{"id":933,"date":"2013-01-15T20:41:50","date_gmt":"2013-01-16T04:41:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/?p=933"},"modified":"2013-01-15T22:01:12","modified_gmt":"2013-01-16T06:01:12","slug":"three-observations-on-the-issaquah-highlands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/?p=933","title":{"rendered":"Three Observations on the Issaquah Highlands"},"content":{"rendered":"

They’re definitely trying to use land more efficiently than normal suburbia.<\/strong> There’s lots of townhomes and apartments there. There’s not always huge amounts of separation between differing land usage; it is<\/em> possible to easily walk from some<\/em> of the housing to some of the shops. A big chunk of the land was set aside as a wildland park (which was the main reason I was there, to go for a midwinter hike).<\/p>\n

Particularly at its current stage, it’s still very much auto-oriented suburbia.<\/strong> It has its own freeway exit, and is served by a feeder road far<\/em> wider than one would have in an older, traditional city for an equivalent-sized neighborhood. While there’s plans to build enough shops to make it self-sufficient, it’s not there yet: for example, there’s still no grocery store at all there; you must drive several miles to the nearest one. There’s big gaps in the still-incomplete development that beg to be driven across.\u00a0Most<\/em> of the housing is not at this time a convenient walk to shopping. Transit service, at this stage, is minimal.<\/p>\n

It shows the limitations of capitalism.<\/strong> If you’re not affluent, all you can afford there is a condo or a townhome. If you’re well off, there’s detached homes (with views) available. There’s very large homes on large lots if you’re really<\/em> rolling in the dough-re-mi. In other words, it’s not really repudiating the wasteful American lifestyle: it’s merely pricing the non-rich out of some aspects of it, turning it into more of an elite privilege than it presently is. (Which it definitely<\/em> is, when you look at things on a world-wide scale.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

They’re definitely trying to use land more efficiently than normal suburbia. There’s lots of townhomes and apartments there. There’s not always huge amounts of separation between differing land usage; it is possible to easily walk from some of the housing to some of the shops. A big chunk of the land was set aside as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/933\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}