The next real estate boom: "New Villages," not sprawling ranch houses

[DeepModem Mom]

CNNMoney: The next real estate boom
Dense settlements, not sprawling ranch houses, are the future of housing - and could make for a smart real-estate investment.
By Chris Taylor, Business 2.0 Magazine senior editor
July 7 2006

SAN FRANCISCO (Business 2.0 Magazine) -- Picture the scene: it's 2025, and you and your family are living in a beautiful, leafy-green village that seems more 19th century than 21st, even though it has only been in existence for ten years and is just 20 miles from a major American city.

You know all of the 150 or so souls in the village; you see them at the market where you pick up a box of locally-grown produce once a week. You see half of them in the morning as they board the commuter train for school or work in the city; the other half are the network warriors who work from home or, on warm days, use the free Wi-Fi in the village square.

It all seems a world away from the crumbling old 20th-century suburbs people used to live in, if you could call it living. You shudder to think you could still be living there. Oh, and you see that really nice house just down the bicycle lane? That's yours, the fruits of your smart move to plunk down a payment on a piece of the hottest new trend in real estate.

Sounds like a far-off future? You can already see such a development opening up in Hercules, Calif., 20 miles northeast of San Francisco. And you can bet on seeing many more across the country if changing consumer desires and economic trends dictate the direction of the housing market.

"New Villages," as community planner Robert McIntyre dubs them in the latest issue of The Futurist magazine, are compact, pleasantly urban settlements located well away from city centers. They share some of the charms and amenities of cities, thanks to their density, but have the mostly rural surroundings that originally drew people out to the suburbs, as well as the friendly feel of a small town where you know your neighbors....

http://money.cnn.com/2006/07/07/technology/newvillages.biz2/index.htm?cnn=yes

[Joanne98]

1. I read about this in a magazine last year. Good idea!

[OwnedByFerrets]

2. It may be reality

it bushco has it way and destroys the middle class. All the poor and dissenters will be in concentration camps or pseudo gitmo's. The upper class will live in harmony......under the benevolent eye of Big Bother. :sarcasm:

[fasttense]

3. They have been touting this as the next big thing in housing for twenty

years now. About twenty years ago I was looking for a house to build and read how this was the biggest thing since sliced bread. Only some seriously high gas prices and much improved public transportation will ever make this successful. Americans love their huge cars too much.

[ixion]

4. for this to catch on, corporate 'Murika will have to lose it's fear of

telecommuting.

I guarantee it won't happen until that happens, because the whole point of living locally like that is to avoid commutes, IMO. Otherwise, it's jus t the suburbs with new packaging.

[undergroundpanther]

5. Corportations fear telecommunting

Because they can't dominate and control a workers every waking moment that way.

[ixion]

6. exactly

and they'll just have to let go.

[applegrove]

7. I think it sounds great. And people could invest in a windmill.

[Bamboo]

8. When snow falls in Celebration.

New urbanism has been around for awhile in Florida,architect Andres Duany lives in Florida but in a traditional suburb which is ironic.Seaside has been around twenty years,seems like CNN received a blinding flash of the obvious.

There are sprawl developments in Florida that have new urban sections for the upscale,this is what every development will have for the rest of the town to overrun on the weekend like a theme park.There are also "village shopping centers" which are designed to look like the old main street but painted sienna-the real color of money.Seems like the shape and color pallet of new urbanism will get tilted up in new villages and without the high ideals of new urbanism.

Celebration Florida has the same real estate turnover as anywhere else so the theory that new urbanism creates the cornerstone for community is suspect.It is a walkable community which is beneficial to health but a blog by a resident shows them with the same body shape two years after joining.The sellout of New Urbanism into New Villages suits Americans who sing hymns on the weekend and sin the rest of the week.

http://www.slate.com/id/2113107/slideshow/2113258