All signs point to its continued declined. While the redevelopment of older inner-ring suburbs can take advantage of its proximity to the City and transit, what about the older “outer-ring” suburbs? From what I have read, there is no “one size fits all” approach. And complicating matters is the long-time residents lack of openness to change, with reactions being far more reactive (put money into public safety, no redevelopment, kick out the immigrants, etc.-see http://www.loudoun.gov/Default.aspx?tabid=2132). Yet, the decline continues. Perplexing indeed.

Those suburbs further out that have a commercial strip mall once every mile at intersections are going to have a rougher time of it if the real estate market continues in free fall, and exurbia, forget it.

Still, the credit crunch seems to be thawing a bit. Look at data from November and December.

I love the penultimate paragpraph of the original article:

“That three-car-garaged McMansions can be subdivided into rental units with streetfront cafés, shops and other local businesses”.

What planet do these people live on? As Richard points out in his introduction, these suburbs have extremely low dwelling per hectare density – that’s even before you factor in the even lower people per hectare density (the wealthier families that live in these areas having far fewer children and dependents) – would you want to open a cafe, shop or other local business where a) there is no passing traffic b) there are very few people and c) no-one walks anywhere?

Bulldoze them, cover them in parkland, hike taxes on car fuel. That will force people to move closer to jobs, and into more space-efficient homes.

There are so many agendas. Suburbia and McMansions might have possibilities we haven’t yet imagined.

Maybe this is trying to squeeze everything into a limited paradynm of separate living. Those McMansions might be great group living spaces for extended families, young singles, etc., who could also share cars and other big ticket items. It might also provide enough density for some transit.

Some immigrant groups whose culture is more extended family communal are already fitting more than one “nuclear family” and their elders into a big house with a yard. My aunt in Salinas has complained about this for years.

And I don’t know about McMansion with storefront cafes, but with some zoning changes small businesses could be run out of them — with the owners living next to rather than over the shop. Some old Victorian houses had offices with separate entrances for professionals like doctors. Tele-commuting and FedEx expand these possibilities much further.

Certainly in Chicago but even in my hometown of Detroit the suburbs I’d consider older i.e. those that were more or less fully developed before World War II and the post war era of freeway construction are generally quite amenable to redevelopment. While they may not have the density of older urban cores they were usually built along rail lines the the Chicago suburbs Buzzcut talks about. This is true even in Metro Detroit where the old rail and streetcar lines are long gone. Suburbs like Ferndale, Royal Oak, Dearborn, and Wyandotte were either developed with their own smaller cores along the old transit routes or grew from smaller market towns that those transit routes were built to reach. In an era of cheap gas and oversized appliances they fell out of favor, losing population to newer more distant suburbs served by the postwar freeways but they seem ripe for redevelopment if we can keep some local politicians from implementing harebrained re-zoning schemes requiring larger house and lot sizes and massive amounts of new parking for commercial development as means of increasing property tax revenues and fees.

* By relative I mean county population change relative to total state population change. Growing 5% during a period when the total state growth was flat was as more of a relative success than growing 10% in a state with overall population growth of 15%.

“Adaptability” is a great criterion, imo, for evaluating built form. Maybe McMansions are the residential correlate to corporate office buildings? Both are very hard to adapt to different uses.

I look at all the small condo units that go up in my city, none of which are suitable for families (and square-footage-wise, it’s still much cheaper to buy a SFH in the suburbs), and I wonder who will be using all those 400 to 700 sq.ft. units a generation from now. I’ve asked developers and architects whether it’s possible to build them with options for combining two units to make one large one, but the idea is usually dismissed as unworkable for financial reasons. However (unless their financing collapses), at least two developers plan to build condos with added-on “lock-offs,” studio-sized condos that can be locked off from inside the main condo and also accessed from the hallway. These are intended as secondary suites for renting out by the main condo unit owner (mortgage helpers), or as teenager suites, elder relative suites, care-giver/maid suites, etc.

Maybe thinking about the adaptability of buildings is sort of like having a five-year plan in economics, vs. looking only at the quarterly profit reports. Too bad “quarterly” thinking spread like kudzu to other social areas.