Reply #19: I moved away from Pennsylvania because of sprawl [View All]

[Redstone]

Montgomery County, PA was a great place to live through the 1960s; there were farms within a mile of the Philadelphia city limits; you could jump on a train and be in Center City (downtown) Philadelphia in less than an hour...

By the mid-1970s the place had become unbearable...nothing but one office building after another strip mall after another yuppie McMansion development.

And it's gotten worse. I can barely stand to go there to visit family; it's so depressing to remember what a great place it used to be.

(Not to insult anyone who lives in that area, OK?)

I'll second the point that others have made, that one of the worst effects of this kind of sprwal is to utterly destroy the character of an area; if you go to this part of Pennsylvania, you look around and it could be ANYWHERE else that has developed like this...Northern Virginia, Colorado, Dallas...all the same.

Redstone