Why Suburbs May Become the Next Slums

[marmar]

via AlterNet:



Why Suburbs May Become the Next Slums

By David Villano, Miller-McCune.com. Posted February 18, 2009.

The poor are fleeing our cities, but life is not always greener in the suburbs, even when affordable housing comes with a two-car garage.



The financial meltdown has produced a vast patchwork of foreclosed and abandoned single-family homes across America, accelerating the decades-long migration of our nation's poor from cities to the suburban fringe. In 2005, as rising property values reduced affordable-housing stock in inner-city neighborhoods, suburban poverty, in raw numbers, topped urban poverty for the first time.

The trend will continue. By 2025, predicts planning expert Arthur C. Nelson, America will face a market surplus of 22 million large-lot homes (a sixth of an acre or more), attracting millions of low-income residents deeper into suburbia where decay and social and geographic isolation will pose challenges few see coming.

"As a society, we have fundamentally failed to address our housing policy," said Nelson, director of metropolitan research at the University of Utah. "Suburbia is overbuilt and yet we will keep on building there. Most policymakers don't see the consequences, and those who do are denying reality."

Nelson and others warn that suburbia's least desirable neighborhoods - aging, middle-class tract-home developments far from city centers and mass transit lines — are America's emerging slums, characterized by poverty, crime and other social ills. Treating those ills is complicated by the same qualities that once defined suburbia's appeal — seclusion, homogeneity and low population density. "We built too much of the suburban dream, and now it's coming back to haunt us," Nelson said.

To be sure, the low-income drift to suburbia has less to do with bucolic appeal and more to do with economics. Over the past two decades, the gospel of urbanism has spread though the American mainstream, Nelson and others argue. The young, the affluent, the professional class and empty-nesters are reclaiming the urban living experience — dense, walkable, diverse, mixed-use neighborhoods in and around city centers — while the poor disperse outward in search of cheap rent. Low-income residents often subdivide suburban homes, sharing them with multiple families. Studies reveal that population densities in suburban neighborhoods increase two to four times when low-income families replace the middle-class, Nelson said. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/story/127395/why_suburbs_may_become_the_next_slums

[musiclawyer]

1. Has already happened--see, Stockton,. CA

One big slum, save for the University of the Pacific, which would get the hell out of there if it could. Anyone with money who has to work there moves to a gated community on the outskirts or drives 45 minutes to the foothills.

People rag on Oakland all the time. But Oakland's slum (East Oakland) is getting smaller and smaller all the time. It will probably be gone in a generation, gentrified and replaced by people with money who can afford to live in the Bay Area.

I'm sure you folks in other parts of the country have analagous stories.

[tama]

2. End of suburbia

there's a movie about it. Its predictions coming true allready.