Grist: The curse of the exurbs

[marmar]

from Grist:



The curse of the exurbs

by Tim De Chant
26 Aug 2011 7:00 AM


There's nothing more depressing than having to stay in a hotel surrounded by acres of parking lots, arterial roads, and freeways -- unless you're caught in the permanent-housing equivalent of an airport hotel: the exurb. Sprung from its predecessor the suburb, these even farther-off 'burbs lie scores of miles away from big cities and are often filled with houses and little else. They boomed during the housing bubble, but took a terrific tumble in the crash. They were based on three simple but ultimately flawed premises: housing prices will continue to rise, metro areas will continue to expand, and gas prices will continue to stay low. Oops.

Perhaps nowhere is this blight more evident than in the seat of Illinois' Kendall County: Yorkville, situated 50 miles from Chicago's Loop. Kendall County led the pack when it came to exurban growth in the 2000s. It was the fastest growing county in the country -- its 110 percent growth rate outpaced even the surging southern sprawlburbias. Dirk Johnson at the Chicago News Cooperative details Kendall County's remarkable fall:

In 2009 and 2010, the top foreclosure rates in Illinois were in Kendall, Kane, and Will Counties. On the new suburban frontier along the farthest fringes of the Chicago region, where cheap land and rising prices once triggered a rush of buyers, some newer developments have become ghost towns in places like Yorkville, Frankfort, Sugar Grove, and Hampshire.

Instead of corn, farm fields sprouted McMansions. They emerged wherever speculation was highest, like small shoots in anticipation of rain. But in some places, the rain never came. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.grist.org/sprawl/2011-08-26-the-curse-of-the-exurbs

[SoCalDem]

1. It's all driven by economics..

low wages pretty much guarantee that young-ish people often cannot afford to live near their low-paid jobs.

We no longer have the village mentality where local communities provided for their own needs (for the most part). We now live in Globalism, USA..no matter where we lay our heads down at night (if we are lucky).


Once upon a time, young people lived with family until they married, and often beyond that. When people had land, they would often carve out a little land and build the grown children houses of their own,...but now we all work for someone who is not family, and does not care if we are paid enough (on the whole) to provide for a family of our own, so if people want to have their own house, they have to move far away where they can get into the first house, and that often comes with a hefty commute. Once households are established in a formerly way-out place, schools, stores and more low paid jobs follow..rinse & repeat until most farms are long gone..

[OnionPatch]

6. We couldn't afford the prices in the city where we work.

And we are educated (my husband has a master's degree) and not even "young-sh." So, yes, we live in the ex-urbs. I'm not sure what we were expected to do. :shrug:

[SoCalDem]

7. We had to as well.. The homes close to where my husband worked were at least $30K

over our pocketbook,..,

This is the driver of exurbia...wages never kept up with "the rest of it all".. and speculation in housing made it all but impossible for younger buyers to get a toehold.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

8. Yet the same young people bought the line that says,

"You MUST own a house, or else you're not a real American."

They also failed to look at the commuting costs for someone living 50 miles from their job.

I'm not blaming the victim here. I know from personal experience how intense the pressure to BUY A HOUSE NOW FOR NO MONEY DOWN! was. It came from everywhere: financial "experts," circulars arriving in the mail, newspaper articles, offers from banks practically begging me to come in and see how much house I could qualify for, even friends and relatives who told me that I was stupid for continuing to rent.

But I ran the numbers and realized that a) I would never want to live in the desolate housing tracts where the "affordable" houses were and b) Owning a house would tie up all my disposable income and would prevent me from traveling ever again.

The other LIE that the foreclosed people bought into was that "farther out is better." The housing developers sell "country living," when the developers themselves are rapidly destroying whatever nature is left out there without providing any of the amenities of a city or even of a small town. When I lived in Portland without a car, my rent was pretty high, but at that time, $50 a month took care of ALL my transportation needs. Some friends pointed to new apartment complexes just beyond the urban growth boundary where the rent was $200 cheaper than what I was paying. However, they had the same problem as a) above--desolate location with no amenities-- and on top of that, they were off the bus/train routes, so I would have had to buy a car, thus knocking out all the savings.

[xchrom]

2. Recommend

[closeupready]

3. K&R for later reading.

nt

[closeupready]

4. Okay, I read it, and I object to his conclusion.

Specifically:

>>It's easy, in hindsight, to harshly judge exurbs like Kendall County, but the reality is, they didn't have time to prepare. The housing boom hit them like a gold rush, and their governments and people were ill-prepared. Towns like Yorkville, which started the decade with just over 6,000 people, do not have the planning mechanisms in place to properly deal with the nearly 18,000 people it has now.<<

Yes, sir, in many cases, they certainly DID have time to prepare. I recall reading op eds (published in papers from Yorkville's neighboring areas during that same exurb boom time) which cautioned citizens and governments to plan growth well, and those calls were in many cases ignored. The fact that they got greedy and ended up losing big was entirely predictable, and was a hypothetical which many warned them about.

[Brickbat]

5. Exactly. A big step in "being prepared" is "don't be greedy -- ever."

That goes a long way toward being ready to do the right thing.