The experience of cities during the 1950s through the ’80s suggests that the fate of many single-family homes on the metropolitan fringes will be resale, at rock-bottom prices, to lower-income families—and in all likelihood, eventual conversion to apartments….<\/p>\n
As the residents of inner-city neighborhoods did before them, suburban homeowners will surely try to prevent the division of neighborhood houses into rental units, which would herald the arrival of the poor. And many will likely succeed, for a time. But eventually, the owners of these fringe houses will have to sell to someone, and they’re not likely to find many buyers; offers from would-be landlords will start to look better, and neighborhood restrictions will relax. Stopping a fundamental market shift by legislation or regulation is generally impossible.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Which suburbs will avoid this fate? According to Leinberger suburbs and exurbs served by commuter rail—particularly those with walkable urban-ish centers (older suburbs with small retail strips in their “downtowns areas” or newer developments with “lifestyle centers”)—may buck the trend. But as gas prices continue to rise and more people choose walkable cities over car-dependent exurbs, the fate of McMansions will be sealed: they will become, Leinberger argues, “the new slums.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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I moved into the city here in Baltimore after I got the staff position at Space Telescope. I am within a short walking distance of work, two nice grocery stores, several drug stores, and some really nice restaurants. I seldom need to drive anywhere most days, unless I need to get something at the Home Depot or Sears. The rising cost of driving anywhere has cut into my lifestyle somewhat, since I love to do cross-country roadtrips. But it’s not critical, other then it drives the price of all the goods and services I buy up too and that’s more the problem for me then the cost of gasoline itself. No…I don’t have all the nice green space around me I did in the suburbs. But my neighborhood is very walkable. City life I’m finding, can be just as nice as life in the suburbs was.\n<\/p>\n
You want to cut this nation’s dependency on oil down? Mass transit isn’t going to do it. The cost of all the service to the entire sprawling suburbs necessary to make suburbanites want to use it will amount to about as much oil consumption as if people just drove their cars anyway. What is needed, is to make the cities livable, so people will move into them, close enough to work to walk it, or a short light rail or bus ride, and close enough to all their routine shopping, like for food, that they won’t need to drive nearly so much.<\/p>\n
The suburbs were heaven, but heaven wasn’t sustainable. They were only nice so long as most people lived in the cities and the roads weren’t jammed and the cost of gasoline wasn’t much. As the cost of gasoline keeps rising, the balance of population between the cities and the suburbs may go back to something more like what it was. But it will never be the middle class heaven it once was again. I don’t think they’ll turn into great swaths of slums either though, since so many working poor and poor people will still need to get to and from jobs and various city services and things and that means either driving or public transportation again and I just don’t see public transportation being that widely accessible in the sprawling suburbs. Public transportation will always make more sense in the densely packed cities then in the suburbs. I think the suburbs will eventually go back to being what they once were…either farmland or a place where the rich build their mansions.\n<\/p>\n
You can read Leinberger’s article, Here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I grew up in the suburbs…in various garden apartments my mom moved us to, as her employer relocated from time to time, and as her income level rose marginally. My earliest memories are of living in the city though, in Washington D.C. close to the Northeast freight yards. I used to watch the trains from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1212\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}