—Bill Vaughn
There is no there there.
- Gertrude Stein
In planning school, we revelled in suburbia bashing, bashing the stronghold of the cult of domesticity, sprawl, disaffected teenagers-gone-wild, Walmart, and Republican, fear-inspired, self-promoting, white, Caspar Milktoasts. Since we decided to move to Louisville, which we decided to move to because it has good access to public transportation, a great historic downtown, and lower housing costs, I have begin to ponder just what suburbia is and isn't.
Louisville has been called a Boulder suburb, but is it the suburbia that planners worry about? What do you think?
Front of our house, which rents at the same rate as our last basement level apartment in Boulder. The house was built around 1983 and about 1,300 SF. While these aren't multifamily homes, they are all built on fairly small lots similar in size to much of the housing that is found in Denver and Boulder.
See our neighbors' house through the peep holes? Pretty close, eh?
We live on West Hackberry Street and this hackberry is our shade tree in our back yard. Unlike the suburbias described by Bill Vaughn, trees were added to rather than subtracted from the landscape.
This bike path and open space is on the north side of the houses that face us across the street. We use this path day and night to go to downtown Louisville.
The preserved open space behind our house.
Notice the countdown: guess non-Republicans live in the "suburbs", too.
Louisville is an historic mining town founded in 1882.
And Louisville benefits from an historic downtown. There was and is a there there.
Community Park - there's a there there, too.
Louisville Days 2008.
So, what do you think? Is it a bad suburb?
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