Design vs. Develop

I’m looking for a new neighborhood. Mind you, Cherrydale has served me well, but Arlington is expensive. My base criteria is this: a neighborhood with ample sidewalks (of course) as well as something you can comfortably walk to. What something? A grocery store, a restaurant, a CVS, a coffeeshop, or anything else I’d be inclined to use once or more each week. I have a car and I’m willing to drive places, but I’d like to live where I can take a stroll and actually get some place.

So, to review: cheap, sidewalks, store(s), in NoVA. I’m not ready to move away from the metro area yet.

UPDATE: I feel that “cheap” is too vague a qualifier for something that should be concrete, so I’ve dropped this from the criteria.

Despite my past rants about Houston, it does one thing very well: getting out of the way. There is no zoning in Houston, which makes it easy to adaptively reuse buildings and to try different things. Since zoning does not apply, there are no zoning boards or expensive layers of red tape to navigate. I may have previously lambasted the lack of these laws in the past, but I’ve come to realize that this is not what I truly find frustrating about the city. The problem, from what I can tell, is that there is no planning whatsoever of the public infrastructure. The city just seems to amble at the whim of private developers, who usually build typical single-use neighborhoods and malls. Result? Lots of traffic on ridiculously large highways and no parks or sidewalks.

I guess my ideal city would be one with the flexibility of no zoning, but well thought out public space. Streets should be wide enough to safely accomodate traffic while being narrow enough to cross on foot comfortably. Sidewalks should be ubiquitous and blocks should be short enough that you aren’t trudging on for minutes on end without an opportunity to change direction. And there should be accessible parks in good locations. Maybe one of Houston’s edge cities will decide to do it.

For those of you who were unaware, I have now bought a Macintosh. (For those of you who do not care, sorry, I promise to get back on topic this Thursday with some original material.) Overall, I’m enjoing the switch to the pretty UNIX. However, I’ve had to relearn some keyboard combinations and there are certain things that simply don’t work the way I’d like. For example, when I drag files over to another folder, I can choose to copy these files by holding down “control” in Windows. This does not seem to work on Mac. Does anyone know of a workaround? Also, you can mount an FTP site as a volume (so it appears as just another drive or disk image connected to your computer), but it’s limited to read-only.