Dear Matt Logan, You did an excellent job of taking notes from a TV program.
I wish to comment on the motives of developers since that seemed to be a remaining question. We should agree that their overreaching motive is a profit. And we must separate developers of the various segments producing housing and infra structure. Each segments has their own markets and potentials for enhancing demands. We tend to think of only the developers of the raw open lands. But they might be just in that segment and would have no interest in subdivisions based on thirty-foot lots or redevelopments of urban areas. Nevertheless, to be successful, they cannot expect to "lead the market." Successful developers FOLLOW the market. Human taste is a complicated subject which we will not settle in "bikies." One's dream house might look like Barak H. Obama's mansion or it might look like a tract house in Sun Prairie. But these preferences, though, probably are seated in early childhood development. We segregate by economic status is this USA country. We might talk about race, but it is economic status which determines where we live and where we go to school. Again, this is another subject which will not be settled in "bikies." And then there is the large segment of the middle class where employment is in flux. Often called "mobile man", these people are not fixed and tenured like employment at colleges and universities. They must move from city to city within their working careers. These are not the people with zero down mortgages. If they are in middle management or upper middle management, they are probably living in a suburb of similar status people, regardless of race. They must know roughly what their real estate is worth if they are to remain mobile. They represent the markets for these subdivisions, planned and marketed by price ranges for groups separated by "income segregation." Possibly the full impact of this sort of suburban growth is hard to grasp by residents of areas such as the Madison istmas, Portland, or Seattle. I would expect the same principles are at work in these places, but are not set out and exposed as they have been in former corn fields around Chicago. But these niche market suburbs have been the rule in Chicago since WWII. And if people like "McMansions" today, in the past forty years they have equally liked such as "fake columns" as the "Southern look," the more refined New England salt box look, and all sorts of ranches and moderns. Criticizing psychological taste is beyond the pale. Eric Westhagen _______________________________________________ Bikies mailing list [email protected] http://www.danenet.org/mailman/listinfo/bikies
