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National
Walkable Urban Living: The New American Dream?
Demand Grows for Mixed-Use Neighborhoods as Suburbs Face New Challenges
''Is America's suburban dream collapsing into a nightmare?'' asks CNN news writer Lara Farrar, reporting that as many suburban residents nationwide work hard to mitigate and outlast the disastrous results of the subprime mortgage collapse in their neighborhoods, urban experts predict a thorough structural transformation of suburbia over the next several decades due mostly to demographic changes, weariness from endless commutes, and the renewed attractiveness of cities, with gradual gentrification of their once depressed areas displacing low-income people to the once dreamt-of suburbs.
''The American dream is absolutely changing,'' said University of Michigan Professor Christopher Leinberger, a Brookings Institution visiting fellow, heartened by the recent influx of well-educated young professionals to cities such as Atlanta, Detroit and Dallas.
''The image of the city was once something to be left behind,'' he observed, but generations influenced by TV series like ''Seinfeld'' and ''Friends'' favor and seek city life as definitely ''cool.''
Along with ever-larger numbers of singles, families without children, and aging baby boomers, the young professionals create a highly absorbent market for dense housing in mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly and transit-oriented neighborhoods.
Recent research on selected metropolitan areas, he noted, found up to 40 percent of households preferring to live in walkable urban areas, a preference authenticated by housing prices 40 to 200 percent higher that in typical suburban neighborhoods.
Regardless of the emergent oversupply of devalued suburban housing, Professor Leinberger doesn't think the pent-up demand for dense pedestrian-friendly development can be met soon, partly because of prohibitive governmental policies and zoning rules.
At the same time, Virginia Tech Metropolitan Institute Director Arthur C. Nelson expects a surplus of some 22 million large-lot homes by 2025, the writer reports, to accommodate urban residents no longer able to afford their apartments and houses in city cores and other coveted neighborhoods.
''What is going to happen is lower and lower-middle income families squeezed out of downtown and glamorous suburban locations are going to be pushed economically into these McMansions at the suburban fringe,'' he said. ''There will probably be 10 people living in one house.'' -- CNN.com 6/16/2008
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