Archive for Suburbs
February 11, 2010 · Filed under Density, Economics, Families, Real Estate, Shrinking Cities, Suburbs
Drive along foreclosure alley, through new planned communities that look like tile-roofed versions of a 21st century ghost town, and you see what happens when people gamble with houses instead of casino chips.
Dirty flags advertise rock-bottom discounts on empty starter mansions. On the ground, foreclosure signs are tagged with gang graffiti. Empty lots are untended, cratered with mud puddles from the winter storms that have hammered California’s San Joaquin Valley.
Nobody is home in the cities of the future.
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Popularity: 20% [?]
December 15, 2009 · Filed under Public Life, Suburbs
After years of having derision heaped on it, suddenly suburbia is all the rage.
Lots of people’s writing is secretly biographical and my interest in suburbia, as seen on this site and elsewhere, is no exception. I reacted against growing up in the outer west London district of Ealing (or rather in Pitshanger, a suburb of it) with a conscious fix of inner city living in my 20s, where I could walk to work but also had a nasty mugging. In my third decade as an older and wiser parent I now both live and work in the west/south-west London ‘burbs from which I sprang, while simultaneously propagating the argument that these much maligned outposts are actually great places. Now it seems after years of deriding the suburbs as boring and lacking in character, people are queuing up to praise suburbia as utopia in a big way.
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Popularity: 20% [?]
November 17, 2009 · Filed under Highways, Infrastructure, Public Art, Suburbs, Traffic, Urban Structure
New Yorkers maintain that Los Angeles is a city with no center. But Angelenos argue that the city of freeways has its core in the Stack, a tower of overpasses — the first four-level connector interchange, according to the California Transportation Department — where the Pasadena, Harbor, Hollywood and Santa Ana freeways intersect.
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Popularity: 53% [?]
November 1, 2009 · Filed under Active Transportation, Cities from Scratch, Suburbs, Traffic, Transit, Urban Structure
Orenco Station, the award winning neighborhood touted as an ideal of mass-transit oriented New Urbanism, has failed to persuade a majority of its residents to use mass transit to get to work.
About two out of three Orenco residents drive to work in cars, slightly less than some other suburbs but hardly the car-free utopia many idealists expect of the transit-oriented area. Even as the neighborhood has grown closer, block by block, to the MAX light rail station named for it, the use of cars for work trips remains relatively high.
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Popularity: 29% [?]
October 5, 2009 · Filed under Climate Change, Density, Ecosystems, End of Cheap Oil, Suburbs
Urban sprawl has rightly been blamed for contributing to increasing fuel consumption in the United States, since many commuters have little choice but to drive to work. But policies designed to make cities more compact will do little to reduce gas consumption by 2050, in time to prevent the worst effects of climate change, according to a new report from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).
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Popularity: 23% [?]
October 2, 2009 · Filed under Architecture, Big Box, Density, Economics, Gentrification, Real Estate, Shopping Malls, Suburbs
Strip malls are in virtually every American city, but they’re rarely an important part of those cities. Ava Bromberg says they can be. Her idea is to turn strip malls into community-owned hubs that generate capital within their neighborhood and keep it there.
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Popularity: 40% [?]
October 1, 2009 · Filed under Active Transportation, Aging, Revitalization, Suburbs
The nation’s sprawling suburbs may have been a good place to grow up, but they’re a tough place to grow old. Here’s how towns are beginning to ‘retrofit’ their neighborhoods—and what your community might look like in the future.
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Popularity: 15% [?]
July 28, 2009 · Filed under Architecture, Density, Diversity, Housing, Planning, Suburbs, Zoning
Don’t write the obituary for McMansions just yet. Although mass-produced behemoths more than 3,000-square-feet in size have only been common (and commonly criticized), since the late ’90s, home sizes have never been influenced by need alone. The builder association’s report also points out that houses ballooned most—about 1,000 square feet—during the period between 1970 and 2008, when household size dropped from 3.11 to 2.57. Homes are getting smaller now because people feel poorer, but all that will change once the recession ends and consumer confidence is restored.
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Popularity: 38% [?]
July 24, 2009 · Filed under EcoCities, Planning, Revitalization, Suburbs, Urban Structure, Urbanization
Anyone travelling regularly through urban and suburban England might be struck, like me, with one contrasting and, sometimes, haunting image. While our city centres have been transformed beyond recognition – give or take the aberration of countless new blocks of bland, Shanghai-style flats, many of them empty – suburbia beyond is declining and, in some cases, decaying. That great wedge of housing in between, labelled the outer-city, is often in a much more shocking state.
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Popularity: 27% [?]
June 23, 2009 · Filed under Active Transportation, Density, EcoCities, Health, Suburbs
City dwellers leave less of a carbon footprint than those who live in leafy suburbs.
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Popularity: 13% [?]
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