I think these threads would be more informative if every picture was accompanied with a corresponding map detailing the location of these neighborhoods and their distance from downtown. San Antonio's history of suburban development is not typical, in that many dense suburbs sprung up around each of the half-dozen or so military installations around town over several decades. The really disgusting stuff is that far west and northwest stuff, and Stone Oak. Hell, Stone Oak looks like Austin. Yecchh. I was born in town, in an apt complex in Alamo Heights, but my parents moved to an $80,000 house on the NW side of town in the early '80s because they couldn't afford to live in 78209 anymore. This was before this decidedly non-San Antonio residential growth we've seen in the past decade and a half on the north side.
What I don't understand is how the developers in the pre-sunbelt cities of the northeast can be seen as any more scrupulous than the sunbelt developers. Had it been economically sound for them to build way out and exploit urban flight in the early part of the century, they would have done it then. They eventually did anyway.
As far as San Antonio's "ugliness:" San Antonio has character (and I'm not talking about the Riverwalk here) that goes back 300 years. It is alive; not thriving, but toiling. There is blood in those buildings; in the dreams of poorer families who believed, misguided or not, that their salvation was in owning a home. And they don't buy the McMansions in this thread. I don't know those people, and I don't care to. There are families who survived the violence of the Alazan Apache Courts of the late '80s and still live inside "the loop." And families like mine, who moved out to the 'burbs too long ago and regret it now. San Antonio isn't pretty, clean or filled with steel and glass. There is a superficiality to that kind of develoment which a lot of San Antonians resent (hence the rivalry w/Austin and its "contact highs" and cookie-cutter bohemia. Austin, Portland, Boulder, where am I again?) Here's a pic of the neighborhood where my band practiced for years in my drummer's house (which was his mother's and grandmother's house). To me, this is what San Antonio neighborhoods looked like.
