Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Defending Suburbia

Richard Murdocco at The Foggiest Idea, his site about land use on Long Island, posts a concise, controlled rant about preconceptions about suburbs that get in the way of clear vision of what's happening on the ground. While dome-headed planners despair of ever "fixing" the suburbs' thirst for sprawl, Murdocco argues, market forces—the price of land, the foreclosure crises, lenders' preference for multi-family homes—are inducing developers to create precisely the kind of walkable downtown neighborhoods the planners say suburbanites are too barbaric to adopt.