In a previous column, I discussed how the United States is suffering from an apparent “mall-aise”- a rising distaste for the traditional, car-centered shopping mall form that has dominated American retailing for at least a generation.
It may come as little surprise that suburban-style residential uses are also under similar attack. Americans are expressing increased preference toward smaller houses, speculation and overbuilding, which has all but exhausted the demand for “McMansions” in recent years. Suddenly urban residential districts are finding themselves gentrified – that is, suddenly in incredible demand to upscale residents (and often to the detriment of the people already living there). In the past, by contrast, developers couldn’t give their inner-city units away. Lo and behold, shifts in consumers’ tastes and demands have made these once destitute neighborhoods into pricey real estate assets.
Meanwhile, large swathes of American suburbia sit empty and under-used. This problem has been extensively documented all over the country in recent years, exacerbated even further by the recession. Malls, as earlier mentioned, struggle to fill vacancies, and in some cases, board up altogether. Speculative housing developments in suburban Las Vegas, for example, have become the homes of squatters and the victims of metal thieves who steal copper plumbing to resell as a commodity. Sections of suburban Detroit, Flint and Cleveland dried up with the manufacturing jobs that paid for them, a phenomenon leading in some cases to houses selling for as little as $1. All over the Gulf Coast, towns and neighborhoods decimated by weather disasters remain virtually untouched since their abandonment, and entire suburban neighborhoods stand yet to be rebuilt in the wake of disaster.
The picture for suburbia, commercial, residential and industrial, is right now grim. While America is far from a coast-to-coast ghost town, the suburban interpretation of the so-called American Dream is clearly no longer at its prime. Gone are the days of suburban mania, of picket fences in front of cookie-cutter ranch houses and the dominance of the hulking SUVs that filled their driveways. Hollowed out are the halls of suburban shopping malls and the Rustbelt factories that once stocked them.
And while it might seem easy for environmentalists to write off this downfall, to turn back to pruning their vegetable-garden eco-roofs while meth heads systematically deconstruct and sell off the pieces of an overbuilt suburbia just outside of Las Vegas, we must realize that suburbia now represents the most extensive “infill” opportunities in American cities. It’s neither ecological nor economical to let suburbia collapse while proposing consumption of new land to build knock-offs of the gridiron downtowns that once constituted the American city.
Many suburban landowners have already recognized this reality. They have begun, albeit slowly, down the path of converting vacated malls and their accompanying parking lots into more social, more specialized and denser retail and housing units for which a new generation of consumers seem to clamor.
Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson recently exemplified this argument in their book “Retrofitting Suburbia.” They argue that abandoned shopping malls and neighborhoods can and should be redeveloped into non-conventional uses. Instead of exclusive retail centers, they see increased opportunities for malls to become hosts for a range of services – everything from added housing to office sites, from libraries and parks to dance halls and schools. They see suburban residential neighborhoods, once solely devoted to ranch houses and their respective driveways, becoming more diverse and offering uses like higher-density apartments and even restored wildlife reserves that make them more amenable places to live, for people and for animals.
Former parking lots have found themselves converted into the foundations for three- and four-story mixed-use buildings as well as sites of ecological restoration for once filled-in wetlands. And while developers might mourn the death of their beloved single-story mall or sprawling housing development at the hands of urban environmentalists, they must realize that there’s a steady demand to rebuild and reuse entire plots of parking lots and box stores as something more – a retail form driven more by the social experience of commerce than the historically dominant pursuit of the materialistic bottom line. In reality, at least some suburban landowners might be sitting on potential cash cows. This nascent but gradually growing demand means an opportunity for profit, as contradictory as it might seem to the traditional suburban development business model.
Finally, it is important for urban environmentalists to quit merely fantasizing about the arson of suburbia and begin realizing the huge chance for economically productive and more diverse infill that this once-destructive land use now offers. It’s not enough to just halt suburban sprawl under the banner of “Smart Growth.” It’s time to begin actually reversing suburban sprawl, as both the market and environment are beginning to demand it – to turn something that meant destruction of the environment into something that means creation of a more social, inclusive, diverse and environmentally sensitive suburban (or rather, urban) community.
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Saving suburbia
Daily Emerald
April 8, 2009
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