Posted on 03/14/2009 7:56:54 AM PDT by dennisw
The downturn accomplished what a generation of designers and planners could not: it has turned back the tide of suburban sprawl. In the wake of the foreclosure crisis many new subdivisions are left half built and more established suburbs face abandonment. Cul-de-sac neighborhoods once filled with the sound of backyard barbecues and playing children are falling silent. Communities like Elk Grove, Calif., and Windy Ridge, N.C., are slowly turning into ghost towns with overgrown lawns, vacant strip malls and squatters camping in empty homes. In Cleveland alone, one of every 13 houses is now vacant, according to an article published Sunday in The New York Times magazine.
Thirty-five percent of the nation's wealth has been invested in building a drivable suburban landscape, according to Christopher Leinberger, an urban planning professor at the University of Michigan and visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. James Howard Kunstler, author of "The Geography of Nowhere," has been saying for years that we can no longer afford suburbs. "If Americans think they've been grifted by Goldman Sachs and Bernie Madoff, wait until they find out what a swindle the so-called 'American Dream' of suburban life turns out to be," he wrote on his blog
So what's to become of those leafy subdivisions with their Palladian detailing and tasteful signage? Already low or middle-income families priced out of cities and better neighborhoods are moving into McMansions divided for multi-family use. Alison Arieff, who blogs for The New York Times, visited one such tract mansion that was split into four units, or "quartets," each with its own entrance, which is not unlike what happened to many stately homes in the 1930s.
Richard Florida, argues that dense and diverse cities with "accelerated rates of urban metabolism" are the communities most likely to innovate their way through economic crisis.
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
1) Equalize incomes, close the "gap" between rich and poor.
2) Drastically reduce carbon emissions, even if it means crippling the economies of the West,
3) End suburban sprawl, centralize human populations and let nature take back the outlying areas.
By setting in motion an economic crisis and by making "good use" of that crisis, these goals may all be achieved. I think it was all deliberate.
In the UK there is a war against the rural areas, one example being the Jiahd against fox hunting. A rough equivalent to the socialist war against our suburbs and independent travel in your automobile. You should be herded onto mass transit to save the planet
In California you have them bankrupting farmers via water deprivation in favor of salmon. And the EPA coming up with punitive dust rules on farmer's backs
Richard Florida is an Grade-A huckster.
That whole “creative class” BS was nothing more than a bunch of kids who were so high on their ability to use Photoshop, make glorified YouTube videos, and string together a lot of BS to make it sound important, that they thought they were God’s gift to wherever they moved. No practical skills in their whole group, unless sipping coffee and playing on Facebook is a skill.
Believe me, I know lots of these brats, and they still dont know whats heading their way. They are still in Obama party mode.
A dog that sick would be put down.
But that is one of the reasons for living in them. OK, I am not objective because I grew up in the country, tried to live in a city, and was miserable in one. But people who do not want to huddle enjoy living a decentralized life.
When the nearby city extended mass transit to one of its suburbs, the very first day the station opend, six cars were stolen from my sister's apartment building's lot. This is why people do not want anything to do with cities once they have adapted to suburbia or exurbia. The cities are filled with not-very-nice people. Bad people run them.
Bad people often run the suburbs also (Scum floats), but they are much easier to uncover and flush. The political machines are smaller and clumsier at hiding what they do.
Oh, and don't forget the perfect environment of blue skies, no disasters and pure untreated water.
Yah. And according to the WSJ this week there are a number of new high-rise construction projects in Seattle that just went idle. Talk about eyesores...
That's only half the story.
Liberals would hate suburb's anyway because they are a refuge from awful schools and loony diversity and the people tend to have high income and have green lawns
The leftist dream is to make suburban schools as bad as urban schools
To call it what the author really means; Take everyone, concentrate them in central dwellings, control every aspect of their lives for the “greater good”. It falls under the definition of Communism. No other way to put it.
I don't think it's irrelevant. Instead, it actually contradicts the point of the article. It suggests "City RIP" (or at the very least the housing market is over built).
A hearty thank-you to all of you who have reported in from the Burbs to refute this article.
Burbs are much better than cities but they are also inefficient. Our move to them over the last few decades since WWII has been haphazard. It would have been so nice and logical to have thought ahead enough to make them modular with a hub and spoke system of efficient mass transportation instead of tens of thousands of acres of moving parking lots we have dubbed as freeways.
There is a way to remedy the situation but it will not come from the dumocrats.
The key to the suburbs (assuming you don’t have a job *in* the suburb) is living at the “end of the line” of a mass transit system.
I live in a very outer suburb of SF and I love my BART commute to SF; I get a nice quiet hour to read. I’m thinking of moving to Northern Virginia and buying in a suburb there (better schools, for one thing), and again, buying near the very last Metro stop.
There’s no reason to do tons of driving just because you are in a suburb. And I don’t drive to shop; I use safeway.com and get all my groceries delivered to me.
“But people who do not want to huddle enjoy living a decentralized life.”
+1
Yes, this is a pile of doggie doo, for sure!
Oh, so he is from Toronto! I hope he was on the 51st floor in a 338 square foot condo when we had the massive Great Northeast Blackout a few years ago. No water (the pumps quit when the power goes off), no elevators, no air conditioning and no lights.
I hope he was in the same place on the coldest day in 2009 when we had a massive blackout due to a sprinkler pipe bursting and flooding one of the downtown hydro stations. Or in the building where the hydro exploded and everyone was put out of their homes for a couple of months and had to live in shelters or schools or wherever they could until the city got around to repairing the building (and when they came back, they found that teenagers from the community — later caught — had been in the *secure* building and looted it.
Yep, living jammed together in 60 story buildings with no view but other buildings, in a city where both power and water are problematical especially in winter is waaaaaay better than living on your own land with a yard and a view of the lake!
Feh.
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