Passive Squalor

When most of us drive through this new shopping plaza, we see a fresh unspoiled marketplace, an inviting, luring destination:


All right, it's neither inviting nor alluring to most people. Most just simply accept it as it is. It just is. I, on the other hand, see an architectural abortion with zero redeeming value, and I might go so far as to say it has negative value.

This is about a half mile away from Franklin Blvd. on Florin Rd., one of the entrances to the WalMart Supercenter. The Supercenter isn't yet finished, but the stores on its periphery are awaiting tenants, and some like this Sleep Train have already set roots.

The most disturbing thing in my opinion, far and away, are those fucking windows on the second floor. What's disturbing to me is that all of us, every one of us, including the developer, the builder, and the city planner -- we all want a place that is worth visiting, a place that looks like a real towne center, a place where we'd stroll about, with lots of people at the margins, going in, coming out, a place that's vibrant, with human scaled activity, with at least one second story that encloses us, that makes the outdoor area a "room."

But our building codes! It's illegal to build anything like a mixed use community but it's not illegal to build a fake one.

But we want them. We want them. This building is screaming out to us that our three hundred year old tradition of town buildings has been thrown in the garbage and we're content to live with incorrectly scaled usless replicas. I just can't believe that we'd go to any expense to build such fakery.


Not one person will use this sidewalk and in any event, there aren't even any doors to walk in fro the street front. This whole corner says "drive your fucking car" to buy one of our cell phones and park it in the 24x7 illuminated forty acres we've provided in the back. The cell phone advertisements in the lower windows are sized to be seen by 56mph speeding vehicles, not by pedestrians. The excessive cost of your Verizon cell phone subsidizes all this, too.

Most people just don't care about any of this. Just don't. Too many other things to think about. And I'm OK with this because we all can't be advocates for everything. But this is our public realm, folks. Everyone is affected. We passively accept living in squalor. This is the only thing we are allowed to live in anymore, and I think it ought to change.