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The Decline Of Suburbia? (video and text)
CBS News
Experts Predict Exodus From Far-Flung Neighborhoods Back To Urban Living
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… Sixty years ago, cheap gas and new highways helped fuel suburbia’s rapid rise, creating a new American utopia. But as CBS News correspondent Ben Tracy reports, the triple threat of falling home values, empty nesters returning to the city and sky-high gas prices is driving suburbia to the brink.
Some developments are left half built while other homes look abandoned. Demand for suburban housing is dropping so fast that a recent study predicts that by 2025 there will be a surplus of 22 million large-lot homes in suburban areas.
… It sounds hard to believe, but some experts are now predicting that this could be the beginning of the end of suburbia — that far-flung neighborhoods could be tomorrow’s slums.
Author James Howard Kunstler has been predicting the decline of the suburbs for more than 15 years.
“I think the project of suburbia is over,” he says.
Kunstler says housing far away from job centers won’t survive.
(7 August 2008)
Gas Prices Apply Brakes To Suburban Migration
Eric M. Weiss, Washington Post
… Cheap oil, which helped push the American Dream away from the city center, isn’t so cheap anymore. As more and more families reconsider their dreams, land-use experts are beginning to ask whether $4-a-gallon gas is enough to change the way Americans have thought for half a century about where they live.
“We’ve passed that tipping point,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters said.
Since the end of World War II, government policy has funded and encouraged the suburban lifestyle, subsidizing highways while starving mass transit and keeping gas taxes much lower than in some other countries.
Americans couldn’t wait to trade in the cramped city apartments of the Kramdens and Ricardos for the lush lawns of the Bradys. Local land-use policies kept housing densities low, pushing development to the periphery of metropolitan regions and forcing families who wanted their dream house to accept long commutes and a lack of any real transportation choices other than getting behind the wheel.
Even the way the government pays for roads and transit is dependent on gas taxes, which is effective only if Americans keep driving.
“There is a whole confluence of government policies — tax, spending, regulatory and administrative — that have subsidized sprawl,” said Bruce Katz, director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. A gallon of gasoline costs more than $8 in Britain, Germany, France and Belgium, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Much of the price difference is due to higher taxes.
Federal spending is about 4 to 1 in favor of highways over transit. Today, more than 99 percent of the trips taken by U.S. residents are in cars or some other non-transit vehicle, largely as a result of decades of such unbalanced spending.
(5 August 2008)
The Future of Shopping Malls: An Image Essay
Morgan Greenseth, WorldChanging
Mall culture in the United States — at least as we know it — is coming to an end. Last month, the fall of Steve & Barry’s became the next addition to a series of recent retailer bankruptcies we’ve been witnessing across the nation. This trend is likely to continue, as the U.S. economic downturn causes people to reduce their trips to stores and to shop less, forcing more shops to close and leaving malls deserted.
… Deadmalls, a site dedicated to these failing malls, tracks closings and developments, and even allows you to locate malls that are dying in your own town.
As malls across the country start to fade into obsolescence, what is to become of these massive structures? After spending some time searching out the most creative alternatives to abandonment and massive landfilling of these former monuments to chain-store consumerism, I’ve found that the future of shopping malls is hopeful and creative:
(6 August 2008)
Today I took my first trip to the nearby mall in about five years. “Are there always so few people?” I asked my wife. The sales people were very happy to see us. -BA
