Letters to the Editor
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Living in Suburbia
First of all, not everyone in suburban areas commutes an hour away in a gas-guzzling SUV. Many communities have developed (or are working on) transit systems that will address vehicular air pollution, plus there are actually people who live and work outside of "the big city."
As for houses, the situation is not good where I live. Developers are trying to unload inventory by undercutting the prices of "pre-owned" homes (this co-opting of the standard euphemism for used cars, by the way, is bizarre to me). In spite of this, many of the new homes are still sitting vacant, along with existing homes that have been vacated by owners who moved due to relocation and, consequently, now have two mortgages. There are three houses for sale on my street (one has been on the market for several months--it's overpriced, though), along with yet another house that is being advertised as a rental (add that to two other rentals). My neighborhood mostly has young families, but the large number of rental properties has allowed for groups of college students to pack themselves into every square foot of nice-ish two-story homes that are barely ten years old--not the typical rental neighborhood. Landlords are tolerating it, even when the number of unrelated individuals in a single house violates the HOA rules (for better or worse--the HOA drives me crazy, but that's another story--we have compelling reasons for living in our current house *in spite of* the HOA).
So what does this all mean? Homes are not selling, and too many are vacant. Vacant homes encourage vandalism and other problems, and yet it took a long time for the builders to stop constructing new homes. They had already paid for the land, and they were determined to keep up the output. When they were first pushing the homes, they sold quite a few to people who couldn't afford the 3000+ square footage, and now those homes are going into foreclosure. There is a freakish Stepford-like community about 10 miles away from my town, and the word is that those houses are doing the worst.
Then we can add commercial real estate to the equation. We have two retail developments that were halted in their tracks not too long ago. The builders tore down existing structures, plowed up the ground on a former ranch, and have left the projects completely unattended for several months. One project lost its financing, and now it's a disastrously unattractive site that doesn't allow for adequate rainwater runoff. The other location was cited last summer for ignoring pools of standing water that were harboring mosquitoes infected with the West Nile Virus. And litter is all over the place in both locations. We have no idea if/when these projects will resume, and the houses that were built in anticipation of the retail centers are mostly sitting vacant.
By the way, I should clarify that I live in a place where housing prices are reasonable, unlike the coasts. And I realize that I used way too many parenthetical asides, but I don't have time to go back and rewrite this.
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No not really
I would suggest that zero cities of 350,000 or less have any serious plans for mass transit. It's simply too expensive and too long term for local governments to sell to the public. I live in a city of 350,000 people and there is a zero percent chance that they will successfully build a light rail system, ever. And we are one of the sprawliest of the sprawls. If anyone needed rapid cheap non car based transportation it's us. Even at highway speed it can take 40 minutes to get from one side of the city to the other. And we have typically one of the 10 worst air qualities in the US - because of all the cars, choked traffic and overloaded roads.
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Electro Robot
Your observations sound exactly like what opponents of our transportation initiative argued right before it passed in spite of their very vocal efforts. We have a good local bus service that connects with a university shuttle system, and there are commuter buses that travel into the city as well. Plans are in place for a rail system to connect to a larger regional network--every year the covered area is expanded outward from the urban center. Population: approximately 100,000. But every municipality is pooling resources and working together for the benefit of the region. It's either that or we'll continue to receive decreased funding for infrastructure because we are out of compliance with the Clean Air Act (or, at least, what remains of it).
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What are your travel times
Ours are enormous even under ideal circumstances. Were you to take the bus anywhere, a typical trip would be 15 miles. Most people won't tolerate those kinds of wait times. As for light rail, forget it. NIMBY central. No one wants the tracks or the parking near them. No one will sell rights of way for affordable prices unless they're 'stolen' under eminent domain. We have bus system but it's pathetic. I think it stops running at 10pm so even if there were a downtown nightlife, no one can go home via bus. So much easier to arrest the drunk drivers, you see. A lot more money in that.
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Public Transportation (and housing)
I work from home now, so it's not a major issue anymore. When I was working outside of the home, it took me no longer to ride the bus than to drive (about 10 minutes, give or take). In fact, it was quicker because there was inadequate parking near my office. I must admit that my own circumstance was unusual because, at the time, I lived right across from a bus stop, and the route was exactly what I would have driven anyway, with just a few stops along the way. The way the bus system is designed, there are different routes that are actually quite logical. It probably takes most people longer--up to half an hour, I would guess--but it can take that long to get across town in a car, with all of the construction that we are dealing with right now. Some of our major roads have been torn up and are taking forever to be fixed, thanks to cutbacks in infrastructure funding.
To get back to the topic of housing, these issues are intimately connected with what is going on with real estate. Our small city is projected to grow tremendously in the next decade, and yet we are already falling behind the projections. A lot of development plans were based on the anticipation of growth, but we won't have the new shopping centers that (according to the "experts") attract new residents. Single-occupant commutes into the urban center can take forever, so we do emphasize the future commuter rail as another "perk" of our community. We will be using existing railroad tracks, and of course there are still people who oppose this plan. The transportation committee argues that, based on studies that I can't elaborate upon off the top of my head, market values *increase* near rail stops. I'm not an engineering or real estate expert, so I can't cite my own research.
I would be more specific, but I am trying to maintain a certain amount of anonymity on here. People who live in my area might be able to figure out my location, though. I don't think that our area is unique--we have looked to other suburban areas as models. And any metropolitan area that wants to submit a serious Olympic bid, for instance, needs to think about how to transport large masses from all over the region into the competition locations. All of these planning issues are related to housing because sales and property taxes are dependent on people actually living in a particular place and earning money, and that "drives" development. Our area will be fine after we ride out this recession or whatever it is because property values are not inflated. Once the economy picks back up (even if it's a few years down the road), people will start buying homes again. I feel sorry for all the people losing their homes to foreclosure, however. Whether or not they overstated their income or took out risky loans, it still must be awful to go through that situation. And it's really hard to make mortgage payments when jobs are hard to come by. All of these issues are related--housing, infrastructure, employment, retail development, food prices, gasoline prices, and so forth. The combined effect doesn't look good at the moment.