Suburbs May Turn To Slums, Says the Stranger Atlantic Magazine

"The Next Slum" is the name of the article in the March Atlantic (not online yet), and Seattle gets lots of mentions. Author Christopher Leinberger, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, argues that as demographics and energy use changes over the next 15-20 years, there will be a growing surplus of large-lot homes that no one wants, decaying on the market.

While there should be about four million more households with kids in 2025 than in 2000, ten million new single-family homes have already been built. Couple that with surveys that indicate only a third of the population wants the traditional, large-lot, picket-fenced suburban idyll, and that a middle third would be happy with mixed-use, walkable city life if they could afford it, and there's a general, toward-urban-area migration afoot.

Demand for urban housing, he says, is evidenced by a price premium of 40% to 200% per square foot compared to suburban homes "in areas as diverse as New York City, Portland, Oregon; Seattle; and Washington, D.C." Leinberger calls it the appeal of "walkable urbanism." Cashing in on that price premium will drive the developer competition that will bring urban "lifestyle" living back to affordability.

The leftover, cheaply built McMansion developments, he predicts, will be sold to lower income families and eventually get chopped up into rentals. Already, 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.

Not to worry, Eastsiders. Affluent suburbs close to major cities (and connected by rail) are supposed to be able to keep the riff-raff out.

Single-family homes next to the downtowns of Redmond, Washington; Evanston, Illinois; and Birmingham, Michigan, for example, are likely to hold their values just fine.

The suburbs that will suffer are on the fringes, too far away from a central urban core, and not connected by rail transit. With no core of their own to infill and create a critical mass with, they will become "magnets for poverty, crime, and social dysfunction." So the poverty and crime will be a change.