The fallout of the housing bust: accidental mixed income in the suburbs (suburban, downtown)
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Like many subdivisions throughout the country, this subdivision in the Cincinnati suburbs was left half-finished. A developer is offering to buy what's left but he would reduce lot sizes and build cheaper houses. The neighbors who already built 500,000+ McMansions, oppose the plan, saying it isn't what they signed up for.
Is this a legit complaint or classism? I think we'll see this situation repeated throughout the country. A developer can replat a subdivision with local approval and part of that process involves public input. In this case, the input will be neighbors concerned about property values.
Personally, I would prefer living in a mixed-income neighborhood or subdivision, but the people who bought into this one in the first place clearly do not share that attitude.
I thought this might be an interesting topic for discussion
I don't know where some of you folks live but I've never lived anywhere that was just one income level. Except for when I was stationed at Pensacola NAS I've lived in small towns or rural areas my whole life.
I don't know where some of you folks live but I've never lived anywhere that was just one income level. Except for when I was stationed at Pensacola NAS I've lived in small towns or rural areas my whole life.
Small towns and rural areas are not the suburbs, generally. Part of the problem is the idea that American urban forms are of two basic types: high-rise, hyper-dense urbanist cities, and suburbs/rural. This assumes that suburbs, small towns and remote rural areas are all identical, which is obviously false.
Small towns generally have a lot of the characteristics that "new urbanists" tend to like: walkability, a clearly defined neighborhood center (the town square), nearby civic functions (the county courthouse/library/city hall), a traditional, walkable downtown (typically street-fronting retail buildings with apartments or offices above), transit orientation (or used to be, back when every small town was based around its railroad connection), and mixture of economic classes and residential uses close to the town center (the residential districts usually right next to the small-town downtown.)
Suburbs tend to feature noticeable income stratification, both because suburban tracts tend to feature a very limited number of differing lot and house sizes--there may be some variety, but seldom do you find mansions and economy apartments in close proximity. The modern suburb is very, very different from small towns, despite the efforts of suburb developers to emphasize their "small-town feel." A car-centric "power center" shopping district does not resemble a small-town downtown at all.
I'm glad you did the differentiation, I was hoping someone would, since many of the posters here don't know what they're talking about when it comes to zoning, building codes, urban/suburban/rural distinctions, etc.
Actually, many suburbs started out as small towns. They usually started zoning out lower land uses after development took off. And the transformation of wealthy areas to mixed or even lower income areas is not new. As the well-off moved on, sometimes their old homes were divided into apartments.
Small towns that become suburbs typically means the end of that small-town character, though: the downtown goes empty because the new freeway interchange isn't nearby, everyone shops at the new mall or power center near said freeway interchange instead so downtown goes broke, the income diversity goes away as lower-income residents get priced out, the walkability suffers as suburban zoning limits or outright bans mixed use--those "lower" land uses.
And yes, some suburbs degrade into low-income suburbs over time, but they remain economically segregated, just with a new demographic. When a neighborhood starts going downhill, there is often a quick exodus by the well-to-do to the next suburb. Suburbs are basically the ultimate consumer product, with a certain element of planned obsolescence. In some ways, what we call "gentrification" is just that same process in reverse.
But "restored" small-towns-turned-suburbs don't function as small towns anymore: government functions like city hall typically move to a much bigger, modern building with an expansive parking lot to serve the needs of the now much larger community, the downtown stores that sold essentials and hardware become boutiques that sell tchotchkes and antiques, the inexpensive neighborhood diner becomes a fancy restaurant for the newly affluent--or a Chili's. The old courthouse or city hall, if it's lucky, becomes a museum or other secondary public space. If it's not so lucky, it gets demolished to make room for the new Chili's or something in the interest of eradicating "blight." The town square gets demoted to the role of a secondary city park instead of the focus of small-town life. Walkability, mixed use and mixed-income neighborhoods are still lost.
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