Is Your Pleasant Suburb The Next Slum?
Is the sub-prime meltdown just part of a larger more fundamental shift in the way Americans are choosing to live? Brookings Institute fellow and new urbanist cheerleader Chris Leinberger certainly seems to think so:
At Windy Ridge, a recently built starter-home development seven miles northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, 81 of the community's 132 small, vinyl-sided houses were in foreclosure as of late last year. Vandals have kicked in doors and stripped the copper wire from vacant houses; drug users and homeless people have furtively moved in. In December, after a stray bullet blasted through her son's bedroom and into her own, Laurie Talbot, who'd moved to Windy Ridge from New York in 2005, told The Charlotte Observer, "I thought I'd bought a home in Pleasantville. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that stuff like this would happen."Leinberger argues that walkable cities of all sizes will weather the coming (current?) storm better than the downtown-less clusters of McMansions we've covered the country with in the past 8 years. Has the suburbanization of America finally exhausted itself? Leinberger argues that the preference for car-based suburban living was fueled by a society where families with children made up more than half of all households.In the Franklin Reserve neighborhood of Elk Grove, California, south of Sacramento, the houses are nicer than those at Windy Ridge--many once sold for well over $500,000--but the phenomenon is the same. At the height of the boom, 10,000 new homes were built there in just four years. Now many are empty; renters of dubious character occupy others. Graffiti, broken windows, and other markers of decay have multiplied. Susan McDonald, president of the local residents' association and an executive at a local bank, told the Associated Press, "There's been gang activity. Things have really been changing, the last few years."
In the first half of last year, residential burglaries rose by 35 percent and robberies by 58 percent in suburban Lee County, Florida, where one in four houses stands empty. Charlotte's crime rates have stayed flat overall in recent years--but from 2003 to 2006, in the 10 suburbs of the city that have experienced the highest foreclosure rates, crime rose 33 percent. Civic organizations in some suburbs have begun to mow the lawns around empty houses to keep up the appearance of stability. Police departments are mapping foreclosures in an effort to identify emerging criminal hot spots.
The decline of places like Windy Ridge and Franklin Reserve is usually attributed to the subprime-mortgage crisis, with its wave of foreclosures. And the crisis has indeed catalyzed or intensified social problems in many communities. But the story of vacant suburban homes and declining suburban neighborhoods did not begin with the crisis, and will not end with it. A structural change is under way in the housing market--a major shift in the way many Americans want to live and work. It has shaped the current downturn, steering some of the worst problems away from the cities and toward the suburban fringes. And its effects will be felt more strongly, and more broadly, as the years pass. Its ultimate impact on the suburbs, and the cities, will be profound.
Things are changing:
"The Boomers themselves are becoming empty-nesters, and many have voiced a preference for urban living. By 2025, the U.S. will contain about as many single-person households as families with children."As affluent Americans move towards cities, Leinberger says, other suburban advantages (good schools, safe streets) may well move with them.
The Next Slum? [The Atlantic]
(Photo:Suzanne Dechillo/NYT)
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I kind of doubt that the urban environment will just improve because some affluent people decide to live there - as with all upper middle to upper class, pockets of exclusivity will force those who just can't keep up to take the other schools, other neighborhoods, and the demand for higher-quality housing and education will exclude them. I don't see New York City being a mixing bowl of happy sunshine love because the former suburbanites move in and people think they'll be okay with bumming it at Juan's Supermart down the block.
Oh noes!!! Stupid people can't afford the payment and the banks lent to them. When will people learn you don't shit in your own bed.
@laserjobs: What?!? How does not being able to make a housing payment = pooping in your bed? In analogy school you would get a D-. This is more a bite off more than you can chew type of analogy scenario.
I've always resisted buying a house. The idea of being tied down to a mortgage & general routine upkeep of a homenever really appealed to me. Then there is the issue of property values rising & falling.
I always had a wacky dream of buying an RV & living in that. Moving around anywhere I wanted to go. Silly I know.
If I were smart...with all the forclosures & highly motivated sellers out there...I'd buy a small duplex, live in one side & rent the other out to pay for the mortgage. But then I'd have to mow the grass & be enslaved to local housing ordinances & possibly a Hone-owners' Association.
I have a friend who has a house in a low to middle income neighborhood & he HATES the local laws enforcing every little thing (like height's of fences, what you can & CAN'T keep in your back yard or driveway... etc. etc..).
@BayStateDarren: I dunno hasn't Lowell been pretty much a dump for years? :P I mean sure you could live in Lawrence, which is arguably a billion times worse, but Lowell is still no picnic :P
A co-worker sent me this video of when I first moved to Mass like 8 years ago, since I was still looking for a place to rent. I think it's fairly accurate in its satirical interpretation of the area :P
"There's been gang activity. Things have really been changing, the last few years."
