The Future of the Suburbs
Very interesting interview with Christopher Leinberger about the future of the suburbs. The point he’s making is perhaps helpfully illustrated by this photo of the Ballston area in Arlington County, VA — one of DC’s extremely successful semi-urban suburbs:
Interesting. So what can DC teach us as an example?
What we’re learning about the DC area is that there are 30 of these walkable communities here. I’m only talking about regionally significant places, not individual neighborhoods. So, for instance, downtown DC, Reston, Bethesda and so on. Of these places, 90 percent are on the metro system and most of the rest will be linked into it in the next five years. So that’s a pretty obvious correlation right there. But most of these walkable places are in the suburbs.What’s the lesson?
This structural trend is about the transformation of the suburbs into something else. I’ve been doing some research looking at the price premiums on a per-square-foot basis for walkable communities. They get a price premium between 40 and 200 percent. I’ve also been looking at what I call the “penumbra.” A walkable place is typically 50 to 500 acres in size. The penumbra, that area around it, can be even bigger.Almost like micro suburbs.
Yes. These places are still suburban but they are within walking distance of the walkable places. This “penumbra” is seeing premiums of 20 to 80 percent over the rest of the market.
The future of a well-done metro area wouldn’t be everything looking like this particular block. Rather, what they have in Arlington is a long high-density, highly-walkable corridor stretched out along a metro line. That then creates lots of more traditionally “suburban” space that’s still within walking distance of the corridor. A metro area should, ideally, have a whole bunch of corridors like that which then converge to create a downtown. Then the wedges between the corridors serve the way traditional suburbs do today. The result is a real mix of housing options and neighborhood types.
71 Responses to “The Future of the Suburbs”
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February 11th, 2009 at 8:54 am
I used to be an enthusiastic New Urbanism/Smart Growth advocate until what an impractical sham it was. People will never give up their 2200 sq. ft. houses, and will most certainly never give up double garages. They will find a minimum yard space also non-negotiable. (My experience has been that 35′ x 125′ lot sizes come pretty close)
Given those constraints, what would work for both environmentalists and suburbanites is the English-style commuter train-based suburb. There was a treatise written actually a hundred years ago on the very subject, but the point of it is, we can have public transportation with existing densities. What would it take would require a strong commuter rail system with the attendant drop-off zone/day parking lot at each station, so the commuter will drop off his car at his station and take the train downtown for work. In this manner, the use of the car is largely reduced to local or lifestyle uses rather than daily commuting ones, which present the bigger public policy headache.
By the way, this is exactly how it works in Sydney. Bedroom communities are here to stay, and we might as well make the best of it instead of snubbing them out of Utopian instinct. Stop worrying about all those New Urbanist tripe; get some commuter rail in those suburbs please already.
February 11th, 2009 at 9:14 am
Of course, living in Ballston will probably require the average upper middle class white family to give up having children. The price of private schools make living in Ballston very unappealling.
February 11th, 2009 at 9:15 am
Useful link to Leinberger at Brookings:
http://www.brookings.edu/topics/walkable-urbanism.aspx
February 11th, 2009 at 9:29 am
what really matters, when ranking DC neighborhoods, is the number of Super Mutants and Centaurs per block.
February 11th, 2009 at 9:30 am
Is it possible that part of the reason DC’s suburbs have evolved this way is the height limit put on buildings? Since this forces a spreading of the demographic that wants walkable neighborhoods it increases demand throughout the area.
February 11th, 2009 at 9:31 am
Ballston is a bad example. It has a shopping mall which generates a large infusion of money and consumers from a surrounding area much larger than any “penumbra”. That can’t be replicated on a consistant basis.
Clarendon is a more honest example.
There are also cases though, of the opposite of Ballston. Pentagon City has a large mall, a huge nearby employer, a metro stop, and is really not a very walkable area.
February 11th, 2009 at 9:36 am
superdestroyer — actually the Arlington public schools are among the best in the nation. The public high school within easy walking distance of the Ballston neighborhood is listed in the US News top 50 high schools in the country. It’s also quite diverse ethnically, with no race being a majority. Unfortunately, because the communities are so attractive, housing prices have been rising (even holding steady in the current market), which reduces economic diversity to some extent.
Myles — some people will “give up” their 2200 square feet and 2 car garages. Indeed Leinberger’s identified places have very few of either, and are much sought after. What we need is marketplace diversity of product; what we’ve tended to have over the last 50 years is uniform product.
