Is Suburbia Turning Into Slumburbia?

[flashl]

...fabled super cities, Richard Florida contends in his new book, "Who's Your City," are attracting an increasingly disproportionate number of educated, creative knowledge workers who fuel the economy. In turn, these folks are keeping housing prices relatively high despite recurring appearances of the R-word on our front pages.

The dark side of this surreality is that the places far from these hallowed urban cores are experiencing unprecedented decline and, according to some experts, threaten to become tomorrow's slums.

We're not talking about mean inner city streets getting meaner, we're talking about the pristine, newly built developments of four-bedroom, three-bath dream homes produced in the last housing boom becoming ghettos for the poor and the disenfranchised.

Slumburbia? After decades of middle class flight from the cities in search of safe neighborhoods and good schools — a flight that continues today even from gentrified cities like San Francisco — it's hard to conjure the image of a truly derelict suburbia.

...

"Over the last few decades we've structurally overinvested in fringe real estate," explains Christopher Leinberger, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institute and a former developer. "Builders are experts in overbuilding, in terms of cyclical overbuilding, like lemmings to the sea. But this time it's different. It's not just a cycle. It's going to take more than two or three years to recover from this."

Last fall, Leinberger published "The Option of Urbanism," a book about the changing sociology of the built environment. Like Florida, he sees the growing attraction to urban living as a matter of critical importance. This month, his essay in the Atlantic magazine provocatively asserts that McMansion developments would deteriorate into crime ridden, impoverished slums. In the piece he mentions several instances of suburban neighborhoods getting hit so hard by the recent downturn that they already exhibit the tell-tale signs of deep decline: Looters stealing copper pipe and siding from new homes, gunshots puncturing picture-perfect facades, squatters taking up residence in abandoned houses.

When asked if the edge suburbs are turning into slums, Florida concurs with Leinberger's ominous vision, "Yes, they are already well on their way," he says. "The knowledge workers can't afford the time cost, they can't afford the commuting time."

SFGate

[SoFlaJet]

1. my neighborhood

looks like a Police State all week...multiple Sheriffs cruisers every night Helicopters WTF is going on around here?

[Warpy]

2. My area is now the buffer zone between

a very posh area inhabited by professors and professionals and a part of town known as The War Zone. It's inner city and houses here are selling quickly as people try to downsize their heating bills and their commutes to work. The people in The War Zone who gave the area its name are now starting to move outward as the rental houses get sold to downsizers.

The houses in this town that aren't moving are the newly constructed monstrosities on the edge of town, all those dream houses that were snapped up by people who wanted to show that they'd made it and by out of state speculators, who accounted for a third of the sales of new construction during the height of the madness in late 2005. There isn't a single block in those areas that is free of the blight caused by a house that nobody lives in and nobody cares for any more.

Because I live in a transitional area, I hear the choppers and sirens all night, too, but I've always lived in weird areas (more space for the buck), so the racket just makes me feel at home.

I do see the outer ring of suburbs plus the exurbs that aren't being serviced by the new commuter rail line as becoming total slums as a dozen marginal workers occupy spaces that were designed for one yuppie couple and their maybe 2 rugrats.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

3. Back in the 1990s, left-wing Portland radio talker Joe Uris

was predicting that the McMansion developments were "the slums of the future."

I always liked him, but he's a better prophet that one would have thought.

[drexel dave]

4. We've already got suburban blight here in Ohio

and man, it's MUCH uglier than urban blight:

http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php/topic,12835.0.html