This made me laugh - like it was June Cleaver or something. People are so naive. Get a gun to defend yourself, your family & your property or move.
The rising cost of gas may play a role in this as well. With gas at $3.25 and many news stories about how it could go higher, I'm sure many prospective home buyers are looking for short commutes. In many cities that will favor the urban center and the inner-ring of suburbs.
My boyfriend lives in Elk Grove in a development that is very similar to this. It is very sad to see these nice looking neighborhoods and houses being trashed!
@satoru: That's pretty much what I was going to say. McMansions and Lowell seem like they should be mutually exclusive words.
Anyway, I think the key words in this article are "recently built". These brand new, often overpriced communities are cruising for a beating from the current crisis. If you are buying a starter home, do so in an established neighborhood (say 10+ years) with a low rate of turnover. All the stats are readily available on the web on sites like zillow.com.
When people ask us why we live in the city, my husband always says: because they make more suburbs every day, they're not making any more city!
i don't know that i can agree with leinberger on this one. i don't think it's so much a shift in our lifestyle as it is a testament to it.
i grew up in your typical 80's "e.t." suburban neighborhood, complete with teenage bullies, packs of kids on bikes/skateboards & parents that knew their neighbors & actually got together with them for dinner, bowling, pta meetings, etc.
these sprawl communities are different. they provide enough privacy that a family can pretend that there are no neighbors. the houses have no windows on the sides so you can't see jack & jane living next door. there's no roving packs of hooligans. hell, dad doesn't even ride the john deere on sundays - he pays jose's lawn service to do that while he's at work.
there's no "neighborhood" in america's culdesacs & consequently, no pride in the 'hood. things don't work out, you pick up & move on to the next community where you don't know who lives next door. what's the difference?
i don't see the move to urbanism that leinberger is predicting. sure, young professionals are flocking to cities. but guess what? they always have. then they get married, have a kid, decide they need a nice house in a nice, quiet neighborhood where you can't hear jack & jane banging one out at 2am & they end up back in the suburbs. circle of life.
@BayStateDarren:
I live on the other side of Lowell from you. (Belvidere I presume) My side is all starter homes, with stable families and not a foreclosure or empty house to be seen. Walk ten blocks out of the Upper Highlands and it's a slum.
In CA and FL where I have spent a lot of time, there are just enormous clusters of houses in the hundreds. There really isn't anything like it in MA.
Very funny video...
@TWinter: Great point. 5 years ago the hot "future growth" spots around DC were in the far suburbs (60 miles or so). People were investing in houses at a quarter of the price of a similar property close in. Double the commute price (and an greater awareness of the environment) and people are less willing to move further out.
@BayStateDarren: I also live in New England and our very small city has similar neighborhoods. But the difference is the town suffered the most years ago, when all the nice houses were split into multi-families and they tore down historic buildings for parking garages. If I walk 3 blocks North on my street I end up in a housing project. If I walk 1 block West I find the $500k+ houses (a lot for around here). The starter homes that were being flipped are sitting empty now, and I suspect it's only a matter of time before they start getting vandalized. Hopefully it doesn't creep onto my street.
Suburban and exurban living is probably not sustainable for many middle-class families. Here in the DC area, alot of people live pretty far from their jobs (some come to the city from as far as West Virginia or even PA) on a daily basis, in part because the cost of housing is so much cheaper where they live, while they still earn a higher big city salary. However, as oil prices continue to rise, the cost of their commute + cheap city living is going to get closer and closer to the cost of just paying more to live in the city (or very close-in suburbs like Arlington, Alexandria, PG county, etc) and relying on mass transit. Second, the farther out of the way those suburban homes are, the more it is going to cost people who live there to buy all their goods as the higher oil prices mean it will cost more to truck their food over to their local grocery store.
Now there are other reasons live to the suburbs-some people cannot fathom life without having 84,321 bedrooms or a 3000 SF lawn. However, they are going to have to a pay a price for those nicities. On top of that, most new contsruction these days (whether in the city or the burbs) is shoddy and cheap by even early 20th century standards. As their vinyl-sided wood frame homes age, the costs of maintenance is going to be much higher than if they lived in a masonry-building.
@loganmo: I live in one of those DC/Baltimore suburbs (though the rural part). My neighbors who dont work in the local area are either looking for work closer or demanding a metro extension.
@laserjobs: Great, except the people who are getting shafted in this story are the ones whose homes haven't been foreclosed.
I live in Asheville, NC, also known as "AsheVegas" for the explosion in growth in the last decade.
Things happen slower here, but the cracks are showing. We've had people move here who have sold their houses elsewhere and decided to move here - without having a job first.
Bad move.
Some massive upscale communities have popped up; who inhabits them is unknown. Funny, the "For Sale" signs are starting pop up. I guess it's hard to pay a Jumbo Mortgage payment on minimum wage employment.