February 11th, 2009 at 9:46 am
Great, all we need now is for some giant government employers like the DoD and NIH to relocate to every major city in America.
You realize that the median income in the metro DC area is much much much much higher than the national average. Excluding the poor parts of DC which you would NOT want to be walking in after sunset. I don’t think this model is applicable to the rest country because the rest of the country is not filled with government workers and their spouses who work for government contractors.
February 11th, 2009 at 9:53 am
Myles,
Single family homes on 4375 square foot lots – that is, about 10 residential units per net acre – IS New Urbanism.
February 11th, 2009 at 10:11 am
Ballston is a bad example. It has a shopping mall which generates a large infusion of money and consumers from a surrounding area much larger than any “penumbra”. That can’t be replicated on a consistant basis.
I refuse to believe that the Ballston Commmon “Mall” has anything to do with drawing people or money to the area. That is the most pathetic excuse for a shopping mall that ever existed.
February 11th, 2009 at 10:15 am
It may be dubbed the “Boulevard of Death,” but Queens Boulevard is the grand-daddy of Wilson Boulevard in Arlington. Both possible because of an underground train. Both support a spine of high-density. Both allow walkable “suburban” neighborhoods to wedge in and utilize the underground, too.
February 11th, 2009 at 10:16 am
DTM:
Article:
Me:
Higher median income means more people can afford to pay that price premium.
February 11th, 2009 at 10:21 am
Charlotte, NC is the prime example of a city taking this approach to reshape development patterns. Check out their development framework, called “Centers, Corridors, and Wedges.”
http://www.charmeck.org/Departments/Planning/Area+Planning/Centers+Corridors+and+Wedges/Home.htm
I’m guessing that JimboSlice is suggesting that a family or individual needs a high income in order to live in a walkable, transit-served neighborhood. It’s true that you will pay more per square foot, but one of the reasons that housing in these areas are relatively expensive is that there are so few of them. There are more people who want the type of lifestyle that goes along with walkable urbanism, but there are not enough of these types of neighborhoods. When you look at the picture nationally, there are only a handful of cities that provide this type of community, driving up the housing prices in those cities that do (NYC, SF, DC, etc).
Also, when one considers savings in transportation costs, living in a walkable, transit-rich environment can be less expensive than an auto-dependent suburb.
February 11th, 2009 at 10:21 am
I grew up in a neighborhood where most houses were about 2000 sq ft built on a 1/4 acre. We didn’t have a car. There was no convenient rail transit. Most people walked to the store just fine. There were a few apartments that supplemented the density, but not many.
I remember seeing the changes as stores of all kinds grew, became more efficient and put local stores out of business, culminating in the superstores like Home Depot and Wal Mart. I think part of the competitive advantage of big stores is going to disappear. They can’t match the internet for variety of selection, low inventory costs, low labor costs, low infrastructure costs. Those are the things that made it worthwhile to burn a tank of gas. If big stores lose those advantages, and fuel prices rise, you’ll see small stores become economically viable even in less dense neighborhoods.
I’ve seen some things that I think are really indicative of things to come.
In a DC suburban luxury townhome development that was having trouble selling, one of the houses was turned into a Subway franchise. They have almost no outside traffic, but are doing well.
In my neighborhood, a local guy used to drive through selling fresh produce from a small truck. His business was great. He bought a bigger truck and stocked it with groceries. His business is better. There are about 6 forclosed townhomes in my development that have been empty for a year. If he turned one of them into an old fashioned “corner store”, he’d do very well. I bet zoning wouldn’t allow it though.
There are probably a lot of developments that would be walkable if there were anything to walk to.
February 11th, 2009 at 10:26 am
Um, no, Jimbo, higher median income is the reason that price premium exists in the first place.
February 11th, 2009 at 10:26 am
Three blocks from this picture is all detached, single family homes with nice, standard sized yards. And jmm is right, Arlington schools are some of the best in Virginia, which has some of the best in the country. I used to live about 2 miles closer in to DC from this neighborhood, and while I lived in an apartment building, my walk to the Metro was completely through a very family friendly neighborhood of single family houses with yards. Living in low traffic, low crime, high pedestrian neighborhoods like those in North Arlington is one of the most kid-friendly ways to raise a family–you can send your 12 year old down to the corner store to pick up some milk, because it’s a very safe three block walk away, with plenty of neighborly eyes on the street to keep kids safe when they’re out and about.
