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The Next Slum and the New Green City
Alex Steffen, WorldChanging
We’ve written before about the idea that suburbs are the slums of the future. … a great Atlantic essay you should sprint to get your hands on:
Arthur C. Nelson, director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, has looked carefully at trends in American demographics, construction, house prices, and consumer preferences. In 2006, using recent consumer research, housing supply data, and population growth rates, he modeled future demand for various types of housing. The results were bracing: Nelson forecasts a likely surplus of 22 million large-lot homes (houses built on a sixth of an acre or more) by 2025-that’s roughly 40 percent of the large-lot homes in existence today.
… But what about the suburbs we leave behind in our wake as we create these green and gleaming cities?
“The ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st century’s frontier.” The decline of sprawl of written: the kinds of demographic and cultural shifts we’re seeing are unlikely to reverse themselves, and even without carbon pricing, oil is going to continue its march towards the sea of in-affordability. It’s what we do with the ruins left behind that’s interesting.
Might the next generation’s suburban pioneers (the Berliners call their urban pioneers taikonauts, a word I like) find ways of taking the housing bubble sprawl housing that today sits rotting on its cul-de-sacs, and making something extraordinary out of it?
I’m often asked to suggest topics for competitions and charrettes and such. Sustainability retrofits for low-income abandoned sprawl would be a damn fine place to apply some wild creativity.
(11 March 2008)
The essay recommended by Alex Steffen is online now: The Next Slum? by Christopher B. Leinberger.
California Needs More Urban Density
Robert Cruickshank, California Progress Report
David Lazarus is showing to Southern Californians what Bay Area readers already knew: the man really understands the problems facing working Californians, and is not afraid to write about them directly and engagingly. In January he took on Prop 13 and called for it to be revamped, if not scrapped. Today he has shifted his focus to the struggles renters face in LA.
As any of us who have lived in the area realize, rents are nearly unaffordable in the urban center of LA – the place where it’s easiest to live without a car. Lazarus opens his column with the story of a single mother who makes $38K as an admin assistant and who can only afford a rental way out in Lancaster. This is a familiar story to me – I know a LOT of Californians who make a similar commute. And as oil prices soar toward $4/gal, it is becoming more difficult for working Californians to get around.
For the last few decades, Californians have been told the solution is more of the same – more sprawl, more freeways, more commuting. The obvious solution – to build more housing in the urban core – is opposed by those who believe, as a USC professor lamented in Lazarus’ column, “density is a four-letter word.”
Lazarus helps explain why the anti-density movement is blocking what I described last summer as the redefinition of the California Dream for the 21st century – that unless we invest in greater urban density, we will inscribe inequality permanently on the urban landscape.
For example, one of the major obstacles to affordable rental housing construction in the urban core is the archaic parking requirement:
(10 March 2008)
Cities on the edge of chaos
Deyan Sudjic, The Observer
It is one of the most seismic changes the world has ever seen. Across the globe there is an unstoppable march to the cities, powered by new economic realities. But what kind of lives are we creating? And will citizens – and cities – cope with the fierce pressures of this new urban age? Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum and author of a major new report, asks if the city of the future will be a vision of hell or a force for civilised living?
(8 March 2008)
SUVs Without Wheels
Stan Cox, Common Dreams
The financial industry is suffering convulsions because it gave too many people too big an answer to the question, “How much house can I afford?” But in looking over the mess left by the popped housing bubble, another question comes to mind, one of much greater consequence in the long run: “How much house can the planet afford?”
Since 1990, construction of supersized homes of 3,000 square feet or more has doubled, to 24 percent of new homes. Combine that with the shrinking size of the American family, and the result is that average floor space per person has grown by three times since 1950.
As the heavy-breathing real estate market reached its zenith, square-footage mania spread from the suburbs into cities, mutating into a doubly wasteful disease: teardown fever. Normal-sized, sound, comfortable houses were demolished to free up urban lots for the biggest, flashiest structures that could be squeezed in.
Stan Cox is a plant breeder at the Land Institute in Salina, Kan., and author of “Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine,” a book to be released later this month.
(13 March 2008)
