I think they are marginalized by first the lack of property rights and then by the absurd socialist, corporatist or mercantilist economies they live under. Sad to say, many small businesses in America face a similar system.

I just couldn’t agree more about this. Cities really undermine they’re value and core strengths with stupid stuff.

Boomers (in many ways the most-educated consumers up to their time) bought minivans in the 80’s and early 90’s and switched to SUVs en masse in the later 90’s as our kids (Gen Y) aged, and dialed back to “mid-size” and “mini” SUVs and “crossovers” (station wagons!) in the past decade as the kids left home.

I submit that people bought those vehicles for their utility and safety, not because they were sold a bill of goods or because they wanted to avoid emissions standards.

Bigger and heavier means safer in vehicles, and boomer suburban folks are all about safety in all its forms.

… [F]irst world cities now seem to have the opposite problem. They are squeezing out anything with a hint of the unusual or the unscripted. They suffer from over-formalization. I think this is an area that needs serious academic study.

One way to look at a law is who supports it and who will be impacted by it.

Read the work of sociologist Mike Males, who while writing about drug laws promoted the “feared drugs/feared populations” theory. He shows how drug prohibitions often were enacted by linking their use to visible out-groups (Chinese and opiates, blacks and cocaine, Mexicans and marijuana, and so on).

Even innocuous-seeming laws can affect groups either by accident or tacitly. In Southern California, one such storm was when L.A. and Orange County health inspectors were citing restaurants in Asian communities for food preparation, presentation and storage that the examiners deemed unsanitary.

By the letter of the law, these food establishments — mostly Chinese and Filipino in L.A. County, Vietnamese in Orange County — were in violation. However, the communities were outraged and felt bullied.

They pointed out to health inspectors that it wasn’t a case of immigrants being unfamiliar with Western rules of food hygiene and preparation. These stores had been approved to open, after all.

First, they said that some ethnic delicacies are prepared or served in ways that are unwholesome in Western eyes (open fermentation, foods deliberately cooked a few degrees below safe temperatures, foods cooked then allowed to cool to ambient temperatures), but are mostly consumed among the ethnic groups who are comfortable with the style of food preparation. Then they asked whether any outbreaks of food-borne illness could be traced back to the foods in question. Food inspectors admitted that in many cases, they could not.

The counties had to step in to create a middle ground. The health inspectors had to study how safely can food be served using ethnic techniques, rather than automatically issuing citations for noncompliance. The restaurants were also given clearer guidelines on acceptable preparation and storage methods, and especially how they would affect the letter grades that are given.

Any look at the structure will tell you that they clearly should be shut down for safety violations that boggle the mind.

There is the case of they guy who broke both his ankles in a fit of stupidity. I broke my cell phone, scraped every joint, cut my head many times, and got horribly sick by hanging out above a smelter, but I love the place just as it is.
I’m told that when fire inspectors look at the place they almost always say it ought to be shutdown. Were a fire to start, everyone would die. Who cares though, there is no place that’s more fun.

The city museum breaks every possible rule in the name of fun, and I’m very pleased with that.

The real rise in popularity of the SUV is directly proportional to the American public’s ability to getting sucked in by mass marketing, victims of media ad campaigns.

Go back 20 years, circa 1990, if your memory can dig that deep, back to when there were very few SUVs on the roads. And pickup trucks were relegated to the service industry and farm country. Unhip & uncool.

Then in the early ’90s Congress enacted stricter emission laws … for automobiles. For Detroit’s big three, complying with stricter emission standards meant passing on higher costs to the average new car buyer. Washington knew that would happen, but didn’t figure that would hurt the economic engine. Hurting small business is different. So the law didn’t apply to service vehicles or farm trucks, in order to spare the farmer and the poor self-employed working stiff or small business owner the burden of increased cost in the purchase of that next pickup truck or Suburban.

So while Detroit grudgingly coped with the obstacle to maximum profits presented by the requirement to improve emission standards in cars and minivans, the big three quickly seized the opportunity to go after obscene profits on those plain, ugly, unhip SUVs and pickup trucks.

Seriously, try to recollect a 1985 Suburban, Jeep Cherokee, Chevy Blazer … real plainJane compared to today’s Tahoe, Hummer and Navigator. And who would have dreamed back then of a luxury SUV from Lincoln or Cadillac?

Detroit’s solution? Gussy them up, and market the hell out of them!

Which is exactly what happened.

No investment in better technology, improved fuel economy, atmosphere-saving engines. Just the same gas guzzlers with heated leather seats, power mirrors, CD players … and non-stop TV commercials, magazine ads, and guest appearances in movies and TV shows. When you’re watching 24, if Jack’s in a hurry and barks at a sidekick for his ride, it’s “Get my F-150″ not “grab my truck.”

Basically, as a society, we were suckered into thinking that SUVs are good. They’re luxurious, they’re more reliable (because they’ve got four-wheel drive), and they’re safer because, well, because they’re bigger.

And ultimately, that becomes the real argument.

If you’re going to have a head-on collision with four kids as passengers, do you want to be driving the Honda Civic or the Lincoln Navigator?

SUVs have the road-bully “I Win” factor, and therein lies their sex appeal.

Thanks to devious dodging of emission laws, the power of marketing, and the gullibility of the public.

I have a deep, deep problem with the tangible sense of striving for utopianism that is present in many American cities, and colors a lot of the current urbanism movement… great ideas, for sure, but implementing them necessitates a sort of brutalism, and a dismissal of anything that doesn’t fit the accepted rubric. And that brutalism, as you’ve pointed out, erodes some of the facets of city life that make it so wonderful and dynamic.

We’re not trying to create a gated community in the Village, rather endeavoring to maintain one of Indy’s most lively areas that has emerged organically rather than w/ massive government subsidies.

We’ve got a funky feel and many people who neither live nor work here nevertheless feel a sense of “ownership” which thereby entitles them to act freely w/o having to deal with the consequences (trash, assaults, vandalism, etc.)

Surely, it’s reasonable to have expectations of respect.

And the bucolic pastoralism of rural “live and let live” mindset is perhaps an accurate expression of your memory but I have plenty of interaction with rural Hoosiers who are dealing with neighbors who operate factory farms. They have no reluctance about placing open manure pits close to neighbors homes and spraying antibiotic-laden nitrogen loads on the frozen ground. This material works its way into the watershed and, in the case of White River, winds up in Broad Ripple and in the city’s drinking water.

Tolerance only works if all parties are tolerant. Or, said another way, one is not being intolerant by observing that one is being shat upon by one’s neighbor.