The suburban lifestyle with the long commute and the manicured lawn is giving way to a new urban and walkable lifestyle. CNN reports on this growing trend away from what was once the American dream, and it’s being spurred by the subprime mortgage crisis and the ballooning number of foreclosures.
The CNN feature has some great insight from Christopher Leinberger, an urban planning professor at the University of Michigan and visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, who says, “thirty-five percent of the nation’s wealth has been invested in constructing the drivable suburban landscape. But now, it appears the pendulum is beginning to swing back in favor of the walkable community.”
The current picture that the CNN story outlines is a bleak one, with vacant houses dotting our neighborhoods that may not be filled for some time to come. The growing trend will spur a rather disruptive and in some cases an unpleasant change as satellite communities are abandoned for denser and more efficient urban neighborhoods.
The CNN story suggests that the urban flight of the 60s and 70s will be reversed, with middle and upper-income people moving to the cities and poorer families moving out to the suburbs with McMansions becoming multi-family homes for the poor.
