Why a Car-Free Suburbia May Become a Reality
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California's East Bay -- the collection of towns, cities, and suburbs across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco -- has a lot to boast about. There's the perpetually great weather, enlightened inhabitants, and a halfway decent, if in my opinion overpriced, public transit system in the form of BART. Yet despite BART's 43 stations spanning 95 miles, most folks in the area find they need a car, too.
But one man thinks his town, Hayward -- or at least a part of it -- can make the leap to automobile-free. "I want to live a lifestyle that's less dependent on cars," says Sherman Lewis, a retired poli-sci professor at Cal State East Bay and president of the Hayward Area Planning Association since 1978. But, he admits, he's chosen a relatively difficult way to achieve it, "by trying find 950 other families who want to live the same way."
Lewis has developed plans for Quarry Village, a 1,000-unit development about a mile from the Hayward BART station and a short skip from the Cal State campus and downtown Hayward. It includes townhouses, condos, walking paths, shuttle buses to the rail ... and no garages. It would fill 22 acres on a former rock quarry (hence the name) currently owned by Caltrans, the California DOT; the land is not yet for sale, but Lewis says the agency is supportive of his redevelopment vision. The residences will be officially affordable, at least by Hayward's definition: studios to six-bedrooms between $250,000 and $650,000. Lewis believes the larger units will appeal to telecommuters, who can use the extra bedrooms as offices.
Inside the development, residents would be able to walk to basic amenities -- a restaurant or two, a well-stocked grocery store. For other needs, they could take an on-site shuttle to BART, use the shared or rental car services that would be available, or, if they really want, rent one of the 100 or so parking spots along the perimeter of the neighborhood. Those spots would be auctioned off, starting at perhaps $125 a month, to help subsidize the shuttle service. No one need fear being judged for not giving up his or her car, Lewis assures. "They're going to be congratulated, " he says," because their money will go to pay for everyone else's bus."
The Quarry Village vision is inspired in part by the Vauban development in Freiburg, Germany, a 6,000-resident suburb where parking is limited to the perimeter and a space goes for $40,000. Some seventy percent of Vauban-ers don't own a car, and by all accounts they seem to have adjusted quite easily.
But that's Europe. Are Americans -- some of whom say their car represents them more than their friends of clothes -- ready for the car-free experience?
Well, maybe. Car-sharing, it was reported last week, is on the rise, with city policies and real estate developments encouraging the practice. (I find ZipCar, at $120 per weekend day here in New York, to be prohibitively expensive, but perhaps I'm spoiled by my bicycle and my $2 subway). Quebec-based CommunAuto asserts that every shared car knocks eight off the road -- that's about 1,800 fewer miles driven per person each year.
So the political climate is ripe for Quarry Village, and perhaps the mindset of many Americans, still stinging from our brief foray into $4 per gallon gas, has properly adjusted. "We have more than 100 people [ready] to sign up to buy these units when they become available," says Lewis.
But when will that be? At the end of May, the Hayward Planning Commission gave the thumbs up to new zoning, permitting higher density and less parking, and Lewis expects the city council to overwhelmingly approve SMU zoning -- sustainable mixed-use -- at the end of June, which Lewis says was created with Quarry Village in mind.
"The city council is unanimously supportive, but all of us are concerned about getting investors and selling units fast enough," says Lewis. That's right, they're still lacking one key component: the money to actually create the neighborhood, despite plenty of interest and excitement. The tagline displayed prominently on the Quarry Village website sums up the current state of the project: "If you'll come, we can build it."
Why Online Comments Are So Toxic
In the year that I wrote for a blog about Brooklyn real estate, I was regularlyplagued by "trolls" -- online commenters who write inflammatory or derisive thingsin public forums, hoping to provoke an emotional response. These commenterscalled me, and one another, everything from stupid to racist, or sometimes stupidracists. And that was just when I posted the menu of a new café.
The most infamous and offensive of these commenters was a man (we assumed)who called himself "The What." His remarks ranged from insults to threats. "I know where you live and I'm coming for you and your family," heonce wrote. The intrigue around The What's identity warranted a cover story inNew York magazine. What kind of person would spend so much time, and so muchenergy, engaging in virtual hate?
The consensus among sociologists and psychologists who study online behavior isthat all kinds of people can become trolls -- not just the unwound, the immature orthe irate. See your perfectly pleasant work neighbor, furiously typing next to you?He might be trolling an Internet site right now.
