Slumburbia

Carol Lloyd in the San Francisco Chronicle picks up on the connection between suburbanization and the mortgage/financial mess:

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 ...

This week RealtyTrac released new foreclosure numbers about cities that were hit the hardest in February.  Stockton, with nearly 5 percent of all its households at some stage of foreclosure, got the honor of ringing up the second-highest foreclosure rate nationwide, after Cape Coral-Fort Myers, Fla. Other sprawling California regions dominated the list: Modesto at No. 3, Merced at No. 4, Riverside-San Bernardino at No. 5, Bakersfield at No. 7, Vallejo-Fairfield at No. 8 and Sacramento at No. 9 ...

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." ...Florida and Leinberger say that retooling the suburbs is going to make urban renewal look like a walk in the park. "Suburb development is really fragile," Leinberger explains. "It's going to be very complex to rebuild."

Your thoughts?

Comments

[RWB]

This is not a new phenomenon. After the S&L crisis, many overbuilt suburban neighborhoods decayed into slum-like areas. These were mainly suburban apartments. Also, in Houston, after the oil bust of the 80s, many distant suburban neighborhoods decayed. At this point, they have mostly come back (not surprisingly), but there were some scuzzy neighborhoods with abandoned houses and apartments. And in Houston, some of these suburban areas remain slum-like (for example, Greenspoint, aka "Gunpoint", in the far north end of Houston). The current mortgage crisis combines features of both of the previous two--a collapse of a bubble, and a financial system collapse.

[hayden fisher]

But today's crisis is not a crisis but a tectonic shift in culture signaling the rise of the new creative class. Suburbia is dead even though we can still observe its spasms; the decaying process will be ugly. Let's hope we have the sense to euthanize certain segments along the way in lieu of attempting to ignore the obvious and throw more good money after bad.

[Zoe B]

The Smart Growth urban planning community is talking now about the need to rebuild suburbs. Among other things, they suggest the redevelopment of 'greyfields', i.e. large areas covered with asphalt, such as you might find in derelict malls, into centers of residential density. The recent Smart Growth meeting highlighted the fact that a big federal transportation bill is due to be passed in 2009. If we want to stop subsidizing sprawl and move more resources into public transit (a la Leinberger), this is a good focus for communal efforts.

[Michael Wells]

The underlying assumption here about suburbs is that there was nothing there before, just unused land that got bulldozed and built. But in California's Central Valley where most of the towns mentioned are located, they're paving over some of the world's richest farmland, bulldozing working orchards and row crops. If we wonder why fruit & vegetables now come from South America, this is part of the reason, we're destroying our farmland.

The Valley towns were also self-sufficient working communities, many a century or more old. They became suburbs/exurbs when people became willing to drive 80-100 miles to work in order to be able to buy houses. In many cases like Modesto, the local culture and economy have been decimated.

And yes, the working class neighborhood I grew up in is tending to slumhood, and if the commuters can't afford to make the trip or lose their houses to foreclosure, it will very likely slide into poverty and crime/drugs.

[Wendy]

In some cities, there is pressure to build residential on industrial or other types of employment lands. It seems in some of these places -- the California towns in particular -- we could see the reverse.

If some neighborhoods revert to industrial land, or agricultural land (with attached packing and processing), perhaps it will create the jobs to anchor a community and thereby save the other residential areas of town?

Will employers looking to attract more of an industrial or service economy workforce seek out these places, for their affordable real estate for workers and perhaps therefore less expensive labor force?

[Michael Wells]

Wendy,

Big questions. In Portland, which I think has done it mostly right, there's zoning to protect industrial uses from housing, the opposite of many cities. So new light industry and commercial uses are developing close to the city center. I have a friend who moved his business about 6 blocks from a now gentrified retail street to an industrial area, was able to buy a building 3 times as large and make money on the deal. And Portland is bucking the national trend away from manufacturing by adding jobs, and has recently passed Detroit in manufacturing employment. That's not all zoning, but I'll bet its part of it.

In some abandoned industrial use land, like the old railroad yards North of downtown or the old shipyards South of downtown, high rise condos and offices are going up -- but not at the cost of low cost industry buildings (as Jane Jacobs said, we need old buildings).

Stopping suburban sprawl seems to require a statewide effort like Oregon has done. If a city or county tries to limit sprawl on their own, the developers just go outside the border to a more pliable jurisdiction -- which is what happened in Central California.

What's happened to the Valley is the good jobs are 80+ miles away. And the creative economy is shunning low education backwaters like Modesto, feeding the downward spiral. It's a bit like tourist parts of third world countries, where you see the tourist economy and the local economy -- except the richer economy is commuters not tourists, and the locals can't live in their own parallel world.

[Kathy]

As long as we measure the health of the eoncomy in terms of "growth" and "housing starts," we're sending a mixed message at best. I'm not an economist, but I keep hoping we'll develop a more holistic way of measuring what would contribute to a community's long-term vibrancy. There is a local context for each economic watershed, and it's not one-size-fits all.

[Barkley Rosser]

For quite sometime in the US the worst off cities have been inner suburbs. Think Camden, NJ and East St. Louis, IL. This is not a new phenomenon.

[Alan Penn]

Part of the problem is that in the US suburbs have grown up since the car. The difference in European cities like London is that suburban expansion happened as a consequence of the invention of mass public transport - 'Metroland' grew around railway stations and is still relatively livable in a high oil price age. Retrofitting the american suburb? well that would require constructing the 'urb' first...

[Barkley Rosser]

Alan P.

The upshot is that in Europe, indeed in most countries outside of the US, Canada, Australia, and a few others, downtowns are where the rich people live and the suburbs are where the poor live, the "sub" urbs, below the urbs. Think of the suburban riots in the red belt suburbs around Paris.