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Over the long term, the burgeoning housing mortgage crisis may benefit the land, by halting the rampant development of acreage previously dedicated to other purposes, such as farming, or simply left to the wilderness. Quite aside from the blight of interminably expanding suburbs is the energy-dependent problem of reaching them affordably.* Regardless of the price of housing or the ease of credit, automobile commuting is certain to become unsustainable by most households, whether economically, because of the price of gasoline and so on, or politically, because we decide that keeping internal combustion engines humming is not the best use of a non-replaceable resource.
In the current (March) issue of The Atlantic, Christopher B Leinberger's "The Next Slum?" (not yet online) looks into the likely future of cheaply-built housing developments — much of it intended for high-income families — as the tax-base center of gravity tips back toward what Mr Leinberger calls "walkable urban areas."
As conventional suburban lifestyles fall out of fashion and walkable urban alternatives proliferate, what will happen to obsolete large-lot houses? One might imagine culs-de-sac being converted to faux Main Streets, or McMansion developments being bulldozed and reforested or turned into parks. But these sorts of transformations are likely to be rare. Suburbia's many small parcels of land, held by different owners with different motivations, make the purchase of whole neighborhoods almost unheard-of. Condemnation of single-family housing for "higher and better use" is politically difficult, and in most states it has become almost legally impossible in recent years. In any case, the infrastructure supporting large-lot suburban residential areas — roads, sewer and water lines — cannot support the dense development that urbanization would require, and is not easy to upgrade. Once large-lot, suburban residential landscapes are built, they are hard to unbuild.
Mr Leinberger, who, according to the magazine, wears a number of hats, is among other things a real-estate developer, and his forecast pessimistically assumes that the problem of outer suburbs will be left to market forces, much as that of inner cities was two generations ago. I'm inclined to go along with him All the bright ideas for intelligent intervention that I've come up with have been defeated, ultimately, by the reality that a neighborhood from which one cannot readily escape (in this case, because transportation becomes limited or expensive) soon becomes dreary and undesirable: that's what's meant by the phrase, no longer literally meaningful, "the end of the line." The end of the line — a streetcar line, generally — took forever to get to and was inhabited by folks who couldn't afford something closer to the beginning of the line. We know what life is like without easy automotive transport; some of us can even remember it. As the density of suburban housing becomes more extreme, less equally distributed, town centers will drain away those who might have taken up residence on Mr Leinberger's "faux Main Streets." Even if these had been viable in the first place, there would be no one to inhabit them.
Calling the future is always a dodgy exercise; the only thing that we can count on is "unforeseen developments." What we do know is that the way we're doing things now can't go on, and now it looks as though it simply isn't going to. Maybe we should be glad that those McMansions were built on the cheap.
* There is also the problem of maintaining their verdure, a stubbornly essential aspect of their design; but a more intelligent use of plants will probably provide many substantial partial solutions from region to region.
Copyright (c) 2008 Pourover Press