The new consumption – take 2

As conventional suburban lifestyles fall out of fashion and walkable urban alternatives proliferate, what will happen to obsolete large-lot houses? One might imagine culs-de-sac being converted to faux Main Streets, or McMansion developments being bulldozed and reforested or turned into parks. But these sorts of transformations are likely to be rare. Suburbia’s many small parcels of land, held by different owners with different motivations, make the purchase of whole neighborhoods almost unheard-of. Condemnation of single-family housing for “higher and better use” is politically difficult, and in most states it has become almost legally impossible in recent years. In any case, the infrastructure supporting large-lot suburban residential areas — roads, sewer and water lines — cannot support the dense development that urbanization would require, and is not easy to upgrade. Once large-lot, suburban residential landscapes are built, they are hard to unbuild.

The experience of cities during the 1950s through the ’80s suggests that the fate of many single-family homes on the metropolitan fringes will be resale, at rock-bottom prices, to lower-income families — and in all likelihood, eventual conversion to apartments.

From the March Atlantic, an article called "The next slum?" (Might've caught this sooner if I'd been paying attention.)

Author Christopher Leinberger goes on:

This future is not likely to wear well on suburban housing. Many of the inner-city neighborhoods that began their decline in the 1960s consisted of sturdily built, turn-of-the-century row houses, tough enough to withstand being broken up into apartments, and requiring relatively little upkeep. By comparison, modern suburban houses, even high-end McMansions, are cheaply built.

There's certainly truth in that. (Though I wonder what he means by "little upkeep" on those older houses — especially in an era of high inflation in energy costs.) If you work on houses of varying ages, as I've been doing for some years, you know well enough about the relative solidness of a pre-WW2 house.

As an aside, it's worth noting that on the whole, American residential construction has always gone more for short-term value than long. And on this question of general decline in quality, at least, (like a good writer) he paints conditions a bit more dramatically than they warrant. His last line in that paragraph comes near absurdity: "Many recently built houses take what structural integrity they have from drywall — their thin wooden frames are too flimsy to hold the houses up." Actually, American-style wood framing is a good construction system, and methods of today achieve increasingly impressive structural performance in those "thin wooden frames" — when the methods are followed, that is. And drywall is never relied on for structural value, because it essentially has none.