Walk Score: neat application
March 9th, 2008
We help homebuyers, renters, and real estate agents find houses and apartments in great neighborhoods. Walk Score shows you a map of what’s nearby and calculates a Walk Score for any property. Buying a house in a walkable neighborhood is good for your health and good for the environment.
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7 Comments Add your own
1. Robert Storm | March 9th, 2008 at 10:41 pm
Our adress recievied a 0 out of 100 score.
It appears to me that a 0 is the best score possible.
On our farm in southern Marion County, we grow our own food, cut our own hay, generate our own electricity, run a family farm, and help train others.
If not living amongst the masses is the negitive that gives us a 0 score; we win!
We don’t want to walk to bars, casinos, whorehouses, yuppie coffee dives etc..
Thank heavens for measure 49.
I hope my place never scores above 0.
2. Peter Bray | March 9th, 2008 at 11:01 pm
Hehe, good point!
3. Jim Labbe | March 10th, 2008 at 8:10 am
Ah but Robert and Peter. The futures of rural and urban Oregon are far more interdependent that you seem to appreciate. Walkable communities are by definition more dense and- if designed to effectively integrate the built and natural environments- more livable. So while Robert may choose to live in his rural escape, the future of rural Oregon depends very much on creating walkable livable urban communities where most people will desire to live, rather than all escaping to the country or some false approximation of the country (suburbia). To quote Mike Houck’s admonishment, “In livable cities in the preservation of the wild.”
Jim
4. Jim Labbe | March 10th, 2008 at 8:10 am
Actually it is “In livable cities is the preservation of the wild.”
5. Robert Storm | March 10th, 2008 at 9:36 pm
Ah but Jim…
All of those beutiful people in the idealistic walkable communities need to eat food.
Ah but Jim…
All of those beutiful people in the idealistic walkable communities need building materials for their houses.
Ah but Jim…
All of those beutiful people in the idealistic walkable communities need aggregate for their roads, concrete, and WALKWAYS.
Ah but Jim… Get real!
6. Jim Labbe | March 11th, 2008 at 12:17 am
Alright Robert. Here’s the deal. Let us both cease with the condescending “ah but” refrain (okay I admit, I started it). Lets also dispense with the holier-than-thou notion that rural or urban Oregonians are necessarily more self-reliant (or necessarily more anything) than the other. I have lived in rural and urban Oregon and the actual cultural differences are far less than some people would like to portray.
I wouldn’t dispute for a moment that any Oregonian (rural or urban) needs food, materials and aggregate or that those raw materials originate in rural areas. So I am not sure what you want me to “get real” about.
In fact, this observation only highlights another way rural and urban areas are interdependent. Modern rural economies are dependent on urban markets. Yes, urbanites need resources and raw materials but ruralites need urbanites to need things because that\’s how ruralites make a living.
But my original point was about a different kind of urban/rural interdependence: that the quality of our urban communities affects our capacity to keep rural communities genuinely rural.
If we care about maintaining genuinely rural landscapes, we need to do more than contain urbanization and defeat M37. We need to make communities inside our urban growth boundaries livable places for “the masses.” That means making urban communities more human scale which in turn means making them more walkable. Certainly there is more to livability than walkability, but it is a darn good proxy which was the point of the sightline.org scoring system which you seemed so quickly to dismiss.
Jim
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