“These older places (the homes being built today) will then be populated by lower class people with fewer resources and less status thereby reinforcing the perception that it’s best to move on if at all possible. These are fungible, forgettable, disposable places that rapidly age and are then left to quietly decay.“
Ghost towns say otherwise. Property usually appreciates, given enough time, but it's never a guarantee; Detroit is dying-globalization killed manufacturing-it's a bad bet to think it'll appreciate when much of the city is already abandoned.
We might, we just dont know that we are building them. Assuming today's nice neighborhoods are the old ones, I would argue that they escaped a period of modernization. I think we look back at our recent creations and always think about how we can tear them down and rebuild. The neighborhoods that escape this cycle of "tear down and rebuild" and luckily slip into the status of "vintage charm" suddenly hold more caché and may even get protected status by their city or municipality.
All those old nice neighborhoods were also built by and for the wealthy. The lower classes lived in squalid tenements and slums that are now mostly gone.
Yeah I was going to say. All those quaint American towns that look like they came out of a time capsule are that way because they've been in decline since those buildings were built and nobody has invested money into new buildings or businesses.
Hmm, I did not consider that. I guess we'll see in a decade or two. My opinion is that many of these constructions will go unused - permanent relocation is a lot harder than just using roads, plus no doubt most of them have already been bought for resale (increasing the price) or rent (which may be more acceptable). Also, there are whole apartment blocks in or near major cities that are still unused despite demand, it's not just ghost cities.
And I'll be the old guy yelling about it in the street. I've lived in the same town for most of my life, so I've seen it metastasize across the countryside, gobbling up farmland, wildlife habitat and open spaces, replacing them with McMansions, apartment buildings and Costcos, just to make room for more ... frikken ... people. It's like watching your best high school friend turn into a junkie whore before your eyes.
I don't know what the answer is, but there is something to be said for retaining some beauty at the expense of fewer people, and maybe rethinking the idea that growth is necessary to success, 'cause we're running out of room and that definition can't last forever.
This certainly is the case in some areas even these days 20+years later, particularly those parts of town that have been lower income for a long time, and are now being renovated. Smart guy to think ahead on that.
> i then lived in a 1st generation walkable semi-suburb w/ small plots/old (1910s) houses
If the houses were that era, it was a "residential neighborhood." It likely originally had some amenities like corner grocery stores that were gone by the time you lived there that made it even more walkable.
That's the current situation, but what about the past several decades? The article claims that very few attractive neighborhoods were built in the US post WWII.
Wrong, it's that those houses are in locations that are now the epicentre of a huge cultural and infrastructure amenity that did not even exist in the 1900s. The physical houses are not the value there, it's the location and amenities.
While the location is the same in a geographic sense as in 1900, a google maps view of that era would show them being in a small town compared to a city with incredible amenities these days.
I mean, it wouldn't exactly be unprecedented. New cities spring up and old ones die every few generations or so when we go through logistical churn. When the old passenger rail system died off, ghost towns emerged. When the old pre-interstate highway system was obsoleted by the interstate system, ghost towns emerged. And I imagine as we shift the way we build things and where value is generated geographically in this country, ghost towns will probably emerge. The nature of low-density suburbs and exurbs is that it doesn't take a lot of people leaving before they become unsustainable.
I feel like Americans should be more used to this.
I disagree: Many of the most attractive neighborhoods to me were built recently.
I used to love walking around the area in Palo Alto around University Ave, on the residential side of Middlefield. Many of those buildings are new.
When I could buy, and then build, a house in Massachusetts, I chose recently-built, upscale neighborhoods. The difference, compared to most neighborhoods, is that the houses are more expensive, and built to a higher quality. (I also favored neighborhoods with restaurants in walking distance. This is possible, even in suburbia.)
I suspect that the older neighborhoods the article favors are just the upscale ones. The cheaper neighborhoods built centuries ago didn't last.
It also means (and by "means" I mean "necessitates" or "requires") decay. Suburban development in metros that aren't otherwise growing guarantees decline elsewhere in the region. Sometimes people look at a place like North St. Louis in disbelief -- "how could all these houses have been abandoned?" -- without ever considering the fundamentals. The region has expanded to cover hundreds of square miles of new development since 1970 all with like 1% population growth. They doubled the number of houses, but they didn't double the number of households.
Decline is an illustration of the pigeonhole principle.
So it's not just that the new suburbs are too low-density to support themselves; they also create the conditions whereby the old parts of the city also de-densify to unsustainable levels.
This is a fair point except that neighborhoods are not fungible and are in short supply.
You’re assuming that there is another 3/10 neighborhood available for the people who are displaced to move to, and therefore they gain a short term benefit and eventually end up back where they were.
In practice it’s typical that older areas which have become run down have ample city services, such as transit, parks, and libraries, which may not be the best quality, but at least exist.
Since neighborhoods are no longer built with these amenities, the best available substitute for someone who is displaced from an old neighborhood may be far less desirable than what they had before - a 1/10 trailer park, or worse, homelessness.
However, if we would continue to build traditional neighborhoods that were walkable, had city services, had transit etc. and built enough of those to keep up with the demand, then it would be much more likely that your scenario would play out. In that case the harm of economic change in neighborhoods would be greatly reduced, perhaps even to the point that it wouldn’t be a problem anymore
But that’s quite far from the reality on the ground today.
20th century history is littered with these types of developments [0]. They all turn out the same way. Decrepit and abandoned within 20 years. No one wants to live like that. Living your life in a 30th story studio apartment is a dystopian nightmare. You are completely disconnected from your environment, and daily needs like grocery shopping, package deliveries, buying furniture, all become herculean tasks. It's why these places very quickly become slums. The only people willing to live like that are those with no other choice.
This is a pretty direct result of the atomization of the family and the lack of meaningful community in my opinion (both of which are pretty strongly tied to lack of walkability).
If you're a depressed 30 something, why the heck would you want to inherit a roof tiling business in Suburbia, South Carolina over going to live in a real city where you might actually meet people your own age who are well adjusted.
This is just us seeing the collapse of small car-centric towns in real time, but from the first moment, we always knew these places weren't sustainable.
Depending on where this is, you can think of it as generations of people have already picked out and settled in the naturally safe spots. What's left then are the less desirable, potentially riskier locations.
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