You are right in some respects. There are pockets of livable communities, but they are definitely the exception, not the rule.
The problem is that I live where I can get a hardware design job. I am actually trying to move, but the job market is pretty lousy right now. Also, places with more tech jobs like Silicon Valley are even worse than Santa Rosa for sprawl.
> The problem is that I live where I can get a hardware design job.
There's some hardware design in the foothills, where there are tons of small towns.
San Jose has a couple of "diverse" communities (one downtown) as does Palo Alto. Mountain View and Redwood City have at least one. I don't pay enough attention to Sunnyvale, Santa Clara or the southern east bay cities (Fremont, Milpitas, Union City) to know where theirs are (if they have one.), but I suspect that they do. (San Leandro and Oakland do.)
Yes, you'll need to drive to work but if you want to live in a "walk everywhere else" community, you can.
Meanwhile, the majority who either don't want that or don't care have other choices.
> Meanwhile, the majority who either don't want that or don't care have other choices.
Be careful with 'majority' - it's probably not really even something most people are aware of being a possibility. You'd have to go to someplace that's older, and with less space, like Europe, to really see a large variety of walkable city centers - the US only has a few, and they tend to be places like SF (and even there is not really all that walkable compared to a European town) that are simply untenable in their cost for most people.
In other words, people aren't really choosing - they're born into it, just as Europeans are born into what they've got and can't easily go live somewhere with low-rise, car friendly, suburban style sprawl even if they wanted to.
Also, what's with the "diverse" scare quotes? If that's his preference, that's his preference. Nothing wrong with that. I don't really care one way or another about living in a diverse area myself, but would find an unwalkable place a very sad place to live indeed.
Actually, you don't. As I pointed out, almost every college town has one, and it's reasonably cheap. Small towns have/are them.
I pointed out that every largish US city has them. (Oakland and Berkeley's are better than SF's.)
Heck - almost every south (sf) bay city has one or two. I forgot to mention that Menlo Park has at least one and I only remembered two of PA and SJ's - both have at least three, and I'm almost certainly missing more in SJ than PA.
> In other words, people aren't really choosing
Except that they are. They are readily available, a huge fraction of people spend a couple of years in them, and yet most people don't choose them for the majority of their lives.
It's interesting that (some of) their advocates can't see them unless they're the only option.
> Also, what's with the "diverse" scare quotes?
They're not scare quotes. I'm pointing out idiosyncratic usage. "Diverse community" typically means that the residents are ethnic and/or culture mix. What he's referring to is typically called "mixed use".
I've lived in SF, the East Bay (worked in Berkeley), Portland, Oregon, as well as Padova, Italy, and Innsbruck, Austria, and US cities, even the ones you cite, still aren't nearly as "walkable" as your average European town, although, yeah, they're better than something like Phoenix, Arizona.
> They're not scare quotes. I'm pointing out idiosyncratic usage. "Diverse community" typically means that the residents are ethnic and/or culture mix. What he's referring to is typically called "mixed use".
Ah, ok... actually that wasn't entirely clear to me either.
> still aren't nearly as "walkable" as your average European town
It depends on what standards we're using. If we're using "every store is in a mixed use area", then you're correct, but that's saying that you can't have any alternatives to mixed use. If we're saying that "mixed use" is "a walkable community that has at least one vendor for almost every need", then a lot of places qualify.
I note that mixed use advocates in the US argue that they should have the choice. If they extend that courtesy to others, they have to be satisfied with something short of universal mixed use.
The problem is that I live where I can get a hardware design job. I am actually trying to move, but the job market is pretty lousy right now. Also, places with more tech jobs like Silicon Valley are even worse than Santa Rosa for sprawl.