[sudosteph]

A few years ago, I spent a summer renting a 1 bedroom new build apartment in the south part of Seattle. The only outside light or fresh air came from a sliding door that overlooked an interior parking garage. It always smelled like fumes. Couldn't even see the sky from most angles. I was convinced after that that living conditions without access to fresh air and nature are probably one of the more potent causes of neuroticism in city-dwellers. Lack of AC didn't help either when it was hitting the 90s at multiple points that summer.

This is probably the one area that most cities in North Carolina excel at. We don't have great sidewalks or transit, but we have a ton a trees. Less than we used to though. But from my current apartment, I'm closer to seeing 300 trees than 3. The post-hurricane-Hugo effort to buy out houses in flood prone zones and turn them into greenways was probably the single smartest thing Charlotte and the surrounding towns have done (though I'm glad we got our light rail too - too bad for Raleigh). It's a good pattern - protects the natural watershed, gives wildlife a safe place to live, makes flooding less impactful, and creates pleasant away-from-road paths for walking and biking.

[chamomeal]

Greenville, South Carolina is also totally covered in trees. I think they have a bunch of laws that new developments have to plant trees, cutting a tree down requires planting multiple others nearby. The whole city is just covered in trees. Even in the suburbs nearby. It’s awesome.

MD has some replace-felled-trees law, but it’s kinda crappy cause trees can be planted somewhere else entirely. So a big development can be treeless.

[rigrassm]

I did a summer working with a traveling survey crew for pipeline work on the East Coast back in the 2010's. We started up north in Maryland and followed the pipeline south down to the North/South Carolina border.

Because we had to move to new sites further south every 3-4 weeks on average, we all had camper trailers and just hopped from campground to campground as we went. Towards the end we ended up staying at a campground near Mooresville NC and every day since we left that place I've wanted to go back.

It was so beautiful and quiet with so much history to explore and it left a huge impression on me. Might be time for me to actually pick up and go visit again.

Unrelated but there needs to be a guide given out to southerners visiting Maryland warning them to not call anyone under the age of 100 sir/ma'am... Might have just been bad luck with my encounters but I had a couple of people get very angry for calling them ma'am and it was so hard to undo a lifetime of defaulting to using those terms when talking to people I don't know lol.

[sudosteph]

Small world. I'm from the town directly south of Mooresville. I'm fond of the area myself. Traffic is pretty awful though.

[xattt]

> The post-hurricane-Hugo effort to buy out houses in flood prone zones …

Toronto completed a similar initiative after Hurricane Hazel in 1954. A number of neighbourhoods in valleys were not rebuilt after devastating flooding, and the city was left with wonderful green space, especially in the Don Valley. For me, it’s a “top 10” biking experience, to cross Toronto by bicycle along the trail system.

As an aside, it took a minute for me to parse the OP as I initially took it to mean some sort of infrastructure resiliency project (buying outhouses vs buying out houses).

(1) https://trca.ca/news/hurricane-hazel-70-years/