes in order to use land for infrastructure projects. This Amnesty International article talks about how homes destroyed to make room for these highways have historically been in neighborhoods with large percentages of people of color. Even with all the fresh produce that grows abundantly in California’s Mediterranean climate, these disruptions can create “food deserts” for people in their neighborhoods.

We can have a conversation any time about how these highways reinforce racial injustice and how inequity is built into every aspect of this country’s infrastructure. But that’s a topic for another essay.

Traffic in Los Angeles is a nightmare specifically because public transit in the city is so lacking. People lose time in their commutes, but that’s not the only thing people lose as a result of car dependency.

Another casualty of Los Angeles’ less-than-ideal urban planning is its air quality. A few days ago, the Los Angeles-Long Beach area was once again ranked as the smoggiest city in the United States. Apparently, it has been that way for many years running. This is, in large part, thanks to the numerous cars on the road. And smog isn’t just unpleasant to look at - it can exacerbate asthma for those living with that condition, cause babies to have low birth weight, and even contribute to lung diseases like cancer and COPD in the long run. 

One band from California, Red Hot Chili Peppers, has been fairly active in the environmental movement. They’ve got a song called “Black Summer” about the 2020 Australian bushfires and climate change more broadly. It’s a beautiful song, as disturbing as it may be, and bassist Michael “Flea” Balzary has stated that after it rains, Los Angeles is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And he might be right about that, except that rain is increasingly hard to come by as the region’s water security takes a nosedive. 

And of course, with the lack of rain, the risk of wildfires increases exponentially. As we saw earlier this year with the fire that destroyed much of the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, cities are not immune to the devastation that such disasters can bring. 

Now, I’m not going to say that climate change is exclusively Los Angeles’ fault. It is true that a significant percentage of greenhouse gas emissions are from the transportation sector, and planes and cars generate far more of these emissions than trains and bicycles. That’s no secret. Furthermore, even cities with far better public transit networks, such as those in the Nordic nations, are going to have to deal with the ramifications of the climate crisis. Indeed, they already are.

But the United States is far and away the world’s most massive climate villain. You can argue that many other countries aren’t doing enough to switch to renewable energy (or as Bernie Sanders says, transform our energy system away from fossil fuels). But at least they accept that climate change is real and caused by human activity.

For instance, at time of writing, tomorrow is the Canadian general election. The Liberals, led by Prime Minister Mark Carney, are broadly seen as favored, having pulled off a 30-point comeback that few people besides myself thought plausible. But even if the Conservatives, led by Pierre Poilievre, were to win a plurality of seats and make Poilievre Prime Minister, Canada isn’t going to pull out of the Paris Climate Accords. 

Anyway, look at cities in the Nordic countries. Not only are they far more sustainable, but their climates are far colder. I’m sure that if anyone from Finland, Iceland, Norway, or Sweden is reading this, they’ll contend that there’s no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing. But lots of people I know would dislike the long, dark winters, even if those countries have very broad social welfare programs.

Ultimately, if there’s nothing else you take away from this column, I want to reinforce that Los Angeles is one of the greatest tragedies in the history of urban planning. It had the potential to be a paradise on Earth, but instead it’s paradise lost. Like Joni Mitchell once said, they paved paradise to put up a parking lot - it shows.

America Is Ready Player One

Cover of “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline. Image taken from Amazon.

I know. It’s a pretty crazy claim. Real life can’t be the same as a work of fiction, can it?

Yes. Yes, it can. 

I’ll start with my own experience. I realize that this is anecdotal, but I’ll explain it anyway. 

Growing up in a suburban Massachusetts community, I lived close enough to my elementary school that I could walk there easily. My mother would frequently take me and my siblings there on foot (or by car if the weather was less than ideal), and she’d get to hang out with the other parents who were doing the same thing. You could consider the schoolyard a “third place” of sorts.

Those were the good old days, and before you call me an old man, just know that I’m still more than a month shy of my 25th birthday. Got that? Good.

