An American Makeover

While perusing youtube, I came across this interesting video entitled "Built to Last". After watching the short 2:55 clip I realized how informative this video segment actually is.
The greatest threat to our planet today is urban sprawl. This video provides a fun and information-packed perspective on urban sprawl and smart growth. Take a look:

Urban Sprawl Pros and Cons

To better present the issue of urban sprawl in a completely non-biased way, I have decided to create a "pros" and "cons" list for you to compare and contrast. First, I will list the benefits of urban sprawl:

• Thanks to less expensive land in outlying areas around cities, people are able to afford larger houses on larger lots. So no more squeezing a large family into a smaller house
• Better school systems are often available in the suburbs. According to the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), in 1999, 73 percent of suburban New Jersey students scored "at or above" the basic reading level, whereas only 27 percent of urban students in New Jersey achieved the same goal.
• Crime rates tend to be lower in the suburbs than in urban areas, providing further incentive for families in particular to seek the white-picket fence safety of the outlying districts.
• The expansion of our society symbolizes a growing economy
• Sense of Community. An individual in a city can often feel lost in the crowd, while living in a less densely populated area can offer more of a sense of belonging to a community.
• It's the easier route

Now, here's a list of the problems or "cons" of urban sprawl:

• Living outside the city makes having a car almost a requirement. Businesses, schools, services, and recreational areas are all spread out at a distance, not to mention the need to commute to work. The increased use of automobiles contributes to increased pollution.
• The construction of roads and buildings destroys farmland and wildlife habitat. This means that food needs to be transported from farther away. The loss of wildlife habitat is not only an aesthetic loss. These areas also often serve as critical recharge areas for a region's drinking water supply.
• As the population becomes more dispersed, government agencies must also expand to meet the needs of these citizens. This means more government offices and the manpower to staff them. All this, in turn, means high taxes to pay for them.
• As pollution increases, so does respiratory problems.
• Longer travel times and more traffic congestion and more of a risk for more vehicle accidents
  
• Car-based living is also credited in part with obesity.

The video below is of Michael Jackson's song entitled "Earth Song". It was performed by Celine Dion, Usher, Carrie Underwood, Jennifer Hudson, and Smokey Robinson at the 2010 Grammy Awards. I'm posting it because every once and awhile we need to be reminded of why we love Earth's natural beauty. It's a great song and sung beautifully.

Urban Sprawl Overview

Today, my goal is to educate your fruitful minds on the issue of urban sprawl. As stated in the previous post, urban sprawl is the unchecked spreading of a city or its suburbs.
To visualize this rapid spreading, take a look at this video demonstration I found on youtube. The creator utilizes Sim City 4 to safely show urban sprawl and its effects.



As you can see, sprawl is more in the moment, rather than the future. People begin to settle in other places and in turn create more of a hassle on their own lifestyle as well as the environment.

Welcome!

First off, I would like to say thank you for taking some amount of interest in this blog. Urban sprawl is one of the most underrated issues in America, and it's nice to see that some people are willing to learn about this developing affair.

Second, many of you internet surfers may wonder what the point of a blog such as this one may be. To put it simple, this is an informative blog. In other words, I am going to attempt and educate my readers in a non-biased fashion on the subject of urban sprawl. Once the facts are laid out on the table (screen), I will then persuade those primers into realizing that urban sprawl is damaging to the environment, detrimental to our society's health, deleterious to our economy, and anything else that adds to the parallel structure, diction, syntax, and alliterations that I have utilized that would make any of my English teachers proud. To make things less boring I will be posting pictures and videos such as the picture above and the video below because we've all heard it before that one retains more information when they visualize opposed to just reading letters and words.

On a final note, like the picture above, the world is in our hands, it's what we make of it. As a member of the up-and-coming generation, and our world's future leaders, I feel that we need to start caring about the planet we live on because it is the only one we have. The goal of this blog is to not make you change; that's your own business. I want you to join me in discovering new ideas, educating able minds, and promoting smart growth (parallelism once again). Help me, help the world...One blog post at a time.

Enjoy this video (the movie actually looks interesting)