> "Ideally, there won't be any new highway capacity built because we can't afford to maintain what we have"
It's not a detail that changes the conclusion, but I want to focus on it:
The U.S. definitely can afford to maintain its roads. The country is the richest in the history of the world, richer than it's ever been. U.S. GDP in 1960, when the Interstate Highway system and many suburbs and malls were being built, was ~$3 trillion in real dollars;[0] now it's ~$18 trillion.
The U.S. chooses not to maintain its infrastructure.
[0] According to one unofficial source on the web, which I'm going to trust for this purpose.
I prefer a 0.5-1.0 acre lot to a lot slightly bigger than the footprint of the house it contains.
I prefer to have the privacy that's afforded by having my house set 40' back from the street, with plenty of space between my and my neighbors' homes, rather than living in a house that abuts, or is 6 feet away, from my neighbors'.
I prefer a spacious driveway and an attached, heated, two car garage, to parking on the street a block from my house, and having to dig my car out after a snowstorm.
I prefer to own a home that was built during or since the 1950s, when Romex wiring was original equipment, rather than own something that still has knob and tube wiring with decaying fabric insulation.
I prefer a home built with drywall or rock lathe and plaster, over one built with wood lath and plaster.
I've found that most pre-1910 homes I've examined do not have foundations or basements to my liking.
I prefer to live in an area where I can leave my doors unlocked and my windows open at night without giving it a second thought. Or where, if I leave the house and realize I left the front door unlocked, I don't feel compelled to go back and lock it.
I prefer to live in an environment where junkies and bums are virtually nowhere to be seen, rather than an environment where I have to be careful not to step in human feces when I walk between two parked cars.
When I can get all that affordably in the city, I'll consider moving back.
Jed Kolko, former chief economist at Trulia, thinks stories like this are either exaggerated or wrong. His basic claim is that urban revival is limited to childless professionals in their peak earning years. See [1], or any of his posts at [2] for the data and analysis.
[1] http://jedkolko.com/2016/03/25/neighborhood-data-show-that-u...
This somewhat anecdotal, but the biggest issue I had when living in the suburbs was traffic. I'm someone who has driven hundreds of thousands miles and never been in an accident, but the extreme levels of fear and stress I got from going even short distances in the suburbs was just aweful.
I didn't always feel this way, but I think the use of cellphones has created and environment where even slow moving drivers are unpredictable. I now walk to work and frequently see people on their phones while driving, if a line of ten cars are stopped at a light at least three people are on their phones. The result isn't an extreme increase in accidents but a constricting deficit of attention which incrementally lengthens every encounter on the road. More short stopping, more people missing green lights or just driving super conservatively and not merging holding up traffic.
Also I never use my phone while driving, but the fact that I can't even look at it when I know someone is trying to contact me is incredibly frustrating and impacts my enjoyment of driving.
I would be very interested to know how much of this is caused by a change in housing preference v/s a change in the nature of employment/wages for millennials. When you had reasonable expectation that your job would last for several years, you are more willing to invest in building up equity in a suburban home/community.
Also, the no.1 reason why people seem to want to move to suburbs is children (IMO, anecdotal etc.)... perhaps the falling fertility is making married/live-in couples more willing to live in a dense, urban communities?
Some of the living arrangements people are resorting to just reek of desperation:
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-millennials-live-in-san-f...
Living in vans. Living in boxes in larger apartments. Thirty people living in a 10-bedroom building.
There is vast demand to live in these cities, and their governments are utterly failing to accommodate it in an orderly and dignified fashion.
"Millennials want to cook at home and don't like to play golf"
They don't have money for restaurants, let alone the resources to pick up a hobby as expensive and time-consuming as golf.
There's a great documentary on this called The End of Suburbia,[1][2] though the causes for such a collapse are very different in the documentary vs this article.
I'm curious if others are seeing tear down fest in semi-urban neighborhoods?
So I live in Metrowest Boston Area. I own a multi family. My wife, infant son and I live in modest square footage despite having fairly generous annual incomes (e.g. well above AMT tax rate).
