{"id":1340,"date":"2010-03-30T10:41:00","date_gmt":"2010-03-30T15:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/?p=1340"},"modified":"2010-03-31T21:26:40","modified_gmt":"2010-04-01T02:26:40","slug":"schadenfreude-for-suburbia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/schadenfreude-for-suburbia\/","title":{"rendered":"Schadenfreude for Suburbia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gated Ghettos-R-Us.<\/a><\/p>\n

After getting hit upside the head with reality, the really smart people at the Brookings Institution<\/a> have finally figured it out (from the LA Times article in the first link):<\/p>\n

There are dozens of places like Willowalk, and they are turning into America’s newest slums, says Christopher Leinberger, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. With home values at a fraction of their peak, he said, it no longer makes sense to live so far from the commercial centers where jobs are concentrated.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Gee, ya think? Nothing like a little rear-view mirror analysis to make it in the big time think tanks!<\/p>\n

“We built too much of the wrong product in the wrong locations,” Leinberger said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Gosh, I wish I could be paid to hang out & be that smart!<\/p>\n

Even the really, really<\/em> smart people in academia* have figured it out:<\/p>\n

Thanks to overbuilding, demographic changes and shifts in preferences, by 2030 there could be 25 million more suburban homes on large lots than are needed, said Arthur C. Nelson of the University of Utah. Nelson believes that as baby boomers age and as younger generations buy real estate, the population will abandon remote McMansions for smaller homes closer to shops, jobs and the other necessities of life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Um….something the likes of Tim Wong, James Howard Kunstler<\/a> and Yours Truly\u00a0have been warning about for decades.)<\/p>\n

But look at those numbers: twenty-five MILLION excess suburban homes!<\/p>\n

Yet despite the ever darkening outlook for suburbia, Mayor Pave<\/a> and his Venti Sicofanti<\/em><\/a> <\/em>continue to embrace the ugliness and economic devastation that is the bucolic 1970s cul-de-sac.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Mayor Pavescapes: New subdivisions in SW Madison, stuck in the 70s forevermore!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

*My first thesis proposal on exactly these issues —\u00a0back\u00a0in 1991! —<\/em> was dissed because it wasn’t an academic enough topic. It was a derided as a\u00a0journalistic<\/em> theme. The predictive nature of the thesis was troubling to the rear-view mirror academic types. (So I went on to finish the MS by doing yet another boring regional geography….About things that, ahem, had already happened.)<\/p>\n

Bitter? Me? Nah! But gosh, if I’d just waited another 15 years or so, I coulda had a nice, cush job at some rich think tank or a professorship, thinking big thoughts about things that, um, already happened! Coulda, shoulda, woulda!<\/p>\n

Oh, and the guy<\/a> who derided it as a journalistic theme? He’s likely to be put in the dock for abusing monkeys.<\/a> Grad students, monkeys, whatever. So I’ll take that as a measure of cosmic justice!<\/p>\n

P.s. Thanks, P, for leaving the LA Times article open on the computer for me this morning!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Academics & think tank fellows finally get it re: sprawl. But Mayor Pave & his sycophants on the council still don’t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[175,5,8,452],"tags":[742,738,740,734,737,735,736,739,84,743,29,706,237,741,733],"class_list":["post-1340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture","category-environment","category-places-that-suck","category-urban-designplanninggeography","tag-1970s-cul-de-sac","tag-alana-semuels","tag-arthur-c-nelson","tag-brookings-institution","tag-christopher-leinberger","tag-gated-ghettos","tag-james-howard-kunstler","tag-los-angeles-times","tag-madison-common-council","tag-martin-t-cadwallader","tag-mayor-pave","tag-michael-d-barrett","tag-tim-wong","tag-university-of-utah","tag-venti-sicofanti"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1340"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1351,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340\/revisions\/1351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}