Posted on 04/26/2012 6:44:30 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
If there’s one asset the world has little use for, it’s an American single family home priced above 250K, reachable only by car.
The great, post-war buildout of America’s suburbs relied upon the continuance of a favorable arbitrage between rising wages, and low transportation costs. Now that this profitable scheme has come to an end, it should be no surprise that Robert Shiller remarked this week that housing “may not recover in our lifetime.”
While some stabilization has been seen since the start of the US housing bust, Case-Shiller data showed this week that many cities hit new price lows. Interestingly, Robert Shiller is now himself noting the energy and transport cost pressure on US housing, and used the phrase “walkable cities.”
To illustrate how I see the future price path of homes in non-walkable cities, I made up the following graphic:
Walkable cities are very nice indeed, and I’ve been fortunate to live in several of them: Boston, New York, San Francisco and now my present city, Portland.
But the majority of American homes, in order to capture any future increase in value, will need to benefit again from rising wages and flat to falling energy costs. At the current juncture, those are two trends unlikely to appear any time soon.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
I salute those who stay off the grid and those that carry. We're on the same team, but have different approaches.
I for one love a walkable city. I absolutely love walking to shops and activity, without having to start the car. Love it, love it.
The problem is that most cities aren’t planned for it. The walkable cities tend to be old urban centers that are in or near poor dangerous neighborhoods and the middle class would not accept living there. Suburban areas tend to be unplanned bedroom communities with very little supporting infrastructure besides the occassional strip mall, so nothing is walkable.
I would love to live in an upscale European style village or town where shops and activities are strewn throughout the living centers and transit is at your doorstep. The problem is, previous US attempts at walkable areas are more like Soviet blockhouses rather than European villages. Also, any planned upscale village built today would be required to be “diverse” and would offer Section 8 housing, so there goes the neighborhood right off the bat.
But yes, I would kill to live in a small European style village where all of the shops and activities I use on a weekly basis were within a 6 block walk of my front door, with light rail to a larger city within 2 blocks of my door, and all of it upscale with very low crime.
No disrespect to those who love rural living but it is not for me. I would love to live in a small upscale walkable village and I would gladly suffer a bit of density to have it. There is space in the USA to cater to both those who want 20 acres and those who want a large lavish high rise apartment in a beautiful urban setting with a solid economy and low crime.
Build it and I’m there. This hardly exists in America becasue it is done wrong almost every time. I can’t think of a planned community in the USA that would feel like living in a French or German village, sans language barrier and nation-specific architecture.
True. Neighborhoods like you describe are not possible in a multi-cultural country.
I watched that video last night. Then had my wife, who heard most of it the first time, come watch it. Then posted it to Facebook, and I never do anything like that. The folks that produced that need to come up with some commercials for election season.
I started a home business that will some day be “sustainable,” despite the commies. I like seeing birds and trees outside my house. Imagine that.
-—Yes, because packing us all into Soviet-style apartments is so much better. /s——
Read Gropius’ theory behind the apartment building. It’s eye-opening, to say the least.
Whoever wrote this did so from outside suburban planning experience. Major corporations adore the idea of huge planned shopping districts, easily accessible to the delivery of goods, but nowhere near housing. Which is why they need huge parking lots.
But this is not the only way to do things. A suburbs is a golden opportunity for small and single proprietor businesses to have a piece of the economic pie as well, trading inventory diversity for convenience. They locate snug against a suburban area and in some cases in an urban area, which strongly undermines the giant corporate model.
Yet this drives major corporations nuts, because despite their huge inventories, their bottom line is based on selling those common items sold by mom & pop stores. Putting the M&Ps out of business by undercutting their prices is a big part of the corporate operations.
Importantly, when some city sets up a “downtown” district to feature small, local businesses, giant corporation franchises are there in a heartbeat to take advantage of the opportunity as well. But in the process they poison it, because they strip any local color away for their mass produced products made with minimum wage workers.
They will even go to court and spend a fortune to get access to such places, which are often designed to keep such corporate franchises out. It is less that they want in, than to keep local competition out.
Walking is not healthy in any city that has a large, hostile underclass. Those thugs are predators, just like hyenas.
There was a years-long wait for new apartments. It sometimes happened that a couple would get divorced and both stay in their apartment, and then both remarry, and you'd end up with four adults living in the one apartment, along with any kids or rug-rats, dogs, cats, or anything else.
Moreover the Soviet empire was always a curious mixture of communism and feudalism. In order to move from Moscow to Novgorod for instance, you had to find somebody in Novgorod who wanted to move to Moscow. That was because, otherwise, the mayor of Moscow would have to figure that his old buddy, the mayor of Novgorod, had just gone one (peasant, i.e. you) up on him.
The language in fact retains a lot of stuff from medieval times. The 'to jinx' for instance (каркать/накаркать) is borrowed from crow language ("carrrr") since common belief held that a human being could not pronounce a jinx or curse and a wizard with any ongoing need to put curses on people needed a crow or raven to pronounce them.
It’s not a European village, but my neighborhood is single family homes on half acre lots, and to the west and south of my house, there is forest. But within a mile or so of my house, there is: two grocery stores (one inexpensive, one upscale), two coffee shops, an ice cream shop, a few pizzarias, a Home Depot, Kohl’s, Costco, Target, and a few chain restaurants.
Walkable suburbs exist. In fact, I can think of quite a few around my town. Just have to look.
Like this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%e2%80%93Green
Stay with other unarmed Libs in cities, where low-income can sit next to Dem yuppies....it’s all good.
Now stay the F away from me, Commie Greentard.
“California Declares War on Suburbia”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303302504577323353434618474.html
There are some towns that put in restrictions on big box stores to try and support their M&P shops. I know Davis, CA to this day will not let Wal-Mart move in and the town has a great downtown with some unique shops and places to eat at and what supports it as well is it is a college town.
There is a different town I have family which is Jackson OH and they have a super Wal-Mart but go through their downtown and it is pretty well dead except for a state liquor store. I also been to some small towns in Kansas and Wal Mart is the only game and nothing else. Like Hays KS for example.
> Importantly, when some city sets up a “downtown” district to feature small, local businesses, giant corporation franchises are there in a heartbeat to take advantage of the opportunity as well. But in the process they poison it, because they strip any local color away for their mass produced products made with minimum wage workers.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.