A few interesting clips from USA Today (h/t Jetson Green):
Music to my ears! It wasn't going to work 10 years ago when it went crazy. Fascinating that people must learn the most mundane lesson by making the mistakes associated with them. Why the sea change?The scent of change is in the air in Maricopa, even in the way city officials talk. Words such as "bedroom community" have become dirty words. "Green," "sustainable," "walkable," "mass transit," "conservation," "open space" and "energy-efficient" punctuate the suburban dialogue.
"Absolutely, suburbs are not going to go away," says David Goldberg, spokesman for Smart Growth America, a national coalition of groups pushing for conservation and sustainable growth. "But the math is becoming very clear."
Until now, people were willing to drive increasingly far for a home they could afford. "Drive-till-you-qualify collapsed," Goldberg says. "It's done. It's not going to work as a housing strategy anymore."
So what is going to happen?"The trends that pushed housing demand toward distant suburbs and rural areas were not sustainable," says David Stiff, chief economist at Fiserv. "The problem is that it can be two, three, four times as expensive to develop in close-in neighborhoods vs. outlying neighborhoods, if there's any space at all."
If gas prices continue to climb or government provides incentives to build more densely and closer in, development patterns should evolve, planners say.
"People respond to economic incentives," Stiff says. "Reducing commuting costs, trying to be more environmentally conscious and trying to find the cheapest housing affect decisions simultaneously."
While I am extremely happy to see an article like this in a paper like the USA Today (the best indicator of Generica around), it scares me to think what else we won't get until we have to experience the bad for ourselves. For instance, say we wait for 10-15 more coastal cities to disappear? Then will we hear a lot of people say and print "the debate is over on climate change"?"We're sort of stuck with retrofitting the suburbs," says Scott Bernstein, head of the Center for Neighborhood Technology, which for years has urged that transportation costs be a criterion for mortgage qualification. "That's not all that bad. … There's nothing like a crisis to get people to try something."
Fresh ideas about development are spreading. A new website gives "walk" scores for more than 2,500 neighborhoods in the 40 largest cities (walkscore.com). Bernstein's group publishes a housing and transportation affordability index for 52 metropolitan areas (htaindex.cnt.org/).
Kenneth Himmel says now is "the perfect moment to be doing everything we're talking about."
The developer of the Reston Town Center in Virginia, the Time Warner Center in New York and City Place in West Palm Beach, Fla., says: "Some people will say, 'For $300,000 to $325,000, what are my options to live closer?' Maybe it's a smaller home. … Do they want to drive or do they want to be five or 10 minutes from their office? People will make the trade."
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