October 28, 2005

Planning

I don’t know about your town, but the streets in our town stay about the same. Occasionally and in a frenzy of public service, the maintainers fill the potholes with enough gunk to make potbumps. But as for planning, except in subdivisions (if you can call that planning), the byways remain the same.

City planning is an oxymoron on a roll bulldozing old, many of them quite charming, single-family houses and running up new multiple-unit condos in their place. Nobody, least of all the builders and rapacious investors, seems much to take into account the fact that for each of these dwellings the number and size of the lots available for razing-then-raising is inversely proportional to the number of automobiles (read SUVs) required to service them. More and more new spreads we see, some with as many as three stories and four garages.

In the face of all this, hardly a week passes that CP and I aren’t prompted to wonder out loud and even sometimes in each other’s presence whether we could do without a second car. (Growing up, neither of us came from a family with more than one, often with holes in the floorboard.) We even thought about keeping a record of when it might be something of an annoyance to have only one, but we never seem to get around to it. We probably ought to be embarrassed, but denial always somehow preempts logic.

[Visit Episcopal Relief and Development at http://www.er-d.org/ to make a donation to Katrina or Rita Relief or Episcopal Migration Ministries at emm@episcopalchurch.org to volunteer to assist displaced people with housing.]

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