Housing prices in relation to proximity of the city (Denver: home, neighborhoods)

[bogotrep]

*Edit should read proximity to the city.

Here Comes the Neighborhood - Magazine - The Atlantic

This is an interesting article I came across in this months Atlantic Magazine.

One of the more interesting comments is "But housing hasn’t cratered everywhere. According to Stan Humphries, the chief economist of Zillow, an online housing-research firm, if you plot changes in home values within a typical metro region on a satellite map, the result “looks like an archery target, with the outlying areas having experienced substantially higher total declines in home values” than areas closer to the central city."

This certainly holds true for Denver.

Some of the later comments would make me nervous if I lived in the new developments well out along E-470.

[livecontent]

Interesting article. It has made some good points about outlying suburbs that rely on the central core of a city.

However, there are many people who live in suburban areas who do not rely on the central core. For example, in the Denver area, most federal workers are employed around and at the federal center in Lakewood. Many of these people will live around that area and certainly would not have a constant need to be near the central core of Denver. Even though Lakewood, Wheat Ridge, Arvada, and Golden are considered suburbs of Denver, they are in the immediate area of another central core, The Federal Center.

We also have a another large central location for jobs which is the Denver Tech Center (DTC) and most people who work there would probably live near the south towns. Those south town residences would be considered outlying suburbs to the Denver central core but for the other central core, the DTC, the would be considered in close proximity.

The same issue can apply to any large business or industrial park in a metro region. There are not just one central core buy many. Each and every one of these cores have their immediate residents and their own outlying suburbs.

I do applaud the expansion of public transit in the Denver area. However, I am somewhat dismayed by the fact that they continue to follow the idea that Downtown is the only Central core of the region. As a committed public transit user, I have found that the greater demand will be for public transit from suburbs to suburbs and from one core area to another, without the need or desire to have to go to Downtown Denver to connect. Essentially we built the public transit with the spokes to the center but we fail to build the wheel around the spokes.

Saying all that, I believe that outlying suburbs housing will be sustained because people will still, for the most part, want to live closer to where they work; and where they work is not always the Central core of the dense urban area. We need to look at the development of the metro area as the building of Transit Oriented Developments (TODs) that not only serve the central core of Denver but also have their own vitality and reason to exist on their own in other outlying core centers of a region. We must also connect these other core centers together and built the outlying wheel so as to minimizing the need to go in and then out of the central core of Denver.

Unfortunately many of the far outlying housing is built in a separate developments that make the building of a central area walkable area difficult and many times impossible. Properties are too big, streets wind in and out of the developments and do not connect with other developments and the cars dumps into overfeed and heavily traveled thoroughfares. The older urban areas of the cities and the older inline suburbs are built so that roads interconnect, lots are smaller and businesses are closer together, allowing the development of walkable public transit neighborhoods possible.

Livecontent