by Francesca Lyman, Special to Sacramento Bee - Is our culture inextricably bound up
with the boundless American dream of suburbia? Judging from the glossy real
estate brochures still selling spacious villas and oversize homes, it seems as
though success, for many, remains the fantasy of driving down a wide,
palm-tree-lined boulevard among the big lawns and mansions of Beverly Hills,
just like the character in Woody Allen's famous scene in "Annie Hall."
This latest burst of the housing bubble, however, has exposed the dark
underside of the suburban dream – with its cascading foreclosures, shuttered
malls and shopping centers – on an enormous scale.
Many experts believe that coming concerns over climate change, and new demographic and economic trends, will cause a booming demand for infill housing. Others fear there isn't enough supply to deliver on this demand, because infill in cities is so much more expensive. The result could be that we're likely to see the opposite happening -- a migration to sprawling greenfields again.
That creates opportunities for designers and city planners to produce shining examples that make "walkable" work, since real estate watchers do agree on a demand for suburbs to remake their cores in the form of traditional cities and downtowns, says David Mogavero, a Sacramento architect specializing in infill projects. Plus, if the patterns of past development were continued at the same rate, the impact on traffic, air quality and farmland "would be devastating," say urban planners like the Sacramento Area Council of Government's Mike McKeever.
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/06/24/4583230/the-conversation-our-new-lots.html#storylink=cpy
Francesca Lyman, special to The
Sacramento Bee, California Forum section
Source: 06/24/2012
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