New urbanism isn’t about childless hipsters; it’s about rebuilding the places that will return communal responsibility and involvement in raising the next generation.
February 11th, 2009 at 10:29 am
“There are probably a lot of developments that would be walkable if there were anything to walk to.”
Bingo. Out here in the southwest, there are a huge number of apartment complexes which have the density to support walkable communities but don’t even have sidewalks. It’s less a matter of increasing density than of putting density in the right places.
February 11th, 2009 at 10:30 am
Jimboslice -
I think you’ve got your economics backwards. There is a price premium because it is desirable, and because there is a limited supply. It shows that people want to buy it.
Therefore, if governments allow more dense corridors to be built, people will want to buy homes in them. Also, if more is built, the price will decrease (allowing more than just the affluent to purchase).
It seems that you are implying that people desire this kind of area “because” they have high incomes (and therefore people in lower income areas would not like it), a premise which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
February 11th, 2009 at 10:34 am
You are correct that a system of park-and-ride lots can expand the reach of commuter rail in such neighborhoods, although you can also achieve a similar effect with well-timed feeder bus routes, or a Bus Rapid Transit system where such local buses convert to express buses with dedicated rights of way.
Sure, if you can prove to me, no problem. But we are talking about low-density neighborhoods,and thus by definition people will still need to drive or be driven to the bus stops, or there would be too many stops per population and it wouldn’t be economy feasible. To have a transit system viable for the daily commuting classes nowadays parking space is of the absolute essence. And also, there is I think a visceral middle-class dislike of buses as opposed to trains. You can get a guy in a suit to take the train pretty comfortably, but he would be less psychologically comfortable on a bus. I used to live in a place with lots of feeder and express, and they were ill-used by the middle classes. I think this is due to fact that commuter trains are perceived to be inherently middle-class whereas buses are not.
Although it is all rather unimportant, in the grander scheme of things. The biggest traffic problems aren’t inter-neighborhood motoring, it is daily long-distance commuting motoring. Whether people use cars, feeder buses, or whatever buses to get to their train station, as long as they are actually using trains or something of that nature, is really just quibble. The really big picture is how people get from Levittown to Downtown on a daily basis, not how people get from Family Home to Levittown Train Station. If people want to drive for that purpose, all the power to them: I couldn’t care less; Levittown neighborhood roads aren’t clogged. I just want to be able to actually drive from Levittown to Downtown on the occasional day I actually need to use the car and not get completely clogged, Caracas-style, on the highway.
February 11th, 2009 at 10:35 am
“The price of private schools makes living in Ballston unappealing.”
Fortunately, Arlington public schools are among the best in the nation.
The idea that the Ballston mall provides the energy for Ballston’s newly won currency borders on fantasy. The Ballston mall has been losing tenants for a long time and was more of a drag on the area than a draw. It has only hung on by remaking itself into more of a community focused destination: theaters, ice skating rink, and mega sports club.
The “flagship” mall in Arlington is Pentagon City, in a walkable community in its own right. Even there, most of the recent development has focused on non-mall projects, such as storefront “courtyard” type retail + apartment building development.
In other words, in Arlington, the malls are actually a bit of a detraction, not an attraction.
And as for the price premium, I have often thought that one reason why Arlington (and Bethesda, etc.) are so expensive is because there aren’t enough other communities like them. If they became the model, they wouldn’t command such relative high prices.
This is also the reason for the “super sizing” of houses in Arlington’s “wedge” neighborhoods, which is directly correlated to underlying land values that make it difficult for development to focus on anything less than that.
February 11th, 2009 at 10:46 am
Ok for the people saying I have it backwards I’ll pose a simple question: which costs more to build – housing in the Ballston neighborhood or housing in say Manassas, VA. I will grant you that the value of the land is a function of desirability, but the overall construction costs to put something on that land is higher in a dense population center versus an exurb. You are only going to pay that price premium for construction if people are willing to pay the price premium for the housing.
Plus you have more public utilities that must be built alongside the housing. Those public utilities costs $$ and you need a strong tax base so that you can pay for it. Those pruned trees and fancy light fixtures don’t appear out of nowhere.
February 11th, 2009 at 11:03 am
I wish I could find the post where you had a overhead google maps shot of the Wilson Blvd cooridor and said it wasn’t dense enough.
