How to save the suburbs

Here is an interesting article.  The author is Christopher Leinberger.  Apparently for years this man preached that the new suburbs forty miles out of town would become the next slum.  Guess what folks…it is happening..  Here are some of my favorite excerpts:

For a half century, it’s been easy to mock suburbia for being too comfortable, white-bread and conformist. That’s all changed in the last 18 months as many suburbs have abruptly taken on a sense of tragedy and desperation–a fact that underlies Obama’s trip to devastated Lee County, Florida, later today. Drug violence, gangs pillaging half-empty subdivisions for scrap metal, skateboarders reclaiming the pools of abandoned McMansions, and whole streets of dead lawns spray-painted green have emerged as the new symbols of life in the ‘burbs.One man who foresaw all the ugliness is Christopher Leinberger. The Brookings Institute fellow and distinguished scholar of the suburban living arrangement has decades of experience in real estate development and urban planning. The meme of doomed suburbs went mainstream with his cover story for the Atlantic magazine last March, “The Next Slum?” The problem, he says, goes much deeper than the foreclosure crisis. It’s part of a painful societal adjustment that will take a generation or more to work through.

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So you have a suburb full of flimsy houses in the middle of nowhere, with no incentive for upkeep. That’s an ugly situation.
Exactly. It fails. Good lord, I’m a great amateur student of ancient cities. At some point they’re just going to collapse upon themselves and blow away — unless there is some massive redevelopment agency steps in.

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In very practical terms, how do towns get on the right side of this multi-decade imbalance between supply and demand?
You need to get the right infrastructure in. Doing so is a three-step process. First, is getting a transit connection that can anchor a walkable urban core. Second, is putting in overlay zoning districts around the train stations that will allow for much greater density and mixed use development. We’re talking about a hundred, two hundred, three hundred acres. The third step is to get in place an entity to manage the thing, which generally takes the form of a non-profit business improvement district. These things are very complex, but we know how to do it now. We didn’t 50 years ago, but we do now.

That’s a tight plan.
And we have hundreds of examples of it working.

What is interesting about this article is that Mr. Leinberger says that in order to save these abandoned houses they must have good public transportation, walkability and be made structurally sound.  We have all of these things here in the Garden District of Alexandria, Louisiana.