It’s not our cities that are in big trouble: what will fill the empty homes and lots of suburban America?
Timothy Egan addresses this question in his latest nytimes.blog post, “slumburbia.” “Nobody is home in the cities of the future,” Egan writes. and then he notes, “Though sick, foreclosure alley is not terminal. This is not Detroit with sunshine. It will be reborn, remade, inhabited. The question is: as what?”
As what indeed. Egan rejects Christopher B. Leinberger’s thesis in “The Next Slum?” (Atlantic, March 2008) – that the areas with the most foreclosures would be turned into slums, homes into tenements. Instead of embracing such a fate, Egan puts his trust in an esoteric guardian: “Through it all, the country churns and expands, unlike most other Western democracies. That great American natural resource — tomorrow — will have to save the suburban slums.”
Leinberger’s article is powerful stuff, though written several years ago, and Egan admits to its influence. Leinberger references such statistics as this: “In the first half of last year, residential burglaries rose by 35 percent and robberies by 58 percent in suburban Lee County, Florida, where one in four houses stands empty. Charlotte’s crime rates have stayed flat overall in recent years—but from 2003 to 2006, in the 10 suburbs of the city that have experienced the highest foreclosure rates, crime rose 33 percent.”
“For 60 years, Americans have pushed steadily into the suburbs, transforming the landscape and (until recently) leaving cities behind. But today the pendulum is swinging back toward urban living, and there are many reasons to believe this swing will continue. As it does, many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and ’70s—slums characterized by poverty, crime, and decay.”
Ultimately, Leinberger’s point isn’t just about the slums – it’s also about the trend towards urban living among middle class citizens. Salted with an impressive array of demographic statistics, he takes the reader on a trip across the decades, highlighting the living styles of Americans for the past century or so.
Of course, Leinberger was writing in March 2008, when the worst was just beginning, and we all saw the future as particularly bleak. Egan’s perspective, tempered by time and the recent upward trend, is understandably more hopeful. I wouldn’t go as far as to disagree with Leinberger — knowing the enemy helps you better combat him; but when it’s all said and done, I find myself more aligned with Egan.
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