[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.