0004. Glen Meadows Estates and More

Tonight's ruck began at the Pet Supplies Plus at the northeast corner of Marsh and Forest, heading north on Marsh. Starting later than I wanted due to a frustrating coding problem resulted in less daylight than I would have preferred, so photos from tonight mostly came within the first 15 minutes.

I know this is only the fourth adventure and all, but I've been consistently intrigued at what I've found in neighborhoods I wouldn't have otherwise explored. Tonight was a mix of a torn-down-something, perhaps a school because I can't figure out why a flag pole situation would be erected otherwise, a middle school I've never seen before and a rather large one at that, and a friend walking his dog. And because I'm a social animal, this explains why my route doubled tonight when halfway through with ny own walk, I joined him for the rest of the walk.

I passed by a small, older apartment complex near the beginning of my route with good vibes all around. It looked like it had its own community, and reminded me of other smaller apartment developments throughout Dallas. These apartments are very much unlike the enormous monstrosities that are typically built around DFW today, and exist as several two story buildings with several units in each building. I wondered what it was like to live there.

From everything I've read, it seems it would be beneficial to introduce small multi-family developments into neighborhoods currently zoned for single-family residential. We continue to tear down older single-family homes in order to build much larger, more expensive, modern versions of the same thing. For what purposes, other than creature comforts and increasing the tax base, I'm not entirely sure. It's not like single-family households are growing significantly larger.

It seems multi-family developments would likely increase the tax base more than single-family re-developments, so the only reason I can think of why we can't have nicer things collectively as a society is the NIMBY crowd's fear of change and the unknown. This is shortsighted – re-building the same thing, only bigger and better, is only beneficial to an incredibly small number of people. And continuing with this pattern contributes to ignoring both the benefits that come from increasing population density in an area and the diversity of housing needs.

I would love to see more diversity of housing slowly introduced into neighborhoods full of single-family homes. Where are the duplexes? The four unit apartments? The missing middle, as they say.

And yes, I understand that adding these types of developments will likely increase the amount of cars on the properties and surrounding streets. At the same time, there are plenty of designs that accomodate for this nicely. I find it funny that a culture so seemingly hell-bent on driving everywhere, is so fixated on cars parked on residential streets. It's ridiculous.

One of the two things I hear over and over in these conversations is that one, it would be great to be able to walk to places, and two, it would be great to have more places where we can hang out with friends and family. But until we increase population density in these areas, it's difficult if not impossible to support the local retail that would give us these places to walk to where more people can hang out and commune together.

Instead, we continue to develop more of the same, increasing sprawl that leaves us with really no other option than to drive everywhere and experience more cars than we would if we had more areas appropriately dense in population.

And at the same time, we can't expect people to walk anywhere if our walkable paths are consistently designed in a manner that places pedestrians right next to vehicles weighing thousands of pounds that, with one wrong mistake, can instantly kill us. But it's not only that pedestrian routes often misplaced – it's also true that they are so often sprinkled with obstacles.

Imagine if while driving that instead of the obstacle-free roads we typically experience, that you regularly experienced some sort of roadblock without warning – maybe a huge piece of furniture was placed in the middle of the road for example. It's completely clear on the other side, but you can't get your car through so you're going to have to backtrack and find another way, or go to the other side of the road and drive against traffic for a while. At best it's annoying. At worst, possible death. This is what it's like to walk through most of Dallas.

As it started to get dark, I found myself walking through the neighborhood behind a couple and their dog wheen I noticed a friend walking his own dog, coming my direction on the other side of the street. We talked about friends, his new job, public transit, and more. It was nice randomly catching up and rambling on together.