[pdxtex]

Originally Posted by jpdivola

Yeah, I'm very bullish on the American suburbs. Sure the urban infill is super sexy and gets all the attention. But, at the end of the day, it's one of those phenomenons that gets attention out of proportion to it's actual impact.

Most MSAs of millions of people are seeing at most a few thousand "urban infill" units being built in their central cities. Now this is a dramatic increase from the 80s and 90s when virtually everything was being suburban and nobody wanted to be in cities. But, at the end of the day, this isn't very much relative to the size of most MSAs.

New urban development is simply too hard to recreate to ever be more than an expensive niche for the affluent. The most expensive part is desirable urban land of which there is a finite amount. Sure there are lots of central parking lots that can be built on, but those lots are expensive. Other central neighborhoods have vacant inexpensive land, but those are typically low income, high crime areas that aren't likely to attract middle income people paying market rate on new construction. It's only in super expensive cities like NYC, SF, and DC where those type of projects are viable.

Most urban cities are under built and have room for growth, but underbuilt by thousands of units,not the million of units US MSAs would need to permanently shut down the sprawl machine.

Now, I do think, we will see "faux new urban suburban developments" become more popular. But, these will generally be self contained walkable developments like Kentlands in suburban DC.

do you think suburban tastes are changing too? im not sure americans are ready for toronto style suburbia but maybe we should be. i think the notion that suburbia has to be a green backyard and driveway off a cul de sac needs to change. americans can live a walkable, urbanist life 15 miles from the CBD but as a nation, but first we need to get over the notion that three people require a 1/4 acre of land.....i dunno. also, the days of the urban ghetto are numbered as an entire generation that didn't grow up with under the shadow of racial strife their parents experienced return to the city...what happens to minorities that get priced out of central neighborhoods needs to be addressed though. so far, they just end up getting pushed out to the suburban fringe and the ghetto just moves from the central core to the outer ring. central city planning really needs to step up nationwide put on their thinking caps to help solve this inversion. so i think more then anything, the central city and suburbs are going to see concurrent booms, well at least in markets that are growing anyway...