Posted on 12/01/2011 6:32:21 AM PST by SeekAndFind
This past weekend the New York Times devoted two big op-eds to the decline of the suburb. In one, new urban theorist Chris Leinberger said that Americans were increasingly abandoning “fringe suburbs” for dense, transit-oriented urban areas. In the other, UC Berkeley professor Louise Mozingo called for the demise of the “suburban office building” and the adoption of policies that will drive jobs away from the fringe and back to the urban core.
Perhaps no theology more grips the nation’s mainstream media — and the planning community — more than the notion of inevitable suburban decline. The Obama administration’s housing secretary, Shaun Donavan, recently claimed, “We’ve reached the limits of suburban development: People are beginning to vote with their feet and come back to the central cities.”
Yet repeating a mantra incessantly does not make it true. Indeed, any analysis of the 2010 U.S. Census would make perfectly clear that rather than heading for density, Americans are voting with their feet in the opposite direction: toward the outer sections of the metropolis and to smaller, less dense cities. During the 2000s, the Census shows, just 8.6% of the population growth in metropolitan areas with more than 1 million people took place in the core cities; the rest took place in the suburbs. That 8.6% represents a decline from the 1990s, when the figure was 15.4%.
Nor are Americans abandoning their basic attraction for single-family dwellings or automobile commuting. Over the past decade, single-family houses grew far more than either multifamily or attached homes, accounting for nearly 80% of all the new households in the 51 largest cities. And — contrary to the image of suburban desolation — detached housing retains significantly lower vacancy rate than the multi-unit sector, which has also suffered a higher growth in vacancies even the crash.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Nothing more demonstrates the central planning focus of Leftists more than a discution of suburbia.
The idea that one might not want to live or work in a large, dense city irritates the hell out of them.
The “planners” won’t be happy until the working and middle classes all live in 1970s Soviet-style crackerbox high-rise apartments, walking or bicycling to work in the rain and snow, while they enjoy penthouses and fly to their country dachas on the weekends, hiking in the woods that once used to be a suburb. (We won’t be allowed in the woods, of course, only the nomenklatura will be. That wouldn’t be environmentally sustainable.)
}:-)4
“New Urban Theorist” Sheesh. It sounds like the name of a punk rock band...
Fancy name for Ghetto Dweller, AKA Community organizer.
The death of the suburbs was always some pipe dream of radical environmentalists and “creative class” residents of artsy city neighborhoods with a superiority complex.
If anything can kill them it will be the forced relocation of Section 8 residents into McMansions, “to make things fair”.
In your dreams, you acedemic wack job.
Most Americans don't want to be cooped up in densely packed, crime-infested, smelly, noisy cities.
Even those who live there would get out, if they could.
BS! Where I live (Buffalo area), its the opposite.
The urban core of cities like Detroit, Buffalo, Cleveland become hollowed-out, such that now people are applying to farm, raise chickens or keep bees in parts of these abandoned cities. The “urban core” is reverting to farmland, while the “suburbs” are the only areas still growing.
The clowns need to realize that its not their leftist fantasies that matter, but culture that drives how/where people live.
Only in their dreams.
I don’t want to live like a rat.
I think the suburbs expended too fast in the 2000s and the distant ones will suffer as a result of over supply. People aren’t going to move to the crime, but they will stay in the suburbs closer to town while the pop-up cookie cutter developments in the sticks has been and will continue to lose all of its value. In other words, the article is half right.
High energy prices affect the rural areas the most. They are notoriously conservative areas, why high energy prices are liked by the urban green/commie/statist.
They’ve been predicting this since 1978....
Just what we need—more victims for the gangs in Oakland & other cities.
It does! I bet a good percentage of the OWS mob has a New Urban Theorist degree.
New Model Army actually is a good band from the ‘80’s.
A the end of the vinyl record is them singing an old sea shanty that's not listed as one of the songs on the album.
Suburbs are in serious trouble. First with fuel costs expected to skyrocket, homes in the suburbs which necessitate long commutes are going to go unsold. This will only further dampen home prices. Enter the section 8 filth / welfare trash who will fill the void with their govt money. Then an explosion of crime and the collapse of quality of life will commence. This cycle has been occurring since 2008. Ignore it at one’s peril.
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