For an interesting look at housing and transportation costs around the United States, check out the Center for Neighborhood Technology's Housing + Transportation Affordability Index. After selecting a region, it becomes quickly obvious that city dwellers spend less overall (as a percentage of their total income) on housing and transportation than do suburban inhabitants. I imagine this is most likely due to the increased availability of mass transit in urban centers, which allows people to live without cars (thereby significantly reducing their transportation costs). Interesting stuff ...

A friend sent me a link to a wonderful article on Slate.com about back yards and children's play equipment. It made me think again about how my best memories of being outdoors as a kid are connected to nature: falling asleep in the grass on a hot day under towering oak trees, burying "treasure" in a back corner of the yard and digging it up the next summer, planting carrots with my dad, climbing trees, exploring my friend's farm to make sod houses or vegetable soup. Of course, I also remember learning how to do the monkey bars on the swingset and playing in the sandbox--both of which my dad built himself out of wood (in contrast to the garish "safe" plastic that so many playthings are made out of today). Here's a lovely quote from Michael Pollan, with some of the text from Tom Vanderbilt's column to give it context:

In his book Second Nature, Michael Pollan writes touchingly about a hedge of lilac and forsythia at his childhood home on Long Island, N.Y. To the adult eye, the hedges were simply flush against the fence. But he had his own secret garden, a space between the hedge and the fence. "To a four-year-old, though, the space made by the vaulting branches of a forsythia is as grand as the inside of a cathedral, and there is room enough for a world between a lilac and a wall."

"There is room enough for a world between a lilac and a wall." Beautiful, both as a turn of phrase and as a practice.