Posted on 07/29/2004 4:10:33 PM PDT by Lorianne
Voting with their feet, boomers head back to the city. Jim and Marty Shannonhouse love the Carolina Panthers, but they don't bother with season tickets. On game days, they stroll from their Charlotte, North Carolina, home to the stadium in search of cheap seats. "If we can't find any, we go home, watch the game on TV, and leave the door open so we can hear the crowd roar," Jim says. Most days are equally relaxed: in the morning, he walks a few blocks to his office. In the evening, he and his wife saunter to bistros, ballet, and the symphony.
The Shannonhouses are part of a growing trend: 50-plus empty nesters are abandoning sprawling suburbs for pedestrian-friendly cities, towns, and planned communities.
In the past decade, affluent boomers and retirees have helped fuel major growth in the downtown populations of several cities. "The upper end of the downtown condo market is all boomers," says John McIlwain, a senior fellow at the Urban Land Institute. In the same period, town centers ringed with housing are popping up in big-city business districts, close-in suburbs, and new-urbanist, master-planned communities.
"Ten years ago, the concept of a town center was an anomaly," McIlwain says. "Now there's a significant trend toward the old urban retail style of parking your car, walking along the street to do your shopping, then going to a movie or a restaurant."
All those footsteps have major health benefits. Last year, a major study showed a link between sprawling, car-dependent areas and obesity and hypertension—one reason why a Manhattanite would be expected to weigh six to seven pounds less than an otherwise comparable adult living in Geauga County, outside of Cleveland, the most sprawling county listed in the report.
How can you tell if a community is walkable? Dan Burden, director of the advocacy group Walkable Communities Inc., has assembled a list of 12 requirements. His ambling essentials include a lively, compact town center with a good mix of stores; tree-lined, low-speed streets; and public space (a park or plaza) within 700 feet of a home. "Look for places that put people first, cars second," Burden says.
Owl_Eagle
" WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
DIVERSITY IS STRENGTH"
I was the pinhead that would never buy in the city. Congratulations.
Hah. Beat you. Bought a $300 K home in 2002, now worth $700 K.
As a Chicago resident, i can attest to this: Charlotte is not a city.
Sorry.
Its not real. The mentality in real estate is just like the stock market with tech stocks.
Actually, not if I sell.
Gee...and I though my 30% increase in 22 months was good....
Location, location, location.
People living where they want is social engineering?
Bulls**t. An AARP wet dream. The AARP is losing its membership base as boomers get fed-up with its Marxist social agenda. They claim everyone in the US over 50 is a member, as bold a lie as any ever told. They are panicing. They'd LOVE to see boomers head back to the city to rebuild the AARP power base. Ain't happening. We boomers are retiring to the small towns because we like it there.
I remember just before the boom in tech stocks a few years back, the quote that "trees don't grow up to the sky" was posted to FreeRepublic more than once.
Thank goodness for such foolishness on behalf of those who prefer pristine nature, peace and quiet.
NC is great for retirement but not IN the city. The small towns are great.
Double hah. How do you like $97,000 to $680,000? Of course, it took 20 years and we put up with a lot of Marion Berry in the meantime....
Your property values are going up dramatically because they are no longer the function of free market, but a government controlled housing market.
The government is issuing the permits for these projects,and by controlling what people are allowed to build, you'll find that pretty soon, no other type of develeopment can occurr. This will create areas with no families with children, because they are not suited to children. Also, because the government controlls the permitting process and how the structures are to be built you will see a homogenization occurring. All these areas, all these towns and cities will start to look alike, because individual expression does not fit into the city planners concepts. Finally, the purpose of these types of developments is to remove the freedom of mobility of citizens by making car ownership and travel so expensive and difficult, people give them up. Your planner are recreating the 19th century where people had to live over shops in crowded stack and pack style, and they had to take a bus or tram or train to get anywhere.
The fact that you have planners,and they are planning projects in the style of the soviet union, except with granite counter tops in the kitchen, should scare you, because they are bringing the soviet union to your town.
LOL...Mayor-for-life Berry?
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