My parents used to live nearby in affluent town (Wellesley) before just recently selling their house to a developer... who of course knocked it down to build a gigantic pimped out house. The same developers was buying 4 other houses at the time. In short Metrowest Massachusetts has become tear down central.
The problem is other than foreign investors (a lot of Newston, Weston, Wellesley, and Needham is getting bought out by foreign investors) nobody from my age group.. the age group that is looking to buy houses wants a super mansion... even if its decked out (That is these houses aren't McMansions. They are real mansions).
From my general experience of talking to other educated thirty somethings is people want authentic and charming not McMansion and yet there all these new houses replacing old New England house.
Yet these new houses are priced ridiculously high. And again talking to other peers it seems gone are the days where people buy 4-6 times their salary. People are buying sometimes as low as just twice their salary and completely fine. And if people want convenient they are going for condo and not McMansion style.
Historically New England has been fairly bubble proof. I fear that time is coming to an end.
When it does happen I might buy some of these big boys and convert them to multi-families ... BTW this is exactly what happened to parts of New England in the late 19th and early 20th century [1] where giant houses were converted to multi families aka Somerville and Waltham (where I live).
I don't know anyone who wants to live in the suburbs. They either want to live in the city or far enough out that they can have land and privacy.
Little boxes, on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky...
You know, it's funny. Some cities are trying to quickly build out higher-density apartment buildings in/near the downtown areas, and from what I've seen the same concept applies. I'd love to see some of those fancy mini-arcologies spring up, but really the boxes are just a bit bigger (or smaller, depending on how you look at it.)
I do hope that malls become very cheap real estate before long; I think it's already happening in some places. I would just love to buy what is essentially a cheap, empty, commercially-zoned warehouse and stuff it full of things like laser tag, arcades and e-sports, a couple of lounge areas and coffee shops/bars depending on the time of day...but I doubt you could make something like that work without very cheap square footage and a lot of people within a 30-45 minute drive.
So, I have to wonder: if this trend actually continues (and I hope it does), could this be a factor that helps curtail climate change to some degree? I realize that we will most likely inevitably suffer major damages at this point no matter what, but I'm wondering if trends like this (along with the rise of better battery technology and electric cars) will at least mitigate the damage to some extent.
I mean, currently NYC has a ridiculously low carbon foot-print for its population size. So if more places become dense population centers with public transportation like NYC, it can only be a positive thing in terms of mitigating climate change.
The idea of suburban areas being less about owning is horrible. Of course if I don't buy my living space and instead rent it, someone ELSE has to buy it first. They become not less about owning, but more about being owned by big companies instead of individual owners.
And the reason people don't own as much as years before is because we realize that we can't afford to. If you give me a mansion for $10 (without any zeros behind it) I'll gladly prefer it over my apartment.
What will be the next article in the series? Children in Jemen prefer to eat less food than their bodies require?
> In one example, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, the extra money that buyers were expected to be willing to pay to own a McMansion fell by 84% from 2012 to 2016. In that same city in 2012, a typical McMansion would be valued at $477,000, about 274% more than the area's other homes. Today, a McMansion would be valued at $611,000, or 190% above the rest of the market.
I love how they think it is only a matter of willingness. Do they realize the cost cited prices out around two-thirds of the population?
I'm really happy that everything they mention in this article is "dying," good riddance.
Good riddance.
The title is somewhat misleading. The suburbs are not dying; in fact they are growing [1][2][3][4] and this article makes no claim to the contrary.
The article is saying that suburbs are becoming more like urban areas.
I like the author's evidence that housing prices are falling:
> In that same city in 2012, a typical McMansion would be valued at $477,000, about 274% more than the area's other homes. Today, a McMansion would be valued at $611,000, or 190% above the rest of the market.
Up 28% in price - must be dying!
[1] http://time.com/107808/census-suburbs-grow-city-growth-slows...
[2] http://www.citylab.com/housing/2016/03/2015-us-population-wi...
[3] http://www.businessinsider.com/americans-moving-to-suburbs-r...
[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2013/09/26/americas-...