Amazing video of brand new suburban homes being razed by bulldozer. Apparently, Guaranty Bank of Austin took over the homes in foreclosure – four in a suburban Texas development and another 12 in one suburb in California – and is knocking them down ostensibly to promote a “safe environment” for neighbors, and more likely because it is cheaper to destroy them them to keep them on their books.

This may be just the tip of the iceberg. Once desired, suburban and ex-urban communities with cul-de-sacs, McMansions, and long commutes could be on their way to becoming the blighted and abandoned communities of tomorrow, accelerating the process Chris Leinberger documented in an essay for the magazine in March 2008.

A large and apparently growing share of mortgages are underwater according to this analysis in the Wall Street Journal:

And, the economic crisis appears to be reshaping America’s economic geography in ways that work against the Sunbelt’s cities of sand and sprawl where real estate development became much more than a way to house workers, but a key driver of economic development itself.

Long ago, I asked my colleague, the esteemed urbanist and architect David Lewis, what he thought was the biggest issue of urban revitalization of our time. He responded without hesitation that the eventual decline of sprawling, shoddily constructed, exurban communities would make the urban cores of cities like Philadelphia or even Detroit – with their compact infrastructure, dense neighborhood footprints, and authentic and historic structures – look like a walk in the park. Not to mention that this entire development cycle is a giant waste of resources and a potential drag on long-run economic competitiveness and prosperity.

Urban designer – and my former Carnegie Mellon colleague – David Lewis has long said that our older suburbs are the greatest urban renewal challenge of modern times. Lacking concentration, density, transit, historic architecture, and highly developed infrastructure like older center cities, he said, the suburbs pose a much greater challenge to redevelop. Over at The New York Times’ By Design blog, Allison Arieff offers some interesting perspective – and possible solutions (h/t: Allison Kemper).

The problem now isn’t really how to better design homes and communities, but rather what are we going to do with all the homes and communities we’re left with …  As I learned in artist Julia Christensen’s new book, “Big Box Reuse,” when a big box store like Wal-mart or Kmart outgrows its space, it is shut down. It is, apparently, cheaper to start from scratch than to close for renovation and expansion … The silver lining in Christensen’s study are the communities she’s discovered that have proactively addressed the massive empty shells they’ve been left with, turning structures of anywhere from 20,000 to 280,000 square feet into something useful: a charter school, a health center, a chapel, a library. (And, in Austin, Minn., a new Spam Museum.) …

But exurban communities are a unique challenge. The houses within them are big, but not generally as big as, say, Victorian mansions in San Francisco that can be subdivided into apartments. So they’re not great candidates for transformation into multi-family rental housing.  I did visit a housing development last year that offered “quartets,” McMansions subdivided into four units with four separate entrances. These promised potential buyers the status of a McMansion with the convenience of a condominium, but the concept felt like it was created more to preserve the property values of larger neighboring homes than to serve the needs of the community’s residents …

I still dream that some major overhaul can occur: that a self-sufficient mixed-use neighborhood can emerge. That three-car-garaged McMansions can be subdivided into rental units with streetfront cafés, shops and other local businesses.

Wondering what others think, and strategies you may have come across in communities around the world?

From Newsweek (via Planetizen):

Moribund malls have not gone unnoticed amongst industry analysts and Web sites like Deadmalls.com that feature photos of hundreds of now-abandoned sites. But what were once just worrying signs appear to have finally flat-lined. Last year was the first in half a century that a new indoor mall didn’t open somewhere in the country—a precipitous decline since the mid-1990s when they rose at a rate of 140 a year…

CMU urban designer guru David Lewis long ago predicted that finding ways to reuse and revitalize these dead malls would make inner-city redevelopment look like a walk in the park.