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America's fastest-growing suburbs are about to get expensive
Sprawl made suburbia affordable. Now it’s breaking it. Here’s what a new vision of the suburbs could look like.
Gyourko, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School who decades ago documented slowing housing growth in superstar cities like New York and San Francisco, told me he was surprised to find the same pattern again unfolding, as if on a 20-year lag, in a region known for its lax regulations and enthusiasm for building things. After the war, a complex alchemy of factors — including a national economic and population boom, federally backed mortgages that favored suburban homes, a Great Depression- and war-era housing shortage, and white flight — produced one of the greatest social and spatial transformations in the country’s history. To a great extent, that’s what’s happened, and it’s given us lots of single-family homes, but also a mind-boggling expanse of costly, deteriorating infrastructure, nightmare commutes, unrestrained greenhouse gas emissions, sedentary, disease-promoting lifestyles, and one of the highest car crash death rates in the developed world.
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