So more Monday Afternoon Links…
The Infrastructurist on the 7 Most Ridiculous Roads as part of the stimulus:
Check out number 1, Louisville’s doozy in downtown…
TIME, on the big ideas of 2009: #2 Recycling the Suburbs.
These words look like they’re directly from my mouth:
Not every suburb will make it. The fringes of a suburb like Riverside in Southern California, where housing prices have fallen more than 20% since the bust began, could be too diffuse to thrive in a future where density is no longer taboo. It’ll be the older inner suburbs like Tysons Corner, Va., that will have the mass transit, public space and economic gravity to thrive postrecession. Though creative cities will grow more attractive for empty-nest -retirees and young graduates alike, we won’t all be moving to New York.
As I have said many times, hard times will flush the chumps (unfortunately, the undertow is pulling a lot of good people down with it). In this case, Fast Company says that Urbanists are the big winners as sprawl’s fatal flaws have indeed been, uh, fatal.
A study by the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech predicts that by 2025 there will be as many as 22 million unwanted large-lot homes in suburban areas.
The suburb has been a costly experiment. Thirty-five percent of the nation’s wealth has been invested in building a drivable suburban landscape, according to Christopher Leinberger, an urban planning professor at the University of Michigan and visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. James Howard Kunstler, author of “The Geography of Nowhere,” has been saying for years that we can no longer afford suburbs. “If Americans think they’ve been grifted by Goldman Sachs and Bernie Madoff, wait until they find out what a swindle the so-called ‘American Dream’ of suburban life turns out to be,” he wrote on his blog this week.
