One of the saddest elements of living in a car-dependent suburb or exurb is that everything you need requres getting in a car. Whether it's a loaf of bread or gallon of milk. For the last 50 years this has meant a short drive to the regional grocery store or strip mall.
But with the crash of the suburban economy, we are now seeing the regional shops close at an alarming rate, some new spaces never get tenants at all. Will suburbanites soon be forced to drive back into the city just to get some groceries?
What a strange turn of events since the White-flight to the suburbs that began in the 1950s.
Sacramento Real Estate Statistics
Kunstler's take on this new trend...
The American public has no idea how over all that is. The bottom is falling out under not only the housing market (as in houses up for sale) but on the whole apparatus for delivering future houses, and the car-oriented crap associated with it. The production home-builders, such as Toll Brothers, Hovanian, Pulte, et cetera are going down and they will not be coming back. There will be a great deal of wishing that they might come back, but they won't. Likewise, the commercial builders of all the various forms of suburban retail will be waiting to "turn the corner." But they will discover that the wall they have hit has no corner. It's just a wall.
Peak Oil
NYT on the coming construction loan crash.
No comments:
Post a Comment