February 11th, 2009 at 11:13 am
JimboSlice,
“Which costs more to build…” High rise housing costs more to build per square foot. That doesn’t mean that the cost per unit or per bedroom has to be higher, but you won’t have as much space.
One of the most concrete illustrations of construction costs can be found here, on an analysis of building in San Francisco (page 6):
http://www.sfgov.org/site/uploadedfiles/planning/Citywide/pdf/EN-Package_5-22-08_WEB.pdf
The wonderful thing about urbanism done right is that the public realm is much improved so that private space isn’t as important. Now these are value judgments, some will want more space over public amenities.
I will argue that the cost of utilities and service provision (police, fire, EMS, water mains, sewers) is higher in low-density areas (especially per capita) than in areas with higher density because everything is so spread out. And areas with higher density to generally provide a strong tax base because you have more residents per acre.
February 11th, 2009 at 11:20 am
Independent of the value of land it costs more to build up then it does to build out. If you live in a dense area and land is at a premium, then building up makes economic sense. If you live in an exurb and land is cheap then you can build out. But the point is that it costs more per sq ft to build in that dense area than in the suburban area, and hence you need richer people willing to pay that $$.
This is all independent from the notion that you need people with large disposable incomes to frequent the small shops and restaurants that make the area walkable. And guess what, areas with higher median incomes have people with more disposable income to spend!
February 11th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Of course, living in Ballston will probably require the average upper middle class white family to give up having children. The price of private schools make living in Ballston very unappealling.
Why only white families? Is it cheaper for non-white children to attend private school? And why is private school such a necessary expense when the public schools in Arlington are excellent?
February 11th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
The gist of superdestroyer’s post is transparently Urbanism = N*ggers! = Flee for your lives! But this tells you nothing about the guy that you didn’t already know, namely that this is someone to be ignored.
February 11th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
If you actually go to an exurb where land prices are cheap, you will soon discover that you need to pay for other things- for example, a well for your water, several hundred feet of power line to reach the road, a dish for your tv, and of course, higher insurance prices because hydrants are further away, if you even have them.
Most of this discussion revolves around suburban land that is absurdly expensive unless you compare it to a townhouse near Dupont Circle.
In fact, the argument is only possible because of the affluence. In my rural county there is no doubt at all about the costs of sprawl- it is bankrupting us, and sickening county residents when septic systems and wells fail. We may be hicks, but we are hicks who can add and subtract, and no developer around here gets a green light until they’ve paid upfront fees to cover sewage and power systems and increased fire and police protection.
Who knows, with everyone going broke, this hardnosed approach may even be applied in affluent suburbs in the future.
February 11th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
Is it cheaper for non-white children to attend private school? And why is private school such a necessary expense when the public schools in Arlington are excellent?
The social expectation for upper middle-class families in the DC area is pretty unambiguously private schooling. It is not like NYC where it is seen as quite normal for an affluent family to sent its kids to a competitive public. Private schooling is a the prevailing fact of life for anyone who can afford it in DC.
That’s simply how the cookie crumbles in that part of the country.
February 11th, 2009 at 2:05 pm
I know professional class people who moved to Arlington specifically for the public schools. So I think you are overgeneralizing.
Perhaps. But I do dread it when people bring up DC area and public schooling in the same sentence. For the most part it is simply not done. I am not too familiar with Arlington in particular, of course.
February 11th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
I am not too familiar with Arlington in particular, of course.
Obviously.
Except for one home-schooling family, I don’t know anybody who lives in Arlington who doesn’t, or didn’t, send their kids to the public schools. Of course, my peer group (government lawyers, mostly) doesn’t qualify as middle class if you apply the Republican definition ($500K annual income).
February 11th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Yeah Myles, you probably shouldn’t claim to know much about DC area schools if you think Arlington families mostly send their kids to private schools. DC families move to Arlington for the schools so they don’t have to worry about affording private school. I think what you say is true for DC itself, but aggressively not true for the first-ring suburbs (Bethesda, Arlington, Silver Spring, Fairfax).
February 11th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
The price of private schools make living in Ballston very unappealling.
Arlington’s schools are excellent.
February 11th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
I wonder how I can take such threads as these seriously when I don’t see Tokyo, or Japan even mentioned. It seems obvious that no one here has ever been there. And you can’t figure the phenomenon of Japan out by just going to visit for a week. If there is anyone qualified and serious, I can hook you up with some people at Japan Housing and Urban Development (Juutakuseibi Koudan).