When school let out, it was very common for children to meet at one another’s homes. Again, we lived pretty close together in those days. There was also a nearby park not associated with any school, and I spent many spring evenings on the playground while my older brother played Little League baseball. That’s how my parents and I made friends back then - in person, the old-fashioned way.

I’m not going to deny that some people still have the social stamina and determination to form bonds in the real world. However, saying that “some people know their neighbors, therefore social atomization isn’t a problem” makes about as much sense as saying “some people run marathons, therefore obesity isn’t a problem.” 

The issue at hand is the way things are trending.

You see, when I was a child, I had a Nintendo Wii, on which one of the games I played the most was Mario Kart. I remember it being such a massive deal when I could connect to the Internet and race against random people from all over the world. The limited chat functionality if you were playing against friends (an option I never availed myself of before the service shut down in 2014) seemed revolutionary.

Why did that seem special, though? Simply put, because it wasn’t the default. 

These days, a large percentage of video games are played online - indeed, a great majority of them require an Internet connection to play. I remember when it was such a hassle to set my Wii up for a game of Nintendo WFC Mario Kart, but these days, people are always online unless they actively choose not to be.

I’ll admit that I am guilty of this myself. It’s a beautiful spring day out there right now, but I’m inside writing this essay. Even when I’m on my front porch, I very often have my computer open in front of me to talk to my friends on Discord. And that’s a problem.

Now, I present my thesis: We’re living in a dystopian novel. A very specific dystopian novel.

I’m not normally a defender of Ready Player One these days. In most respects, it’s a sorry excuse for literature. But I’m starting to think that author Ernest Cline was on to something about the modern world, even if that wasn’t his intention.

The year is 2025, and America has gone to shit. It’s just gone to shit two decades early. In the United States today, we have to deal with mass shootings - but events like Columbine or Sandy Hook are only a small fraction of the overall gun violence in this country. We’ve got road rage shootings every day because we’ve collectively lost our patience as a society. People kill each other over the smallest things, aided by the fact that we’ve literally got more firearms than people.

Main character Wade lives in the Stacks, a trailer park outside of Oklahoma City, while the late owner of the OASIS, James Halliday, had a net worth estimated at $240 billion USD. When the book came out in 2011 (and when I first read it in 2015), $240 billion seemed absolutely insane even by billionaire standards. Now, however, America’s shadow President Elon Musk is even richer than that. As for the Stacks, the homeless population keeps on rising. Maybe it’s not as visible and sensational as it is in Ready Player One, but it still exists. Housing keeps getting more expensive, as do other things people need to survive.

In Ready Player One, the plot revolves around an Easter Egg hidden within the OASIS and a competition to find it. Given that the winner is going to receive a sizable share of Halliday’s fortune (or maybe not even a share!), it’s highly coveted.

We see this in real life too. So many Americans vote for Republicans because they don’t see themselves as members of the working class who could benefit from progressive economic policy. Instead, they see themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” who could benefit from owning the libs. The American Dream, after all, has historically been to get rich and famous.

At one point in the book (and no, I don’t hate myself enough to check what page it is), Wade mentions that people can broadcast themselves to the world whenever they want, doing whatever they want, whether or not anyone is watching. In 2011, Twitch streaming (and YouTube streaming for that matter) was in its infancy. The idea of playing video games for a live audience was, again, absolutely revolutionary.

That’s not the case anymore. To become a popular gaming YouTuber, you basically need to be a streamer; recording your let’s-plays and uploading them later isn’t going to make you popular. And don’t even get me started on SEO and the quest to beat the algorithm, which is what drives people to hire massive production crews. It’s often said that Mr. Beast ruined YouTube, and I’m starting to see why people think that.

It’s not just gamers who constantly want attention. We have people literally risking their lives to be famous, like one Trevor Jacob. Remember him? He’s the YouTuber who claimed engine failure and jumped out of a perfectly good plane just for views, leaving it to crash into the side of a mountain. (On a side note, the video title “I Crashed My Airplane” is just perfect - he did it on purpose).

