Suburbs to Slums - Orlando Sentinel: "Sprawl is just one more nail in economic coffin" [View All]

[El Pinko]

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Sprawl is just one more nail in economic coffin
Mike Thomas | COMMENTARY
May 1, 2008

Urban sprawl can ruin the environment and our quality of life. But could it also undermine our economy? There is growing sentiment among urban planners that cities are surrounding themselves with the slums of tomorrow. These are the outlying developments, many thrown up with reckless abandon during the housing bubble to feed speculator demand.

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A recent eye-opening piece in The Atlantic Monthly titled "The Next Slum?" picked examples of new subdivisions around Charlotte, N.C., Sacramento, Calif., and Florida's Lee County -- some with $500,000 homes -- falling into crime-ridden decay. As this happens, such developments bring in less tax revenue but require more services in the form of police patrols and code inspection.

Making matters worse, some demographic researchers think the current housing downturn simply exacerbates a long-term trend. As people age, they go from being homebuyers to home sellers. This means that with the impending retirement of the baby boomers, we are entering an era of more sellers in proportion to buyers. And the sellers will be selling suburban homes designed to raise children, while a growing percentage of buyers won't have children.

Arthur Nelson, director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, predicts a glut of 22 million "large-lot" detached homes by 2025, with large lot defined as one-sixth of an acre and up. Put another way: If we didn't build another house in the suburbs, we still would have too many of them 17 years from now.