I have become, much to my surprise, a suburban homesteader. More precisely, a suburban homesteader wannabe.
Paolo's antipathy about suburbs is shared by many planners and architects committed to environmental preservation and the conservation of resources, and I share that concern; but nonetheless, I have a home in the suburbs. It is a 1930s Tudor-style cottage that my father's next-older sister, my Aunt Jo and her husband, my Uncle Ben, called "home" almost all their married life, until their respective deaths.
What I call "arcologizing" is a plan to triple the existing floor space without hardly expanding the footprint of the house. I want to conserve as much garden and edible landscape space as I can make available, preserve as much green space as I can. In that way I can capitalize the usefulness of a two-lots-on-a-SE-corner property. For me, it is a 'no-brainer' to maintain maximum arable space and maximize actual habitation-space.
What I find mind-boggling is how local politics (aka cronyism) has tried to obstruct that kind of development. Lord help me, the Town of Huntington had to be backed to the wall to agree it was OK for to keep a few chickens. The requirements to create a two-family in what was once a one-family include 15 copies of a 19-pp document along with signatures of every neighboring household w/in 500 feet of one's own, agreeing to the *application* for a change in zoning.
Live in hope y con arcology, veneceremos. That's what I'm gonna do.
Paolo's antipathy about suburbs is shared by many planners and architects committed to environmental preservation and the conservation of resources, and I share that concern; but nonetheless, I have a home in the suburbs. It is a 1930s Tudor-style cottage that my father's next-older sister, my Aunt Jo and her husband, my Uncle Ben, called "home" almost all their married life, until their respective deaths.
What I call "arcologizing" is a plan to triple the existing floor space without hardly expanding the footprint of the house. I want to conserve as much garden and edible landscape space as I can make available, preserve as much green space as I can. In that way I can capitalize the usefulness of a two-lots-on-a-SE-corner property. For me, it is a 'no-brainer' to maintain maximum arable space and maximize actual habitation-space.
What I find mind-boggling is how local politics (aka cronyism) has tried to obstruct that kind of development. Lord help me, the Town of Huntington had to be backed to the wall to agree it was OK for to keep a few chickens. The requirements to create a two-family in what was once a one-family include 15 copies of a 19-pp document along with signatures of every neighboring household w/in 500 feet of one's own, agreeing to the *application* for a change in zoning.
Live in hope y con arcology, veneceremos. That's what I'm gonna do.
