Cosmo*burp*
Posted on | August 7, 2008 at 10:17 pm | 1 Comment
There’s an interesting article in Next American City about the changing face of the suburbs. It’s particularly relevant to me as it uses my town Lakewood as an example of a new type of city coined a “Cosmoburb”, which means “wealthy suburbs that are also diverse and that increasingly contain non-traditional households”. The article says that in Lakewood, “singles and childless couples outnumber households with children”. I never really noticed it before, but I would have to say that my neighborhood really does not have a lot of kids around. There are a few pockets of traditional families here and there in the development, but there are also a heckuva lot of singles, couples without kids, and older people whose grown kids have left the nest. I’m not sure about diversity – there aren’t a lot of minorities around here, although there are certainly more than there used to be.
But one way in which my little corner of the city will never be cosmoburb-y is that there’s not a lot of “mixed-use” property around here. It’s all pretty much residential, with an occasional small strip mall. The “walkability” score for my address is a paltry 23 out of a 100 (”car dependent”). I long to be able to walk down to a corner cafe and sip a latte out on a patio, or to be able to do some produce shopping at a local corner market, or to walk to a neighborhood bar and stumble home drunk, but that’s never going to happen here.
The article mentions how the eventual FasTracks expansion of the metro light-rail line is going to create these mixed-use hubs around the Lakewood stations. But even the closest one of those is still very far away from me. Lakewood currently has at least one sorta mixed-use area, Belmar, which may or may not be a model for the kind of thing they’re going for around the stations. And who knows what’s eventually going to spring up around Solterra and the area between Alameda and Morrison Rd on C-470. That definitely looks to be targeted for mixed-use. I don’t see Belmar, Solterra, or their ilk being a model of diversity or “real” city life, and I can’t really see that happening to whatever springs up around those light-rail stations either. But one thing’s for sure: change is definitely coming and I can’t wait to see what it entails.
Oh, and the suburbs are becoming more city-like in at least one way: more homeless people begging on street corners.
Latre.
Pet Peeve of the Day: Driving in downtown Denver. It was bad enough today, pre-convention. I can’t wait to see what it’s going to be like in a few weeks…
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One Response to “Cosmo*burp*”
August 8th, 2008 @ 1:41 pm
May not be your cup of tea, but my ex wrote a book contrasting Denver and Portland’s political fragmentation and how it affected suburban growth.