Is America's suburban dream collapsing into a nightmare? - CNN.com: "Recent market research indicates that up to 40 percent of households surveyed in selected metropolitan areas want to live in walkable urban areas, said Leinberger. The desire is also substantiated by real estate prices for urban residential space, which are 40 to 200 percent higher than in traditional suburban neighborhoods -- this price variation can be found both in cities and small communities equipped with walkable infrastructure, he said.
The result is an oversupply of depreciating suburban housing and a pent-up demand for walkable urban space, which is unlikely to be met for a number of years. That's mainly, according to Leinberger, because the built environment changes very slowly; and also because governmental policies and zoning laws are largely prohibitive to the construction of complicated high-density developments.
But as the market catches up to the demand for more mixed use communities, the United States could see a notable structural transformation in the way its population lives -- Arthur C. Nelson, director of Virginia Tech's Metropolitan Institute, estimates, for example, that half of the real-estate development built by 2025 will not have existed in 2000.
Yet Nelson also estimates that in 2025 there will be a surplus of 22 million large-lot homes that will not be left vacant in a suburban wasteland"
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Fred Pilot sent this cheerful piece about how the American suburban dream died. Again.
1 comment:
Jack Lessinger in his 1990 book "Penturbia: Where Real Estate will Boom AFTER the Crash of Suburbia" got it half right. Lessinger predicted suburbia would suffer the declining fate discussed in this item. But based on this article, he may have called it wrong in forecasting a new migratory pattern would shift to the penturbs — small town America — and not urban centers. The motives: to avoid long commutes to work and a desire for lower real estate prices than in large metro areas.
Why did Lessinger turn out to be only half right? His premise was based on what in the early 1990s were seen as an emerging cultural ethic to abandon frenetic, consumption driven lifestyles in search of a simpler life. Instead, after the economy recovered in the late 1990s, just the opposite occurred. Also, at the time Lessinger wrote Penturbia, information technology was seen as a way of igniting a dispersed, information based economy that didn’t require most work to be located in centralized offices and factories. However, nearly two decades after the publication of Penturbia, America’s “last mile” telecommunications infrastructure in many areas of the nation Lessinger identified as the emerging penturbs is sorely lacking, with inhabitants limited to early 1990s era dial up Internet connections.
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