Runaway climate change, like what happens in Ready Player One? Yeah, it’s happening here too. We’ve even got a climate denier as President yet again. Despite increasingly devastating wildfires every year, the only significant American response has been from the entertainment industry making some TV series about conventionally attractive firefighters. 

And speaking of entertainment, it’s all giant corporations these days. Amazon might not run the world to the degree Ready Player One’s OASIS does, but it’s not far off either. Gone are the days when they merely sold books online. Now they own entire grocery store chains and even an aerospace company that recently gave Katy Perry et al a glorified carnival ride. But there’s also Amazon Instant Video, which lots of people use for streaming TV shows and whatnot.

As dominant as Amazon is, they don’t have a monopoly on peoples’ time and attention. Consider the Walt Disney Company as well. They don’t just make movies from the imagination of one imaginative man with some retrograde ideas about race - not anymore! They’ve got theme parks, cruise lines, streaming platforms, and even entire residential neighborhoods. I’m not kidding about that last one.

One of the most commonly criticized elements of Ready Player One by its detractors is its misogyny. Women, such as Wade’s obsessive love interest Art3mis, are often portrayed as one-dimensional, and plenty of reviewers have taken notice. And then Aech is (spoiler alert) only there so that Wade can say “I’m not racist, I have a black friend”.

We’ve got plenty of misogyny in real life too. It’s not just the United States Supreme Court overturning the constitutional right to abortion, either. The “manosphere” of content creators like Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan influenced the latest election, and that TV series Adolescence has also drawn attention to it. (And yes: I know Adolescence is set in the UK, not the USA, but I’m sure American schools are, as usual, even worse than British). 

I could go on and on about the parallels between the 2044 described in Ready Player One and the reality of life in 2025-era America. But I think I’ve covered my bases. 

The point of dystopian science fiction (as opposed to fantasy) is that events depicted in the former are supposed to be at least conceivably plausible. Harry Potter, for instance, is no closer to coming true now than it was when the first book was published. That’s not the case for the work of Ernest Cline.

Ready Player One is not a literary masterpiece. Not even close. But in its own sick, twisted, and depressing ways, it predicted the future. And for that, we should appreciate it. 

Sprawling Apathy

There are many well-documented advantages to living in a city. There’s more to do, for one, as compared to a small town that has nothing but a bar and a handful of strip malls. It’s easier to stay physically active when you live in a walkable neighborhood, which has all sorts of health benefits. It’s even considered more ecologically friendly to live in a city, in large part because the increased density of an urban area reduces emissions from transportation.

Conversely, suburbs and rural areas hold many well-documented disadvantages. There tend to be fewer “third places” at which people can gather. A “pub crawl”, or a night at a single bar, is less enjoyable when somebody needs to be the designated driver and that person cannot drink. (In theory, of course - I am a teetotaler.) Car dependency and urban sprawl is bad for the environment considering that 28 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions, as of 2024, come from personal vehicles.

All of these pros and cons are widely known and frequently talked about in any discourse on city planning. I don’t mean to minimize any of these issues, but a recent Reddit post on r/SuburbanHell felt topical and worth looking into.

Simply put: It’s a lot harder to organize a protest in car-dependent areas.

A Black Lives Matter protest in Brussels, Belgium from 2020. Image taken from the Global Times website.

Take a look at the picture above. It’s from the racial justice protests of 2020, during which some of the demonstrators in Belgium called for statues of King Leopold II to be taken down. This effort was successful, by the way. That’s Exhibit #547 in why protests are far more effective in other countries besides the United States. But have you ever stopped to wonder why that is?

It’s easy enough to blame the American system of government, and you’re not wrong to think that. This is the same government, after all, that did not pass gun control even after the horrific tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School. And now, while Donald Trump and Elon Musk are robbing the place blind, many people from elsewhere in the world have been expressing their shock that Americans are not in the streets like the French would be.

To be clear, there have been protests. You could argue (and I would agree) that the protests are not nearly so massive as would be warranted given the current situation. But they exist, even if the mainstream media won’t cover them. Political apathy certainly exists here, but I would argue that’s not the only factor leading to the relatively small scale of these demonstrations.