"Most people who troll are people who are just like you and me, but just a bitmore intense," says Olivier Morin, a cultural anthropologist who has written abouttrolling.
One Web site breaks trolls into categories: the hater, the moral crusader, thedebunker, the defender. But trolls might not retain those qualities in real life. It'sjust that the Internet's anonymity makes it impossible for them to resist spewingvitriol from the protective cave of cyberspace. Psychologists call it the "disinhibitioneffect," in which "the frequency of self-interested unethical behavior increasesamong anonymous people." Non-academics refer to it as "John Gabriel's GreaterInternet Fuckwad Theory": the combination of anonymity and an audience bringsout the absolute worst in people.
"Social psychologists have known for decades that, if we reduce our sense of ourown identity -- a process called deindividuation -- we are less likely to stick to socialnorms," wrote Michael Marshall in New Scientist. "The same thing happens withonline communication... Psychologically, we are 'distant' from the person we'retalking to and less focused on our own identity. As a result we're more prone toaggressive behavior."
Online disinhibition ranges from benign -- oversharing of personal information -- totoxic, virtual hit-and-runs in which you call writers stupid racists, or in which youwrite, in response to the shootings in Colorado: "What kind of idiot parent bringstheir 3-month-old to a midnight movie. Morans." Hey, no one ever said you had to bea good speller to be mean.
Only a psychotic person, incapable of empathy, or someone perpetually engulfedby rage, would say such things in public. But people feel alone when they're typingon a computer, even if they're in a public "place," -- a chat room, on Facebook orwithin the comments section of an article. MIT professor Sherry Turkle calls this"being alone together"; the Internet causes "emotional dislocation," so we forgetabout the together part.
Anonymous, unethical behavior started way before the Internet, of course: Platowrote of the ring of Gyges, which bestowed the gift/curse of invisibility, leading mento thieve. Who wouldn't swipe stuff if he knew he couldn't get caught? Well, saidPlato: no one.
But we're not talking about thieving anymore. We're talking about cyber bullyingthat leads to teen suicides, and trolls that leave photographs of nooses ontribute pages to those dead teens. "Trolling normalizes abuse, and that's what'sfrightening," says Morin.
Online anonymity creates a sense of a culture without consequences. Think ofthat tween who posted a video on YouTube of his own abuse of a 68-year-old busmonitor. The Internet limitlessly expands the possibilities for unkindness andwaywardness and misbehavior (and, yeah, for community-building, too -- Internetusers raised $700,000 for that bus monitor, and now she's retiring). Lots of folkswho would never step foot in a whorehouse happily watch Internet porn.
Anonymous comments once embodied the promise of the Internet, the supposeddemocracy of the place, and their defenders say that privacy is what we must prizethe most. But I'm not sure donning an alternate identity, hiding behind a screen,is the same thing as privacy. There is a movement to eradicate, or at least reduce,anonymous commenting, in the hopes that it will seal up this space between ourlives online and off. Many sites require readers to log in through social media tocomment, so that they are, in theory, linked to their real-life selves.
Personally, I resist such cross log-ins. I'm not much of a commenter myself, savefor when the New York Times covered the controversy at my local food co-op overwhether or not to carry six Israeli-made products. And all I said was: Why is thisstory in the New York Times? (It turns out that a disproportionate number of NewYork Times employees shop there, and thus were under the mistaken impressionthat this constituted news.) But I don't necessarily want all my Facebook friends toread that comment -- that was, I hoped, for the Times' editorial staff.
One of the strangest things about the commenters from that Brooklyn blog was thatmany of them had in-person relationships. They held regular meetups in local bars,attaching a face, if not their real names, to their screen personas. And for a few daysafter these gatherings, the comments would be less vitriolic, as if the civility of theevening leaked onto the virtual pages of our site.
Did The What ever attend, skulk in the background and sip brandy while watchingthe blog devotees socialize? He could have been anyone, of any race or either sex.But he never attached a face to his online name.
Perhaps, like a lot of people, The What simply wanted to articulate his worldview.You can't ask why trolls do what they do without asking why people argue ingeneral, and people do that, says Morin, because they want to assert their ownrectitude. "They really want to be right, and prove a point," says Morin. "And themagic of the Internet does the rest."