Housing & urban design – July 29

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Housing crisis hits exurbs hard
Michael B. Farrell, Christian Science Monitor
Home values have fallen 43 percent in Victorville, Calif., but the city has rebounded from previous slumps.
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… Victorville and other exurbs like it lie at the core of America’s mortgage meltdown. A year ago, it was America’s second-fastest-growing city (behind New Orleans) with a 9.5 percent surge between July 2006 and July 2007. Now, foreclosures have more than doubled in the county. New home prices in the city have plunged 43 percent.

But while new exurbs – those once fast-growing communities at the fringe of major metropolitan areas – will rebound much more slowly than traditional suburban and urban communities, housing experts say, city leaders here are more upbeat. They have one advantage: They’ve learned how to handle downturns, offering one model of survival for other exurbs reeling from the housing crisis.

“Places like Victorville that are on the edge of growth have seen boom and busts before,” says Hans Johnson, a housing expert at the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonprofit think tank. “There will be a recovery there.”
(25 July 2008)

Freeways give way to boulevards — slowly
Philip Langdon, New Urban News
Toronto is moving toward razing a jumbo suburban-style highway interchange. Seattle expects Washington State to tear down the massive, elevated Alaskan Way Viaduct. New Haven, Connecticut, is mobilizing to replace a short expressway with a boulevard, and Trenton, New Jersey would like to do the same.

As those four examples indicate, cities across North America are anticipating, and in some instances vigorously campaigning for, the razing of sections of limited-access highways. In their place, what are often envisioned are slower-moving traditional street and road networks…

…The benefits of expressway removals have been demonstrated in cities like Milwaukee and San Francisco. Demolition of Milwaukee’s Park East Freeway in 2003, a priority of John Norquist during his 15 years as mayor, has helped tie that city’s downtown area together and has set the stage for hundreds of millions of dollars of real estate projects…
(25 July 2008)

New houses are universally horrible, and eco-houses are the most horrible of the lot
Germaine Greer, The Guardian
Once upon a time, when most people in rural Ireland were poor, Irish houses were lovely to look at. They were horrible to live in, which is why when EU subsidies kicked in, everyone who lived in a whitewashed grass-roofed cottage, with a dungheap steaming before the door, knocked it down and built himself a hideous villa. Where the old cottage had been almost windowless and dark, what with the smoke of the peat-fire painting the interior brown as it curled its slow way through the thatch, the new villas had lots of glazing, doors, windows, porches and conservatories, and acres of hardstand. Because over the years he had grown sick of wading through mud and manure, the owner concreted all round the grand new house, and threw up balustrades and gate-posts in all directions.

In Italy, the peasants couldn’t wait to move out of their beautiful case coloniche and into the nasty new case popolari in the suburbs of the neighbouring towns. If they were ever aware of their damp stone houses with their heavy chestnut beams and terracotta floors as beautiful, they dumped beauty for comfort and convenience, and sold their old houses to fools like me who struggled for years to stop them falling down…
(28 July 2008)