The American Suburb Is Bouncing Back - Forbes.com: "Nationwide, existing home sales--predominately in the suburbs--have been on the rise for the last few months. The strongest growth is occurring in Sunbelt markets in Arizona, Nevada and Florida, as well as in California. These places experienced some of the greatest surges in prices, which forced many buyers to turn to subprime and interest-only loans.
These loans are largely not available today, Guerrero notes. Instead of financial quackery, lower prices--sometimes as much as 50% below peak--are allowing new buyers to buy affordably. In 2007, Inland Empire median house prices were roughly seven to 10 times the average annual income of potential buyers. Now they are settling close to the historic norm of three times."
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As Kotkin points out, the academic anti-suburban types will lament this.
3 comments:
I don't understand the "anti-suburban" types. After all, if they want to live a block from a Starbucks then they can follow their dream. By the same token, why should they care if the vast majority of folks have no desire to live a block from a Starbucks?
Even more appalling is the elitism by which the "anti-suburban" types believe that their view as to how people should live should be applied to anyone but themselves. Otherwise, why shouldn't the "suburban view" be just as valid and be used to prohibit the "anti-suburban" types from living anywhere except suburban areas?
Surely there is a middle ground between urban living and uncontrolled sprawl. I've lived most of my life in the suburbs, but I've been persuaded that our current development trends come at too high of a cost: http://www.myregion.org/Default.aspx?tabid=204
We'll see how long this survives as gas prices and commodity prices reset to something normal again. Fact is that sprawl is a very expensive way to develop that will be priced out by infrastructure costs, construction material costs and our future of higher gas prices. The original American city was very dense. Early government efforts at economic development -- transit, passenger and freight railroad subsidies, water treatment plants -- did not interfere with that. Later government efforts however fought that actively with zoning codes, density limits and heavily subsidized streets and utility line extensions. With the permanent fiscal crisis now facing government, presumably we'll be going back to the old way of doing business, and large lots in the desert won't be economic.
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