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[Adventurer]

Monday, April 13, 2009
Is America's Love Affair with Suburbia Over?
by Andy Sullivan

GAINESVILLE, Virginia - Jean Bell didn't plan to take care of her neighbor's lawn when she moved to this cluster of brick townhouses hard by the freeway.

Slabs for houses not yet built sit idle in a housing development in Gainesville, Virginia, March 26, 2009.
(Reuters/Kevin Lamarque)But the house next door has sat vacant for the past year and a half, and the bank that owned it wasn't keeping it up. So the retiree and her family have mowed and watered the grass to deter the burglars who have hit nearby developments.

"We all have to watch each other's homes because we don't want the property values to go down any more," Bell says. "It's scary, and I really don't know what's going to happen."

Thirty-five miles from downtown Washington, it's easy to find signs that America's relentless suburban expansion may have petered out.

Raw earth and blank concrete pads mark house lots that have sat unsold for three years.

Streets remain incompletely paved and poorly lit, the legacy of a builder that declared bankruptcy.

And transient renters have replaced homeowners who were forced out by the foreclosure crisis.

Is America's love affair with suburbia over?

Though the recession has left few areas of the United States unscathed, the sprawling neighborhoods out on the far edges of the United States' metropolitan areas have been especially hard-hit. Property values are falling, crime is rising, and the roads remain as congested as ever.

Some planners say the hard times are spurring a long-term shift away from the car-centric sprawl that has defined increasing swaths of the landscape since World War Two.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/04/11-4

[ontheway]

Suburbia is a disaster created by socialism. Without socialism it wouldn't exist. Without socialism it would be transformed into something else.

I have explained all of this in past threads.


We must abolish all forms of socialism: free roads and highways, subsidized energy, RFD mail delivery, subsidized electrical transmission to rural areas etc.

If people in suburban and rural areas had to pay the full cost of living there, these areas would have never been built.

People would live in integrated communities where work, housing, education, shopping and recreation are integrated in campus like settings. This would eliminate the need for most daily commuting and transportation needs.

We would have fewer roads and highways, and more walking, elevators and people movers instead.

As a result, we could spend all the funds now wasted on highways and cars on better housing, better communities, better educational institutions, better recreational options and better living.

We need infrastructure develpment to be left in the hands of the free market.

By getting government out of the infrastructure business, especially by privatizing the infrastructure itself, all of it, we could generate a massive increase in the funds available for development, and the development would be planned and rational, instead of the government created chaos of today.


And, by elimiating the need for most roads, highways and cars, we could radically decrease the amount of energy needed to support our standard of living, and greatly increase our overall living standards at the same time. We could become energy independent from the middle east and cut off the use of oil as a weapon and source of conflict.

Finally, this massive reduction in use of fossil fuels would resolve most of our current environmental issues and global warming issues.


Socialism is truly evil.

All of the world's major problems are a direct result of socialism.

[brento1138]

^ I couldn't have said it better than On the Way. Congrats.

[Yu_Bum_suk]

[Hater Depot]

Suburbia was initially a great boon to many people. It got them out of poorly-maintained and badly overcrowded city apartment buildings and into small, clean homes they could afford. And as owners rather than renters, they saw their personal wealth go up and up.

[harlowethrombey]

[blade]

[Ya-ta Boy]