February 26, 2008
mommy, there's a crack house in the our cul-de-sac
Those who have been gleefully awaiting the decline and fall of america's suburban empire received a delightful treat in the March issue of the Atlantic Monthly:
"At Windy Ridge, a recently built starter-home development seven miles northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, 81 of the community’s 132 small, vinyl-sided houses were in foreclosure as of late last year. Vandals have kicked in doors and stripped the copper wire from vacant houses; drug users and homeless people have furtively moved in. In December, after a stray bullet blasted through her son’s bedroom and into her own, Laurie Talbot, who’d moved to Windy Ridge from New York in 2005, told The Charlotte Observer, “I thought I’d bought a home in Pleasantville. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that stuff like this would happen.”"
[the windy ridge subdivision, via google]
Towards the end of the article, Leinberger engages in a bit of interesting speculation about the future of these homes:
"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.The experience of cities during the 1950s through the ’80s suggests that the fate of many single-family homes on the metropolitan fringes will be resale, at rock-bottom prices, to lower-income families—and in all likelihood, eventual conversion to apartments."
It would be nice if the article had spent a bit more time exploring these burgeoning dystopias (and the reactions of the shocked homeowners) and little less time developing the standard urban planner's argument about suburbs and density (suburbs are bad, density is good, zoning, tax incentives, and nimbyism distort market demand in favor of large lot development, etc.). [Charlotte's newspaper, the Charlotte Observer, has done exactly that here]. I say this not so much because I disagree with those standard arguments (though they're often pushed in an unseemly fashion by Kunstler-types, I think they're essentially correct), but because the process of decay is much more interesting (and at least as important -- people will be living in those rentals, after all). This flickr set of the Detroit public school's (abandoned) book depository provides an ample demonstration of the potential attractiveness of decay. You can read a follow post by the photographer here, in which the photographer notes some of the danger implicit in romanticizing decay.
[from sweetjuniper on flickr; link above]