When a city zones for sparse land uses, it's forcing people in other municipalities with no say in the decision to subsidize this choice.
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Despite what you may read, urban poverty is still a big problem, but the growing national interest in urban living has the potential to turn that around.
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Everything that used to be shiny and new in this town is now aging – not all of it well. This town, like nearly every other town of its vintage, is functionally insolvent.
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NIMBYs are responding to a set of very rational incentives. That presents a challenge for those of us who hope to alter the course of the Suburban Experiment.
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If it "doesn't make sense" for the people that live along a dead end road to pick up the cost of maintaining it, what does make sense?
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Does anyone think the folks in the $700,000 suburban homes would be living there in anything like their current circumstances if they had to pave their own roads and pump water up to their own homes? Does anyone believe these homes would be worth $700,000 without the heavily subsidized public infrastructure?
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Suburbia is a massive experiment, and millions of Americans are finding out that it doesn’t work.
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What if our goal wasn’t to build the most stuff in the shortest amount of time for the least amount of money?
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This suburb is a growing place, but it's not a successful place. It risks becoming an increasingly isolating place full of people who are cut off from the economic mainstream.
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Next time you want to label a town as 'family oriented' - don't just think about the young and middle-aged people that are able to depend on an automobile at a moment's notice. Ask yourself, would your 13 year old kid or elderly grandma with a walker have their freedom and be happy there?
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Ponder what life will be like following another decade or two of inversion, with society’s arrangements -- no longer able to be propped up by an expanding state. Consider an America where the affluent inhabit our core cities and the poor are left behind on our suburbanized outskirts.
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Toms River, NJ was built as a collection of convenient commodities and it will be discarded once it exceeds its usefulness.
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This week was all about the promise, the risk and the decline of big box stores in America.
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Although it’s tempting to picture packing up and leaving suburbia to peacefully degrade, we shouldn’t. We'd be missing out on the unique opportunities it provides.
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While the landscape of Westland remains predominantly suburban, projects like this are steps toward upcycling and intensifying obsolete developments: an important shift from our historical habits of build-and-abandon.
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Suburbia cannot and will not be retrofitted to a substantially different model of development. But a small portion may be salvageable.
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We treat big box stores as mines to be filled up and exhausted. Once depleted, we move on to design and build the next bigger mine, abandoning the former.
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Ferguson is trapped in a cycle of decline, not because of its people or even their poverty, but because it is designed to be that way. Failing suburbs are where the power shifts of our time are concentrating desperation and discontent. Sadly, Ferguson will not be an anomaly.
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Most American cities experience a modest, short term illusion of wealth in exchange for enormous, long term liabilities.
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Strong Towns member and Detroit native, Andy Walker, talks about the changes in Detroit over the last several decades and his hopes for the city's future.
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