ESCAPE TO NEW YORK
SUBURBAN ECONOMIC REFUGEES ARE HEADING OUR WAY
By ERIC TORBENSON
Last updated: 5:17 am
July 20, 2008
Posted: 4:16 am
July 20, 2008
Want to get us out of what's looking like a capital "R" Recession?
Defibrillate the suburbs - if you can.
The tenets of suburban life are the oxygen in the economic bloodstream, and the nation is suffering hypoxia. The reason a lot of folks think we're just getting warmed up on an economic swoon is that the global economy has neatly garroted all the drivers that make suburbs flourish.
For New York and other cities with respectable public transportation, it's still relatively good times; maybe too good. But have you found a seat on the subway recently?
New York City, already projected to expand to 10 million people over the next 15 years, will grow even more rapidly if these trends continue. After a half century of suburban flight, demographers from John Fregonese to Richard Florida are predicting the return of urban sprawl.
"The subprime crisis and the gas price crisis are accelerating the trend that people want to be in walkable urban areas," said Christopher B. Leinberger, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institute, who is also a real estate developer. "It's been happening for the past 15 years and these trends have just accelerated it."
Is it any wonder that the greatest number of new housing construction starts last month - that's nationwide - were apartment buildings in New York City?
America in the early 2000s was a frothy brew of low inflation and cheap houses financed by what we'd later find out were mortgages handed out like those little dum-dum lollipops at the dentist; everybody got one no matter how bad their teeth. Nothing percolates GDP like the need to fill the screaming maw of a new home with stainless steel appliances, memory foam beds and body sculpting equipment that gathers dust while owners horf down cheese fries at TGIFridays.