February 11th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
I’d just like to echo one of the comments above.
I live in a northern NJ suburb that’s plenty walkable. The problem is that there’s nothing to walk to. There’s a convenience store (which is nice for getting milk/bread, letting me go to the supermarket less often), one restaurant, one pizza place (delivery only), an ice cream stand (with nowhere to sit), a lawyer, dentist, a few medical offices, an auto shop, two banks, a gym, and (I kid you not) four, FOUR nail salons.
The problem where I am isn’t infrastructure, it’s the character of the business district. These places don’t complement one another in the sense that I might hit several in one trip, none inspire me to hang out in the area, there’s no bar or coffee house or other entertainment venue to go to.
A few miles away there’s a slightly bigger strip which is about a mile long and seems to do it right – there’s two Starbucks and an indy coffee house, a used book store, an indy movie theater, a variety of restaurants and bars, and several other boutique niche retailers.
Course, I can’t afford to live over there, the apartments being several hundred dollars more expensive in that area.
But the point is that the difference between these two areas isn’t infrastructure or lack thereof. It’s the diversity and character of the local businesses. The latter has businesses that actually serve the local community. There’s a trick to that, though I’m not sure what the trick is.
February 11th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
Eric’s point illustrates the need for residential density to support retail diversity and abundance.
February 11th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
Myles, I think you have conclusively proved you don’t know what you are talking about what is “done” in D.C. Arlington public schools are so good that there are virtually no non-Catholic private schools in Arlington and almost no one in Arlington sends their children to private schools. Ballston is three blocks from a public high school that routinely makes it onto the list of the top 100 high schools in the country. Give it a rest.
February 11th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
Unpiling from Myles for a minute, and returning to the original point about “streetcar suburbs”: A couple of years ago I had to drive around the Chicago area quite a bit, at a time when the expressways were utterly impassible due to construction, so I put in a lot of miles driving on surface streets. I drove through a lot of suburbs that were strip-club sleazy, and through a lot of suburbs that were just dreary. Whenever I came to a suburb that made me think “This would be a nice place to live,” I looked around and there was a Metra (commuter rail) station in the middle of the commercial district.
(Specific examples: Park Ridge. Lagrange. Elmhurst.)
February 11th, 2009 at 5:19 pm
You highlight the trick in the previous sentence.
The rich(er) people live there, so they can frequent the shops more often and pay the little price premium that keeps the shops running. One key to a successful business is having enough paying customers around – rich densely populated neighborhoods provide just that thing. Since there are only a limited # of rich people in each metro area the number and size of these districts will be finite.
February 11th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
A lot of people who assume that large single-family houses with yards are the natural habitat for Americans don’t realize that only 26% of today’s households are married couples with children. Higher density housing often makes a lot of sense for the other 3/4 of households — and even for a lot of families. Vancouver’s new downtown elementary school is already overflowing, with children accounting for one in eight residents of its new, mixed-income high-rise neighborhoods.
February 11th, 2009 at 6:05 pm
Vancouver’s new downtown elementary school is already overflowing, with children accounting for one in eight residents of its new, mixed-income high-rise neighborhoods.
Funny you mentioned Vancouver. Guess what’s the price for a single-bedroom condo downtown right now? In excess of $500,000. Couldn’t even fit a couple, less a family. Most people can hardly afford a decent sized house in Vancouver; not a model for America at large.
I don’t even know why you brought it up.
February 11th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
I live in Arlington with my husband and two kids. Being close to DC was a priority for us — we gave up having a bigger house with a bigger yard in order to live close to the city and have a shorter commute. I think we’re pretty typical.
We didn’t even realize when we first moved here how good the Arlington public schools were. The main reason is that they are very well funded by the community. I believe there is an agreement between the county and the school board that about 50% of tax revenues go to the schools. In the meanwhile, only about 17% of people in Arlington have kids, so we’re being subsidized by a lot of young people, DINKs, the elderly, and families who no longer have kids in the house.
Also, the buildup of shops along the Clarendon-Ballston corridor (as well as its various malls) gives Arlington a very stable tax base. Another benefit is that Arlington is a relatively small county, so its easier to manage than, for example, Fairfax (which is one of the largest counties in the U.S.).
I better stop touting the benefits of Arlington — too many people will want to move here!
