Jane Jacobs: Champion of Neighborhoods and People
By: Diane Tuman, Zillow Content Manager | April 26, 2006
Every day I read about gas prices going up, beautiful farmlands that have given over to developers — or mega-stores — and the threat of global warming. Then, today, I read about a woman who died by the name Jane Jacobs. I had never heard of her, but she made it her mission to champion cities and neighborhoods and reduce the need for expressways. Evidently, she went head-to-head — and won — a battle with Robert Moses who wanted to build a freeway through Washington Square Park in Manhattan. Gotta love that.
Basically, she was an activist beating the drum against our dependency on cars and urban sprawl. And when I saw that Curbed started a contest to "name the Most Jane Jacobs Block in New York City," I knew she must be a pretty cool person.
I moved to Seattle about 7 months ago — mostly to take a job here at Zillow, but also for quality of life issues. I wanted to live in a city where I could know my neighbors, walk safely at all hours of day or night and where I could exist without my car. I can do all of these things. Happily, I’m living Jane Jacobs’ mantra.
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- Categories: Vacation Homes, Zillow
Comments
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alfred comi on June 19, 2006 3:27 pm
Maybe, since your looking like a progressive person that’s concerned about global warming, fuel prices and sprawl, you can get Zillow to fix up their code to be more compatible with the most progressive operating system out there. Mac OS X.
And the real problem with our planet is the same problem creating all you’ve mentioned. HUMANS and their ability to reproduce.
Bryan on June 19, 2006 3:46 pm
Hi Alfred,
This is Bryan from Zillow and I’d like to apologize that Safari is currently not supported on our site.
We are working to add support in the future.
As a Mac user myself I share your concern. For more information please reference:
http://www.zillowblog.com/zillow_blog/2006/02/safari_support.html
Thanks for using Zillow.com
San Diego Homes on June 14, 2009 10:53 pm
New York city was definitely one of the hardest hit with the wave of inner-city expressways when they first became popular. Then the trend switched to the loop system, which made most of us drive even further to get from one side of a city to the other. Maybe we can get rid of it all when the personal flying machine comes along.