Korean Job Discussion Forums

[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]

[No_hite_pls]

I miss the suburbs sometimes.

I like being able to have a job, green space, shopping, dispersed pollution, little or no crime and a beautiful yard.

[ernie]

i don't understand how ontheway's libertarian position could possibly be mistaken for "living in communes where we pool our money for the good of the community". what he's saying is the exact OPPOSITE of how you characterized his argument. summary fail.

i agree 100% that socialized transportation is leading us to disaster. the fact that something needs to be subsidized indicates that it is uneconomic. i agree with socializing things that are absolute necessities because 'what the market will bear' is infinity if people's lives are on the line. however, having a white picket fence and a big backyard doesn't seem like a necessity to me. 100% of the costs of construction, maintenance, and policing of roads should come from the people who use them. if you can make a boatload of money owning property in suburbia, by all means go for it. just don't expect other people to pay your bills.

[Rusty Shackleford]

The thing I love most about socialized transport, is that often it is that way because a private company was deemed to be making too much profit. It's not surprising when the public entity fails to deliver adequate services at a higher cost to the consumer.

[Robot_Teacher]

Credit is what built suburbia; not cold hard cash nor socialism granted that roads and utilities are a form of socialism. So is public transportation. We need some elements of socialism for utilitarian reasons such as allowing people transportation to go seek work. Some roads are tollways and we do pay taxes for roads so they are not free.

Suburbia is dead if people can't acquire the credit to buy big SUV's or even just a car while affording the payments on house, car, and credit cards. The need for a car is a huge burden on many families and prevents many young adults from finding meaningful work or even just a job. Suburbia was built for the comfort of the older generations who had decent money making career oppotunities (and credit!) in allowing them the comfort to get away from the black people and perceived high crime rate associated with being downtown. Well, downtown people are very desparate for a job, food, housing, and money.

In the US, I found it troublesome to need a car in order to live and then when it breaks down, you're out of luck. I lived in a major city and the jobs were far out in suburbia; not downtown where public transportation runs. We need compact campus like infrastructure to have an efficiently operating community or city; not urban sprawl clogged with cars and SUV's on credit.

[mises]

It doesn't matter if Americans (or Canadians) fall out of love with their suburban wastelands. They are built, and that is where people live. Even if no more are built from now on (huge expansions are still being planned as "economic stimulus" in places like Miami) the fact that they exist can't be changed.

I reckon that the wealthy and middle class will move into cities and the poor into suburbs. The Atlantic had a good article on this about a year back (The Next Slum).

[ontheway]

[mises]

You're right. But it will never happen.