we aren't self-important and narcissistic enough yet

6/13/2006 7:59:17 PM

oh i beg to differ

people in raleigh have quite high opinions of themselves

they just live in a boring ass town with nothing to do but watch ACC basketball

6/13/2006 8:24:09 PM

the esteem of a city is directly proportional to the number of nicknames it has

6/13/2006 8:36:30 PM

6/13/2006 9:11:13 PM

Nicknames...

The big insulin.
The big barcode.
The big moderately difficult, but not too much.

6/13/2006 10:18:07 PM

Sir Wally World

6/13/2006 10:36:13 PM

^^^they stole our round clarion/holiday inn building and they stole nyc terrorists

6/14/2006 2:01:09 AM

you are the dumbest poster on this forum

a) holiday inns/clarions look like that all over the country
b) san diego's airport is literally downtown

6/14/2006 2:25:44 AM

someday you'll have a sense of humor.....you just wait

6/14/2006 2:28:29 AM

honestly, i thought you were being entirely serious

youre that fucking stupid

6/14/2006 2:30:50 AM

so you thought i thought planes were crashed into san diego skyscrapers?

6/14/2006 2:35:50 AM

they should totally like get rid of those skyscrapers and replace them with parking decks downtown

i abhor walking

6/14/2006 2:39:29 AM

they should tear them down and sod the whole area so the san diego residents will have a place to play flag football

6/14/2006 3:05:46 AM

nah they should just pave over balboa park instead, and then they should fill up the bay with concrete!

6/14/2006 3:42:00 AM

This guy is such a snide reactionary. I think a dot-com hipster raped his mom.

Quote :

"Ho-hum cities are blowing up New boom towns have the advantage of sustainable growth By JOEL KOTKIN THREE kinds of boomtowns have emerged in the last decade. The dot-com era created brainy, culturally savvy, "hip" cities such as Boston, San Francisco, Berlin, Montreal and Sydney. But they turned into very expensive places in which to do business and for the middle class to live. Low-cost cities became the new boomtowns after the bubble economy burst in 2000. Business and tech firms headed to Phoenix, Reno and Fort Myers, Fla., and other no-nonsense, middlebrow places. Now, the prospect of persistently high energy prices has fueled the latest wave of boomtowns, Rodney Dangerfield-like places that are finally getting respect — Calgary, Canada; Nagoya, Japan; Perth, Australia; Casper, Wyo., and Midland, Texas. Calgary, Canada's energy capital, is arguably North America's fastest-growing major city. Located near the vast oil sands of Alberta province, the city is deluged with thousands of new residents from throughout Canada and from around the world seeking jobs and opportunities. Although its low taxes and business-friendly environment made it a thriving city before the high energy prices, it's really booming now. Downtown Calgary is a déjà vu version of urbanity in its heyday. At a time when many cities — Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco, among them — are busily converting redundant office space into high-priced condos, Calgary's downtown has the lowest office vacancy rate — a paltry 1.7 percent, according to one estimate — of any North American city. More than a million additional square feet are planned for downtown and another million for the city's burgeoning suburbs. The big problem in Calgary is not finding a job but finding workers. From March 2005 to March 2006, the city added almost 45,000 full-time positions — about an 8 percent growth rate. The manpower shortfall is felt across Alberta. Calgary is exceptional, but other energy and resource-rich places are similarly benefiting from high energy prices. The Australian states of Queensland and Western Australia, for instance, are two such places. Both families and young singles are moving there and settling in such relatively affordable cities as Brisbane and Perth, long dismissed as cultural backwaters but now widely seen as offering a better shot at realizing the "Australian dream" of a single-family house and a bigger paycheck. Because commodities represent a smaller part of the U.S. economy, the boomtown phenomenon has been slower to emerge. Yet high oil prices have set off undeniable changes in such energy-producing areas as Wyoming, which sat at the bottom of income growth in the 1990s but is now getting richer faster than any other state. Two of its towns, Casper and Gillette, for instance, are filling up with workers from the rest of the country, as well as immigrants. Using new oil-exploration technology, wildcatters are reopening long-neglected fields in eastern Montana and in the Dakotas. Since 2000, Wyoming has enjoyed the fastest growth in personal income of any state, according to one survey. Such unlikely places as Montana, North Dakota, New Mexico and coal-rich West Virginia are not far behind. The job bases in these states and their region have expanded at rates greater than the national norm. The biggest obstacle to future growth, as in Alberta, Queensland and Western Australia, is too few skilled workers. Energy companies are scouring the industrial Midwest for welders, electricians, mechanics and other skilled blue-collar workers to keep the oil wells pumping. Alternative energies are driving economic boom times in the eastern edge of the Great Plains, where several new energy-producing projects have been built and many more proposed. In Fargo and Grand Forks, N.D.; Sioux Falls, S.D., and Omaha, the talk is about the growth of manufacturing jobs, rising farm prices — and ethanol, which is made from corn, as an alternative fuel for cars, as well as wind power, which the Great Plains possesses in abundance. Perhaps the biggest long-term winner in the energy sweepstakes will be Texas, where job growth has languished under the presidency of its former governor. Until recently, West Texas oil-exploration firms, said Midland oilman Mike Bradford, had held back from drilling because they feared the high oil prices would not last. Now they are convinced that the energy market has broken free of OPEC control and that prices will remain high. "We think high (oil and gas) prices are for real — and we're going nuts," said Bradford, who also sits on the Midland County Commission. Bradford said there were barely 100 houses available for sale in Midland, down from 500 about a year ago. Unemployment, once well above the national average, is virtually nonexistent. Office vacancy rates, near 50 percent a few years back, have dropped to about 10 percent. Houston may be the big city with the most to gain from continued high energy prices. Over the last decade, it relied largely on the huge Texas Medical Center, growing economic diversity, immigrant businesses and low housing costs to keep its economy running at close to the national norm. Energy's contribution to Houston's economy dropped from 82 percent in the 1970s to less than half today. But with energy firms returning to the oil fields, job growth this year may exceed 3 percent, roughly twice the national average, according to Houston Federal Reserve economist Bill Gilmer. The effects of high energy prices also have turned economies that specialize in developing technologies to overcome them into boomtowns. The most stunning example is Nagoya, the headquarters of Toyota and the de facto worldwide center for energy-efficient transportation. Toyota's hybrid engine, most closely associated with the Prius, is widely considered to have the inside track for the next generation of cars. For decades, the western Japanese metropolis paled beside the glitter of Tokyo. It was caricatured as a doughty, thrifty factory town — the center for the Japanese culture of "monozukuri," or making things. But even Tokyo economists refer to Japan's current economic expansion, based on energy-smart innovation, as "the Nagoya boom." Nagoya-based manufacturers account for roughly half the U.S. trade deficit with Japan. And as in the U.S., Canadian and Australian energy belts, there is a huge surplus of jobs, with 1.6 positions for every available worker. In light of the historical growth patterns of the energy industry, it would be foolish to identify these cities as long-term boomtowns. As any Houston real estate developer or wildcatter can tell you, energy-based growth can slacken, sometimes quite suddenly. Yet, whether in Japan, Australia or North America, the cities that flourish will be those that stick to the basics — producing goods and services for the global market, providing opportunities for middle-class citizens and a favorable environment for local businesses. This may be less appealing to some than the hipster mantra of the late 1990s, but it also is something infinitely more sustainable."