20 years from now, no one will want to support such a massive house. Funny, our little 1920's cottage looks better all the time...
@forgottenpassword: @mac-phisto: @Kat@Work: Did I miss a meeting where we decided to start using ampersands instead of typing out the word "and?" :)
@loganmo: Regarding your last paragraph, that's the upside to this story. Since most of these homes were built in the style of trailer homes and double wides, they probably won't be standing after 10-15 years. By the time my kids graduate, those will be pre-loaded landfills.
@satoru: That is a great piece of film. I'm inspired.
Meg-
I believe you are referring to "The Brookings Institution", not "the Brookings Institute".
They go by just "Brookings" now, but the full name doesn't have "Institute" in it at all.
exactly. I think where they stated that some neighbors are pulling together to mow the lawns, etc, is the only thing the homeowner can do. It sucks when you bought a house you could afford and are paying your mortgage, then a bunch of people move in and get foreclosed on and you're screwed..The foreclosure problem doesn't just affect the people losing their homes, it affects everybody@Superawesomerad:
this guy missed the mark unless suddenly people will stop getting older.
people grow up and grow out... mainly because large urban areas arent going to suddenly knock out their financial district to accommodate a subdivision full of new, single family homes for when they're ready to start a family.
and this "suburban gang activity"? wake up idiots, it's been happening for 4-5 years now as those who couldnt afford a home in your neighborhood suddenly could with subprime lending. they werent being pushed out of "downtown"; they were lured out with the opportunity to buy a home despite their reduced capacity to pay for it.
in 5 years, these problems will all be flushed out of the suburbs and be back mugging the urbanites.
unsavory individuals usually prefer larger communities to blend in, not smaller communities so they stick out... and these same people arent actively "hiding out" in the suburbs if they're proudly committing petty crimes in their own sparsely populated neighborhood.
@Tracy Ham and Eggs:
Oh, great, another metro extension. Criminals love public transportation that takes them right to their victims. No need to drive.
@bmwloco: "20 years from now, no one will want to support such a massive house. Funny, our little 1920's cottage looks better all the time..."
wrong. peoples' wants always trend upwards, not downwards. the wanters will find a way to support their desires. how do i know?
when was the last time you ever heard someone WANT to live a life that's lesser than their forebearers? at worst they want the same standard of living... but never less.
sorry, but the only "socialist revolution" that ever happens are by the privileged who want the less privileged to take from each other instead of them.
@joemono: lol. i pretty much do it out of laze - gotta fend off the cts as long as possible. =P
file this under "things about me that no one cares to know": i can't actually write an ampersand, so i use that funky backwards 3 thingy w/ the 2 vertical dashes above & below.
Brookings just released a book that is a study of the immigrant population in America...places like the D.C. area are booming with immigration, legal and illegal, and I think that might be one of the "problems" a lot of suburbanites complain about. Good, nice, clean areas are being somewhat destroyed by crime supposedly brought in by immigration...Next on Fox, when poverty collides with well-landscaped lawns...
I''ll bet you 1000 Quatloos that most of the "vandalism" & "gang activity" is coming from their own little snowflakes in these communities.
I had the whole neighborhood change happen to me after I bought my house. Its like I bought my home and from that everyone decided to sell that could. My next door neighbor was very nice but his realtor was a tool. He thought they were mowing the grass but I did it every other month to keep the varmits away. His back yard was fenced in and I didnt want to cause issues by going there. So it got completely overgrown. The realtor paid me to cut it as it needed a serious effort and a push mower wasnt going to do a thing.
It sold to some pretty horrific folks who caused me a lot of problems complaining about rainwater flowing downhill across their driveway (yes I really have a letter from some A33hat at the city that told me to deal with the water flowing downhill onto asphalt!)
Most of the neighbor keep to themselves but are friendly when I am outside working in the garage. I would not have bought in this area if I had known how bad they would fake house values for taxes and provide no services at all. Nothing.
The article claims:
This future is not likely to wear well on suburban housing. Many of the inner-city neighborhoods that began their decline in the 1960s consisted of sturdily built, turn-of-the-century row houses, tough enough to withstand being broken up into apartments, and requiring relatively little upkeep. By comparison, modern suburban houses, even high-end McMansions, are cheaply built. Hollow doors and wallboard are less durable than solid-oak doors and lath-and-plaster walls. The plywood floors that lurk under wood veneers or carpeting tend to break up and warp as the glue that holds the wood together dries out; asphalt-shingle roofs typically need replacing after 10 years. Many recently built houses take what structural integrity they have from drywall-their thin wooden frames are too flimsy to hold the houses up.
The author is clueless about construction. Plywood does not break up and warp unless it is defective, asphalt-shingle roofs last more like 25 years, and drywall is never uses as a structural material.
