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This is how the suburbs die
The Week ^ | 1/21/206 | Michael Brendan Dougherty

Posted on 03/01/2016 10:15:16 AM PST by ek_hornbeck

In 1974, corporate behemoth GE moved its headquarters from Manhattan to the suburban Fairfield, Connecticut. Last week, it announced that it was leaving Fairfield for Boston's waterfront district. And as GE goes, it has people wondering whether the suburbs are going to lose their economic lifeblood.

Mad Men reminded us that mid-century advertising executives worked in the heart of Manhattan, but slowly began their retreat to the burbs as crime exploded in New York City. The corporate offices followed them and their growing families in the 1970s and 1980s.

(Excerpt) Read more at theweek.com ...


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Culture/Society; US: Connecticut; US: Massachusetts
KEYWORDS: crime; demography; suburbs; surburbia; trends; zoning
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The elite in our culture have almost always viewed the suburbs with some contempt. They are places scrubbed of physical danger at the cost of mediocrity, soulless consumerism, and despair. Further, the suburbs are now widely-condemned as the moral and policy expression of racism; created to accommodate white flight and to further impoverish blacks. The view that the suburbs are a moral and political hazard is seeping down.

And so what we are seeing in America seems to be a shift to more European model, of fantastically wealthy cities and increasingly–slummy suburbs

It's hard not to notice the trend: inner cities get gentrified, people from the slums relocate to cheaper suburbs where they can recreate the problems of the inner city. Meanwhile, working and middle class Americans who can't afford to relocate to the high-end gentrified districts get their neighborhoods destroyed by people from the city slums.

1 posted on 03/01/2016 10:15:16 AM PST by ek_hornbeck
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To: ek_hornbeck

To buy my 275K house in Apex NC it will now cost you 450-525K. I’m sitting on my suburban investment!-)


2 posted on 03/01/2016 10:19:05 AM PST by Harpotoo
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To: ek_hornbeck

This has moving in this direction for approx. 30 years. It is not surprise to people who have been paying attention. The suburbs will be the new ghettos.

The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City
http://www.amazon.com/Great-Inversion-Future-American-City/dp/0307474372


3 posted on 03/01/2016 10:22:21 AM PST by Lorianne
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To: ek_hornbeck

> [suburbs] are places scrubbed of physical danger at the cost of mediocrity, soulless consumerism, and despair. Further, the suburbs are now widely-condemned as the moral and policy expression of racism; created to accommodate white flight and to further impoverish blacks.

What a load.


4 posted on 03/01/2016 10:22:38 AM PST by Ray76 (Judge Roy Moore for Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States)
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To: Harpotoo

Prices go up .. and they go down.
Maybe not right in your particular neighborhood, but ones nearby can change pretty quickly ... 10 years or so. And that affects a larger area.


5 posted on 03/01/2016 10:24:24 AM PST by Lorianne
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To: ek_hornbeck

The suburbs are the slums of the future.

They are only getting older, they were built poorly and quickly to begin with and wont age well. They have low ceilings are were built too close together with almost no character or some character repeated 1000 times over within a few blocks.


6 posted on 03/01/2016 10:24:44 AM PST by TexasFreeper2009 (You can't spell Hillary without using the letters L, I, A, R)
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To: ek_hornbeck

Here we clearly see an example of a DEMOCRAT governor and decades of a democrat supermajority legislature destroying business.

Suburbia or not doesn’t matter. This is hardly an example of the point the article is trying to make. Liberal policy is at fault here.


7 posted on 03/01/2016 10:24:56 AM PST by Travis T. OJustice (I miss my dad.)
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To: ek_hornbeck
The company from which I retired (Weyerhaeuser) moved from the city of Tacoma to a rural part of King County Washington in the early 70’s. The reason was more space for their growing headquarters AND affordable housing for the families (key word: families) that worked there. Without these suburban neighborhoods, it would be hard to get operations talent to re-locate there upon promotions

In 2015 they announced they were leaving that HQ and would build a new one in downtown Seattle. The reason? The once mighty brick and mortar forest products is now essentially a financial business managing only forest lands as a REIT. They said a metropolitan city is where the talent is. The new building will have only 40 or so parking spaces. Who knows how many bike racks. I doubt few working there will be family people, rather than childless urban people.

8 posted on 03/01/2016 10:27:37 AM PST by llevrok (To liberals, Treason Is the New Patriotism)
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To: ek_hornbeck

They’re conflating two distinct things here: businesses moving back to the cities, and residents. I live on the San Francisco Peninsula, in between “the City” and the Silicon Valley. For all the hype about how vibrant the economy in San Francisco is, everyday in the morning there is a massive stream of traffic heading south out of the City towards the suburban Silicon Valley. Real estate in the City is crazy, but in relative terms, it’s worse in places like Palo Alto.


9 posted on 03/01/2016 10:31:41 AM PST by Behind the Blue Wall
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To: ek_hornbeck
Meanwhile, working and middle class Americans who can't afford to relocate to the high-end gentrified districts get their neighborhoods destroyed by people from the city slums.

