Replace the Pepsi Machine with one that sells Worms and you’ve nailed my area.
Rural Iowa here, the only one I can’t find within walking distance of me is the bottom middle, and probably because I haven’t walked the entire town yet.
I grew up in small town. Very. Like, a few hundred people. One school. This meme is so accurate but railway picture is wrong! Too clean. XD
Tracks should have at least a few decent sized trees growing in the middle. Or, if you’re in the Midwest US, they should dead end at a random field where a manufacturing plant once stood.
I occasionally take the bus from NYC to a town in the Finger Lakes, and this is so true. I have been through so many towns that check off every one of these boxes.
There do be the random pile of gravel.
My brother in law’s properties and philosophy is a great example of how this often happens.
He owns a number of rentals as well as a large property adjoining his home. He is always improving amd acquiring properties. I think of him as a “slum Lord with good intentions”
Anytime, and I do mean anytime, something of value comes up for free, at a discount, or in a bartering situation, his eyes become as large as saucers.
He is a “random pile of gravel” hoarder. This behavior also applies to random piles of dirt, random piles of lumber, and other random piles of shit.
He has a very neat home with a somewhat well kept yard, but his adjoining property looks like a junkyard.
Don’t forget the Pepsi machine doesn’t actually work half the time if ever.
Fellow midwesterner can confirm
Am I missing something? Aren’t most buildings bricks? Or is that just because I live in London?
Not here in the USA!
In the US houses are held together by thoughts and prayers.
Pine with a light dusting of steel & cardboard.
Plastic on exterior walls, paper and chalk on interior walls, and tar and gravel on the roof.
Early this year forest fire fighters in Alberta were complaining that new houses have so much plastic in them that they were combusting and consumed in like 5 minutes making saving them impossible and slowing the fire’s spread harder.
I’m having a hard time finding the quote. I found this explaining houses burn faster now than before because of plastic https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/modern-homes-burn-8-times-faster-than-50-years-ago-1.1700063
Considering the ridiculous heat of those forest fires 5 minutes is believable
I can believe it; in the UK our fire regs have become rather stringent due to the Grenfell fire, though those changes are mostly on flats/buildings more then 3(?) storeis etc.
The PVC external cladding can melt from a mid to large sized bonfire 10-15 foot away. We can’t use it to clad houses above the 2nd floor, though there are exceptions if your replacing existing cladding. So if you want to add a former to your loft you have to use tiles now.
Though there’s this interesting product called magply which is roughly as strong as ply, but is made from magnesium oxide and silicate. It’s considered incombustible so you can clad with it, then render it.
I wonder if we’ll start seeing different materials used in areas prone to forest fires
Brick isn’t as common in the US. It’s more “regional.” I’m most towns, you’ll have like one or two brick buildings and that’s it. A town hall, maybe a church.
What are they built from then?
Wood mostly.
Wood and sheetrock
https://time.com/6046368/wood-steel-houses-fires/
It’s one of the few places in the world where wood is the dominant material used in new-home construction—90% of homes built in 2019 were wood-framed, according to the National Association of Home Builders.
despite lumber shortage and wildfires, tornados and wood eating insects
Lumber is cheap, concrete is expensive. If the US were to switch to concrete, construction would become substantially more expensive everywhere in the world.
It’s not like you can’t use concrete in the US even if you want to. Commercial architecture and public infrastructure use it all the time.
London is an extremely old city. In the US, the older areas with older buildings like New York often have brick, but almost everywhere else, where most structures are less than a century old, they use alternatives. Most commonly this is lumber framing with exterior siding (either wood or plastic), interior sheet rock (“drywall”), with fiberglass insulation in between.
Used to have a really nice commuter rail that connected to the city, now there’s a six-lane highway that clogs up twice a day.
Welcome to the American dream nightmare.
Baltimore is this but somehow an entire city.
Chadbourn, NC is like this. My buddy drove over the train tracks too fast and it messed up his A/C for a while.
It’s the 1970s car friendly town - so car friendly noone wants to go there anymore, because there is nothing than car infrastructure and car pollution. It doesn’t have to be like this, take back your towns folks!
So once upon a time, America was a place where anyone could come to get a good job. In fact, if you were walking down the street in the middle of the day, someone would stop you and say, “Come work here, please.” Practically begging you to get benefits, a pension, and you could buy a house on your salary.
This is because manufacturing was a huge part of the post-WW2 booming American economy, they needed bodies to run the machines, and you didn’t have to know anything or be specially trained, you could just go in and start being productive on day one. Shows like Mad Men, where a bunch of men were sitting around, getting paid to think, that was far more rare than it is today. Most people did something in a factory or warehouse.
Then, international trade became increasingly cheaper. Then countries with poor human rights (ie slaves) were able to undercut companies who were using an American workforce to produce the same product. As execs cut costs to keep up, the workforce became more opinionated, some forming unions, which increased the cost of labor. So beginning in the 60’s and 70’s, they started moving all the manufacturing overseas to areas with cheaper labor. My parents were from Baltimore, they and their parents and everyone they knew had all worked at Bethlehem Steel at Sparrow’s Point (a mill producing steel) almost their entire lives. In the 70’s they started decreasing the workforce, then it got sold to a German company, who moved most of the operations overseas, and by the 90’s my grandparents were basically forced into retirement with a great pension and health insurance, as guaranteed by their union.
Oddly enough this is exactly what happened with the great recession in 2008: overseas companies started offering less-regulated investment opportunities, this put pressure on our own oversight to deregulate - which they did. Then American businesses started packaging more and more risky home loans (called sub-prime loans), and investors were buying them at prime rates because home loans were such a sure thing.
I remember from my life, in a suburb of DC, when a poor family moved into the neighborhood. They had habits that we were not familiar with, to put it politely, and they kinda stuck out like a sore thumb. They only lasted a few months, then got foreclosed on. Basically what had happened was there was pressure on banks for more home loans, so they started offering loans to people who couldn’t normally afford a house, and probably didn’t fully understand the implications of a home loan. The bank probably just told them “Free Money!” and they said ok. But then they couldn’t pay, and this happened so often everyone probably remembers something like this happening around that time.
So anyway, globalization has caused these small towns that used to house workers for a factory to become frozen. Usually around the time the mill closes or massive layoffs happen, workers will move to greener pastures, businesses that relied on them will close, leaving the town in whatever state it’s in. And that’s why you see so many towns exactly like what OP is describing.
I genuinely am interested. I assume this is for the US. Did houses get bulit with bricks in older days and why did they move away from it?
I live in europe an have only seen brick and cement Houses here
Cheddar actually made a good video on this topic. The US switched to wood during the postwar boom because it was faster and cheaper to build houses and buildings out of wood, because wood is abundant here.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/wpxLLCdW_Gc
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
People are missing an opportunity by not selling the gravel.
Did you just shit on pretty much the whole UK?
Nope, the American midwest. Most of my state is like this.
Would you classify your castles as “every building is bricks” or “random pile of gravel”?
I’m not British, but the vast majority of their buildings indeed seem to fall into either the “bricks” or the “gravel” category - not just castles.
All our houses are brick based. Source: own house in UK, made of bricks.
But don’t understand why it’s portrayed as bad here?
Yea imagine buildings being made of bricks and not match sticks
