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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (266330)	12/29/2005 1:24:46 AM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1575549

re: In six years, it has gone from nothing to one of the hottest residential real estate markets in the area. Where people refused to live, people are paying 7 figures for condos. They've built 5K units in two years and there are 6K more in the pipeline. That has nothing to do with creativity, it's a nationwide trend. Hell, it's even happening in provincial downtown Tampa; even Trump is building a tower! One tower does not make a downtown. This transformation covers the gamut from apt., condos, hotels, live theatre, restaurants, clubs, movie theaters. Its all in the article to which I linked you. To pull off such a transformation takes a lot of imagination and money. LA has that in spades. Over 10 years ago Chicago switched to a reverse commute; the city was such a great place to live that more people were living in the city and working in the suburbs than the opposite. Downtown's are coming back all over the country. Yes, starting as early as the 1960s, Chicago began to put together a very attractive package in downtown and along Michigan Avenue. But Chicago started out as a different city. It was modeled after the cities of Europe and the East coast. It has high densities downtown with densities lessening as you go further out from the core. Briefly, LA was on the same path but then moved into a different direction......sprawling instead of developing density. By the time the late '90s hit, there was not much downtown other than office buildings, a couple of hotels, a couple of market rate apts., a garment and jewelry district, maybe one department store [most had closed in the 1980s], a lot of low income housing and a big skid row. It had very little of the infrastructure that Chicago had even as early as 1980. LA may be the second largest city in the country but its downtown looks like a city more on the scale of a Houston. In LA, unlike most other cities, the further west you go the more desirable the city becomes. South is ghetto, East is barrio, North is barrio til you hit Pasadena and S. Pasadena. Up until 2000, I would say probably less than 5% of the population had ever been downtown. Some would say New York is more creative than LA, some would say that most of what is labeled "creative" out of California is crap (just watch a few sitcoms on TV). I just think it's a bad generalization. I wasn't even thinking tv or movies or music.....but the most creative people in those fields are mostly in LA with some in NYC. I was thinking hi tech in SFO and OC, fashion and furniture in LA, and then weird stuff like craigslist which is this site on the Web that looks like plain wrap but where you can buy or rent almost anything imaginable. I think it started in SFO. When one of my German friends moved to London recently, she consulted craigslist and another UK copycat list that started after craigslist when she wanted a flat. In fact, she found the flat she moved from craigslist and not the UK site. Its stuff like craigslist that I think is very creative. Here's the site......check it out: craigslist.org And then, of course, there is google.com.