Going back to the example of Belgium, their cities are far more compact and walkable - at least, major cities like Antwerp and Brussels. Even in times when people aren’t protesting, it’s a lot easier to meet up with friends when nobody has to drive. It’s a lot easier to bring lots of people together in one space at one time. Therefore, it is far more feasible to hold a massive protest.

Meanwhile, let’s look at the States. I live in Greater Boston, a city that is relatively walkable but still has plenty of cars. If I were to attend a demonstration at Boston Common today, I could take the MBTA subway downtown to Arlington Station and get off there, then join the crowd. But the T’s so damn slow that it’d take 45 minutes to get there.

Stock image of urban sprawl in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex in Texas, USA. Most people here don’t interact very much. Image taken from Dreamstime.

If you’re driving to the protest, that’s another story entirely. You need everyone to be able to park their car nearby, and yet most parking garages have only hundreds of spaces. To get the sort of crowd that might actually be noticed by those in power (which is, you know, the whole point of a protest), you’d need thousands of people in the streets, and not all of them live within walking or transit distance. This makes it far more difficult to hold a protest of sufficient size, especially given that most US cities are not like Boston.

This infrastructure-induced atomization is not an accident, either. Rather, there’s plenty of evidence, if you know where to look, that car dependency leads to a lack of societal solidarity and greater atomization, and that this was an intentional decision. 

We’re constantly told that the United States is polarized along racial lines, and that systemic racism is present in many areas of public policy. This is true. But in some of America’s most segregated cities, even the infrastructure is a reflection of this systemic racism.

Consider the Francis Scott Key Bridge. It collapsed last year, killing six people. To be clear, that was a tragic disaster that should have been avoided. However, as Common Dreams wrote at the time, the bridge was built along the Interstate Highway system so that people would not need to drive through the city of Baltimore. Additionally, other infrastructural investments could have better served Baltimore’s lower-income residents (a group that is predominantly African-American).

Take this screenshot from Google Maps. It’s out of date, of course, given that the bridge is no more. But you can clearly see that the road containing the bridge skips the city limits entirely, when it should have been just as easy for people to simply drive through Baltimore. In that case, the $141 million (nominal money in 1977 terms) spent to build the bridge could have been saved.

Google Maps screenshot of Baltimore, showing the Francis Scott Key Bridge selected. The bridge clearly goes around the city, avoiding it very intentionally.

This is hardly the only example of systemic racism in Baltimore, or even the most egregious. The Common Dreams article linked above states, for example, that there’s a twenty-year gap in life expectancy among the residents of the city’s poorest neighborhood and its richest. The latter neighborhood, Roland Park, is a well-known “streetcar suburb” often associated with white flight. I don’t have time to discuss its history in great detail; many scholars have studied this topic more than me. For these purposes, just know that it’s a major issue.

Baltimore is only one example, however. All over the United States, there exist cities zoned specifically so that African-Americans and white people rarely saw each other. Look up redlining - it’s a thing. 

It’s been said to death before, but ignorance is one of the most dangerous forces in this world. It was a lot harder for white people to empathize with African-Americans if they didn’t live alongside the latter group. And indeed, Baltimore (and many other major US cities) were designed so that white people did not have to live alongside African-Americans. 

So if you’re reading this from somewhere other than the United States, and you’re going to claim that Americans don’t protest because we’re fat and lazy, or apathetic, or that lots of us support what’s going on…well, you’re partially right. Individual choices are at fault, at least to some extent.

But to blame it solely on one of these factors misses the bigger picture. It misses the way cities were built for the car (or rather, bulldozed for the car), making it more difficult for people to gather in large enough numbers for a protest. It also misses the way our cities were designed in the first place to reduce solidarity between different racial groups.

We do not, of course, need to accept that the past is destiny. But to discount the past as a reason for the woes of the present is equally foolish. 

Blog Post Title One

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.

Blog Post Title Two

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.

Blog Post Title Three

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.

Blog Post Title Four

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.