Yep, I grew up in blue collar suburb and have seen it change from a bedroom community to being peppered with "section 8" apartments and flooded with cheap heroin from Mexico.

10 posted on 03/01/2016 10:33:19 AM PST by Prolixus (Proud to be on Hillary's "Enemies List")
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To: ek_hornbeck

It’s the age and condition of the houses and buildings.

1st ring suburbs are now pretty old and are falling apart.
3rd ring suburbs still have new developments being built and are rather expensive.
Inner city areas that have been torn down and replaced or have been totally remodeled are also pretty expensive.


11 posted on 03/01/2016 10:33:31 AM PST by toast
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To: ek_hornbeck

Apparently, all of these people with millions to throw around in elections aren’t being taxed NEARLY enough. I guess this will be one of the many things they can expect to lose - like “Foundation” loopholes hidden by tax-exempt status, money in overseas accounts, etc.

No wonder they are all freaking out. They may have to end up paying their actual fair share - not what they put on paper to the IRS.


12 posted on 03/01/2016 10:36:49 AM PST by mabelkitty
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To: ek_hornbeck

Suburbs are white and Obama is determined to destroy them by importing minority poor through his proposed affirmative housing Hud rules.


13 posted on 03/01/2016 10:38:17 AM PST by steel_resolve (And an angel still rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm)
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To: ek_hornbeck
How the cities will die: self driving automobiles, government pension system implosion, increasing difficulty in importing third worlders to pay high taxes.

the high-carbon lifestyle of the suburbs / the lower-carbon lifestyle of mass-transport living in big cities

This libtard lie can be easily disproven simply by price, which is an extremely accurate proxy for total energy consumption. If government transportation were at all energy efficient the government wouldn't have to pay 90% of the fare cost to get people to ride it.

The reason it costs thousands of dollars per month to rent a tiny apartment in a big city is because the energy consumption and pollution output to build and maintain vertical steel and concrete real estate is off the charts.

The real reason they want to herd us into the cities is because the higher the population density, the more socialist the voters. This is a leftist plot by the Democrat Central Planning Committee. If not for massive third world immigration the Democrat party would have already gone extinct.

14 posted on 03/01/2016 10:40:04 AM PST by Reeses (A journey of a thousand miles begins with a government pat down.)
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To: ek_hornbeck

The reason G.E.went to Boston is the same reason Lockeed-Martin-Sikorsky will leave as well as General Dynamix Dlectric Boat.

The Taxes are too damned high.No amount of state subsidies will keep those companies in Connecticut,and Connecticut can’t afford it (Subsidies)any longer.

The governor,Dannel Malloy just reported that the States budget is blown and their finally going to have to cut the number of highly paid employees.

The State has also found that the income tax is out of balance and they’re not collecting as much from the high income people because the stock markets are terrible and these same people are fleeing the state for greener pastures.

It looks like the people of Connecticut made their beds.Now their going to have too lay in them.That is after they work like a dog to pay off Connecticut’s debt.


15 posted on 03/01/2016 10:40:33 AM PST by puppypusher ( The World is going to the dogs.)
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To: ek_hornbeck
created to accommodate white flight and to further impoverish blacks

How does not having white people around "further impoverish blacks"?

16 posted on 03/01/2016 10:41:09 AM PST by Jim Noble (Diseases desperate grown, are by desperate appliance relieved, or not at all)
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To: ek_hornbeck
This is how the suburbs die

They tax, spend and cater to public unions like big city democrats?

17 posted on 03/01/2016 10:41:13 AM PST by 2banana (My common ground with terrorists - they want to die for islam and we want to kill them)
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To: puppypusher
I've never lived in Connecticut, but I grew up across LI Sound and must have driven from the MA line to the NY line 500 times in my life.

It's incredible what's happened to Connecticut in such a short time. It used to be a beautiful, somewhat snooty liberal Republican state with a lot of nice little towns. The whole state is now a ghetto.

I'm sure the businesses that fled NYC to Fairfield County are leaving now because of drugs and crime.

18 posted on 03/01/2016 10:46:09 AM PST by Jim Noble (Diseases desperate grown, are by desperate appliance relieved, or not at all)
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To: ek_hornbeck

“They are places scrubbed of physical danger at the cost of mediocrity, soulless consumerism, and despair.”

I saw some of that despair right around the time Obama was sworn in back in 2009. I was still seeing it in 2013 and while it appears to have been on the wane, it still has enough momentum behind it to come back on the rebound.


19 posted on 03/01/2016 10:47:29 AM PST by equaviator (There's nothing like the universe to bring you down to earth.)
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To: Jim Noble

“It used to be a beautiful, somewhat snooty liberal Republican state with a lot of nice little towns. The whole state is now a ghetto.”

Not true.If you stay the hell out of the major cities or their immediate suburbs you’ll find a lot of nice civilized communities that you can escape to but the taxes are becoming intollerable.The state taxes you on everything.We’re lucky they haven’t figured out a way to tax the air we breath.


20 posted on 03/01/2016 10:53:51 AM PST by puppypusher ( The World is going to the dogs.)
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