The addition of a family of four to the typical urban area necessitates an additional ten thousand square feet of parking space

Since each major urban center served but a single function, parking lots began to multiple rapidly. Culture center parking serves only its patrons and is not used most of the time. Mall lots are all but vacant after nine in the evening. Arena lots, school lots, medical center lots, etc., enjoy no shared use but must be there. We have arrived at that point where the addition of a family of four to the typical urban area necessitates an additional ten thousand square feet of parking space to accommodate members’ vehicles at home and in the variety of separated centers at which they will have to park them. And now, we must use up a lot of land to secure houses and lots away from the congestion of auto traffic. Nothing was harder hit by unifunctional planning

R. Oldenburg, The great good place (1987), 216

Community social life is necessary to healthy religious life

It wasn’t that the American farmer lacked the social instinct or had any less of it than anyone else. It was that the conditions of rural life and, often, that of local clergymen, operated against its realization in the social habits of the people. In Clermont, Ohio, for example, a survey conducted in 1914 showed the clergy’s stand on the following social activities: Sunday baseball (100 percent against), movies (65 percent against), dancing (90 percent against), playing cards (97 percent against), pool halls (85 percent against), and the annual circuses (48 percent against). Only tennis, croquet, and agricultural fairs received general approval.

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The authors of that report concluded with some irony that the churches were strongest where the lodges were strongest and that “both are expressions of the same spirit of fraternity and sociability.” Two clear conclusions were drawn: “(1) Community social life is necessary to healthy religious life, and (2) If the church is going to succeed it must recognize the social needs of the community and assume its share of the leadership in social activities.” Perhaps the strongest indictment that can be made against the Puritanism and Protestantism of developing America is that, far too often, they sought to ensure the life of the church at the expense of the life of the community.

R. Oldenburg, The great good place (1987), 73

The more people moved about, or were moved about by the companies that employed them, the more difficult it became to penetrate the nation’s residential areas

Once America became the high mobility society it now is, with about twenty percent of the population changing residence every year, one might have thought that neighborhoods would have been designed so that people could be integrated quickly and easily. What actually happened, however, was quite the opposite. The more people moved about, or were moved about by the companies that employed them, the more difficult it became to penetrate the nation’s residential areas.

R. Oldenburg, The great good place (1987), loc. 258