6/14/2006 11:36:40 AM

why?

because he failed to mention Raleigh?

The article was about energy, not biotechnology

6/14/2006 11:52:13 AM

BOOM TOWN!

6/14/2006 1:46:03 PM

i didn't read the article because the formatting of the page has been ruined by that absurdly wide picture

6/14/2006 5:43:23 PM

I apologize sincerely

I didn't mean for San Diego's skyline (which actually isn't even that great) to crowd the page

Im sure in 20 years or so, posting a picture of Raleigh's skyline might pose the same problem

6/14/2006 5:56:20 PM

WOW - what a shitty, poor excuse for a "city"

6/14/2006 5:58:21 PM

^^yeah, for as cool a city as san diego is...it has a lame skyline in comparison

6/14/2006 6:11:49 PM

well the airport is literally downtown, so buildings are capped at 500 feet thanks to the FAA- but there's a lot of talk about moving the airport away, and if that happens, the sky is pretty much the limit.

Sd's skyline may not have height, but it has a lot of density, and the east village near petco park is blowing up with condos that have already sold out before construction.

give San Diego 5 years and see what happens, it's already changed significantly in the last 2 years

unlike Raleigh, SD needs to densify, because the city is simply running out of room- it's not an artificially induced attempt to draw people downtown. 30,000 people actually live downtown in SD, and by 2020 the population is expected to be over 90,000.

I honestly think Raleigh is in the middle of an identity crisis and it needs to make up its mind as to whether it wants to be its own city or an anchor of the triangle.

6/14/2006 6:36:12 PM

please continue posting more pics. I'm enjoying them

6/15/2006 2:07:07 AM

my skyline in Jacksonville, FL

6/15/2006 7:30:20 PM

jacksonville is awful

6/15/2006 7:52:10 PM

Sydney


Dubai


Manilla


Miami


Singapore

6/15/2006 8:52:54 PM

6/28/2006 9:44:33 AM

hong kong is the shit

6/28/2006 10:01:10 AM

when did this thread turn into posting pictures of the largest cities in the world.

6/28/2006 11:42:42 AM

skyscraper envy

6/28/2006 11:54:58 AM

to remind people what a skyline actually is since Raleigh doesnt have one

6/28/2006 11:56:55 AM

6/28/2006 12:17:02 PM

I have some really good friends that moved up to boston
i want to go up there and visit w/ them sometime

6/28/2006 2:38:13 PM

i thought boston was nice when i went up there. the bridge that is lit up purple at night is awesome. the roads kind of suck
though (especially in South Boston), and there was some work being done all around downtown on the roads at the time,
making it hard to get around sometimes, but it was definitely manageable, unlike say NYC. NYC though has a grid type
layout that makes it a little more navigable. we ended up on one road in Boston that ran along the water, and it was a
worse ride than most dirt roads i've been on. the Jeep Cherokee we were in was jumping up and down. in Boston roads will
merge out of nowhere, sometimes there weren't even any lines for the lanes, and who the hell makes 2 and 3 lane
roundabouts? that's one scary experience going from the inside lane all the way to the outside lane in a 3 lane
roundabout, especially with the so called worse drivers in the nation according to that regional study someone posted on
here before.

[Edited on June 28, 2006 at 4:46 PM. Reason : ]

[Edited on June 28, 2006 at 4:47 PM. Reason : ]

6/28/2006 4:45:10 PM