In contrast, nearly all older houses contain lead paint and asbestos. They lack sufficient insulation and have leaky windows, leading to high energy bills. While these deficiencies can all be corrected, buyers may find that the solid old house that they have purchased might just need to be torn down and replace it to create a liveable home.
I just had a flash of Back to the Future 2, so where is Biff's Casino?
@oakie: Your problem (and that of the public in general) is the conflation of "bigger" with "better." It's not necessary to have 3000 square feet of bland developer-built floorspace to "move up." As the real costs of living 50 miles from their office mount, and the real costs of heating and cooling the 50% of the house they don't really need affects their ability to buy that new Acura, it's just possible that people will realize that the quality of their living space is orthogonal to its size. I don't see how it has anything to do with socialism, but if that's an easy way for you to dismiss the possibility that there might be a nice house that's not huge without experiencing cognitive dissonance, fine.
Of course, I'm into architecture and small houses, as much for the more comfortable scale as for the economic aspects, so my perspective on this is different than that of the average KB Homes customer.
@GearheadGeek: That is one thing I dont understand is why someone would buy a house to live in 50+ miles from where they work.
So they completely remove the factors of Gas, wear and tear on car, car maintanence, added car insurance due to milage driven each day. Commute time and last but not least stress from the commute and its length, blows my mind
@GearheadGeek: Amen. I'm a city dweller living in a 1200 ft Condo. A small house by suburban standards, but I can walk five minutes to countless numbers of bars, shops, restaurants, parks, etc. Because of that, we only need one car. So when you remove a car payment, gas, insurance, maintenance, etc. we're not spending that much more than suburban dwellers.
I know its fine for many, but I can't justify spending tons of money on a big house, a bunch of cars, only to have to drive 40 miles to get to the nearest mediocre TGIF's.
Very happy I moved into an older neighborhood. It has about 180 homes in it with maybe 10 a year for sale. So even if half went into foreclosure it's only 5 a year. Compare that to half of a new development going into foreclosure and the neighborhood just can't absorb the impact.
Its not silly, I had the same dream most of my life. When people would ask me what I wanted to do when I grow up I used to tell them I wanted to be a vagabond, like David Janssen in the Fugitive (only without the murder charge hanging over my head). It still is my dream for retirement.
As for affluent moving into rough neighbor hoods improving them -- we have a lot of areas of gentrification where I live, but it doesn't improve anything.
@loganmo: You're right about the shoddy construction quality. While mortgages are 30 years long, most houses built after World War II are designed to last at most 20 years.
Recently built houses and condo conversions try to hide the shoddiness by including granite countertops and stainless steel appliances.
I thought I'd bought a home in Pleasantville.
Why? Did trees burst into flame every time a nearby housewife masturbated in the tub?
@PirateSmurf: YEP! thats exactly what ive been thinking. james howard kunstler has said that the 21st century is going to be all about living locally... because of rising energy costs and their trickle down effect into the rest of our consumer goods. this subprime mess might speed that return to living/working/playing in the same community. i think its great. but i'm one of those weirdos who chose to live 7 minutes from my office and doesn't mind paying a bit more in housing to save myself the headache and costs associated with 3 hours of commuting per day. i never understood how that trade off made any sense. id rather pay a premium to be relaxed and happy than save money just so i can waste 15 hours a week sitting in a car.
@weave: Amen. Same here, old established community. It's just outside of Chicago. I keep looking for the foreclosure rush to hit, but it's not happening so far. Which was actually quite surprising to me, since in the late part of the boom, a lot of flippers started working houses here - so I thought we'd end up with a lot of foreclosure activity from them getting stuck with properties. But, whatever, housing values are staying firm here in Skokie and in fact our crime rate seems to be going down.
There ! I zipped up my asbestos suit, because I'm gonna get flamed for this one...
What's with all of the suburb bashing from these pink wiener "academic" types. If this were North Korea and there was a government office that made us buythese so called "McMansions" ,then the bashers would have a point. But these things have been built by free people with their own money (or financing). If they are such a bad idea,let the builders go broke. I'm getting real uncomfortable reading all of these "studies" that show how our lifestyle is "unsustainable" and we all need to mail the keys to the bank if we live outside these "walkable cities". Fuck you, Chris Leinberger. I like my home and lifestyle just fine,thanks. You move your happy ass to the city and I hope that you have a great big group hug every day after work.For the rest of you gullible types that parrot this nonsense without doing any critical thinking,It's not a very big jump from desiring that we all move back to the 'hood to requiring same. Hell,no. There are lots of good things happening in these residential areas that this pretentious asshole and his ilk have no clue about.
I think that happened to the town, I live in, Lowell, MA. I walk 2-3 blocks from my apartments east and there's a neighborhood populated by beautiful McMansion-type houses [some have signs up indicating 19th-century origin, though]. 2-3 blocks south or west though are literally gettoes.