Lisa
February 11th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
D.C. doesn’t seem to me to be a good model for arguments about suburbia. Unless the government goes bust, it isn’t in danger of becoming Telegraph road. What will happen to the suburbs of relatively poor cities that don’t have a large population bringing money in from other states and other countries?
February 11th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
Washington D.C. is one city and Arlington is one suburb. People who think Arlington is the wave of the future need to get out more. Try visiting some of the counties further out in Virginia and Maryland, and then you’ll see just how silly it is to think Arlington represents the way people want to live.
February 12th, 2009 at 12:01 am
Myles, take a look at any introductory text in New Urbanism (start with, say, “The New Urbanism” by Peter Katz). You’ll find that Ebenezer Howard and his 19th century Garden City concept is pretty fundamental to any history of New Urbanism, and that early 20th century streetcar suburbs are usually considered to be very strong regional precedents.
It’s simply not economically feasible to provide mass transit service, or neighborhood retail, within walking distance in a low-density context. Businesses and buses just don’t make economic sense without a mass of paying customers nearby. That’s why you need higher densities to support these amenities; there’s no free lunch in planning, either.
February 12th, 2009 at 12:34 am
Myles, I’d be a little less aggressive about being wrong. In Concord Pacific Place, the largest development in downtown Vancouver, 25% of housing units are family sized (3+ bedrooms) and 15.5% is affordable.
And you know what? The market rate units are expensive because people really, really like living there; 97% of residents surveyed would recommend it to a friend. Thousands of families have plunked down billions of dollars to live in places like downtown Vancouver. You can’t have it both ways: if high density living wasn’t popular or realistic (which you claim), it wouldn’t be expensive (which you also claim). Leinberger’s entire argument rests on the fact that pleasant, walkable places are in high demand and thus become very expensive.
Higher median incomes have nothing to do with the price differential between un-walkable and walkable places. A place with lower incomes and overall lower property values would still see the same differential in land values; it might not be as dramatic, but it will still exist.
February 12th, 2009 at 3:13 am
Indeed, think about shuttles at airports for things like extended parking lots or hotels. I don’t know a lot of middle-class people who refuse to use them, and yet those are buses. Hence, it isn’t the vehicle, it is the nature of the service (and, perhaps, the nature of the other riders).
No, I think it’s the vehicles. Have you not ever been on a bus? In the former Eastern Bloc city where I am living, where people are pretty far from having “American middle class attitudes”, whatever these are supposed to be, if you talk to people about getting around, there is a pretty definite mental hierarchy: a train is better than a tram, a tram is better than a trolleybus, a trolleybus is better than a bus, and a bus is better than crawling. A private automobile is best of all, but given the traffic and one of Europe’s most appalling road fatality rates, I am personally inclined to disagree.
February 12th, 2009 at 6:20 am
yuppies and bohos talking about the best suburbs and how good their schools are
enlightening
February 12th, 2009 at 9:48 am
Basically fact of the matter is, housing is unaffordable ANYWHERE in Vancouver, not just in Downtown. There is virtually nowhere in the City of Vancouver where you can buy a house and pay the mortgage (reasonably) with middle-class income and not have the mortgage payments eat up 40% of your income. Of course, people still do, but they pay a terrible price in terms of income being taken up for mortgages. I call your bullshit.
Not something anyone else should want to imitate. Same reason people don’t go about imitating Manhattan urban policy; economically unaffordable. The whole point of post-war housing policy has been widespread homeownership; needless to say, Vancouver prices do that cause no good. Complete, utter bullshit. The only place that’s remotely affordable and still accessible to working in downtown are the neighbourhoods near West Coast Express stations.
February 12th, 2009 at 11:15 am
If you talk to people in Vancouver, many blame the impending winter olympics for the staggering increase in prices.
Also, regarding the way people want to live — I run into so many tourists in D.C. who are in awe of its metro, who say, gosh, it would be great to have something like this at home.
It’s a complete failure on the part of their local and state governments that no one has even tried.
February 13th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
You mean, like Del Ray? We’ve got tall apartments at both ends, more tall apartments and offices on the Metro station end [Braddock Road], surrounded by small (like 1000 SqFt) SFHs and garden apts, all converging on a walkable “main street” strip containing locally-owned shops and restaurants? Oh, and community-center facilities, local schools, bike paths, landscaping (i.e., trees), bus service…
I love my neighborhood…I hope that your new neighborhood goes from Vacant-lot land to the downtown DC equivalent before your eyes!
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