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I predict even more will leave the cities if there is some big communicable disease outbreak in one of them. I look at big cities as a disaster waiting to happen.
Just imagine; they may all move at once to your town...
It's always sad to see places decline. I don't really care whether it's California, Florida, Ohio or Michigan, they all have great cities and places that are pivotal to the history of this country, and it's to our collective benefit to have all of them as healthy as they can be.
I agree it is sad but sunbelt sprawl has peaked. Cities and suburbs need to embrace smart growth to thrive in the 21st century. The Sunbelt may still boom but it needs to plan accordingly.
As a Sunbelt property owner, I sure hope this thread title bears fruit. I don't think FL will ever be what it used to be. Entire cities/communities previously occupied by retirees are now drug infested and run down. FL takes a beating in the National Press, if it ain't hurricanes, it's Casey Anthony, the face-eating guy, sinkholes, etc. The unemployment is horrible, the heat unbearable, real estate stagnant.
Seems like the old days when folks came to retire and stay year round have been supplanted by "folks who just want to get out of the snow for awhile".
That's why a lot of retirees are starting to move to NC and SC....They aren't that far away from the North as opposed to being all the way down in FL
I agree it is sad but sunbelt sprawl has peaked. Cities and suburbs need to embrace smart growth to thrive in the 21st century. The Sunbelt may still boom but it needs to plan accordingly.
That's why a lot of retirees are starting to move to NC and SC....They aren't that far away from the North as opposed to being all the way down in FL
I don't blame them. The weather lies about the temps here, I think. The main TV station says 91, but the little town newspaper thermometer said 101 today and I felt every single degree of it.
I agree it is sad but sunbelt sprawl has peaked. Cities and suburbs need to embrace smart growth to thrive in the 21st century. The Sunbelt may still boom but it needs to plan accordingly.
True.
BUT: a few other aspects:
Smart growth isn't the only part of the picture. Let's look at California. You see examples of best and worst there in the same state - San Francisco is the 2nd most dense major city in the US, and it's completely unaffordable. Buying a house in Stockton or Modesto - 80-100 miles away - was completely reasonable as a commute, which undercuts any environmental benefit to any planning of any kind. And now Stockton has gone bankrupt, in part (but not entirely) due to it's bubble-driven bet that it would remain the closest thing to affordable that many who work in SF would ever likely encounter. Were it not for greater, national levels of sketchiness in the real estate business during the last decade, this might still be true. This affordability conundrum is a lot more complex than simply mandating walkability, though that may help.
A look up the coast - to Oregon - where urban growth boundaries have prevailed around all cities and towns since the mid-1970s might offer a way out. This has been copied - with modifications - elsewhere in the country on a scattered basis. In Oregon, cities MUST have a stock of affordable housing within that UGB, or a few things - legally - must happen - the UGB must annex additional territory, or the city must incentivize smart growth or other development that would include mixed income levels. There are (I believe) a few other options, like land banking on the table as well. These measures presumably would undercut artificial upward compression on real estate prices, which would prevent the Stockton scenario from unfolding. Chapel Hill, NC has duplicated the Urban Growth Boundary, though it's a fixed boundary in Chapel Hill, and it has driven home prices to twice the state average in Chapel Hill (which has the highest rated school system in the state); this in turn has fueled some sprawl elsewhere in the same greater metro area, with a small protected buffer around Chapel Hill.
Other things cities need to deal with - urban corruption, crime, and the uneven quality of local school systems. If any state, city, or region becomes associated in people's minds with poor schools, machine politics, or spikes in crime, then it ain't going to come back, no matter how dense or walkable the community is. This is especially true in cities where large-scale abandonment is a real issue that can't be papered over - this carries a stigma, and public relations or conceptual academic solutions will not eradicate that stigma - only workable solutions that can be implemented quickly and efficiently, and show results. If - for example - Detroit suddenly became the best public school system in the country (instead of a system where a recent superintendent was a functional illiterate, as revealed in a series of memos leaked to several newspapers), then people would be breaking down the doors to get their kids in there, instead of any number of school systems elsewhere - often college towns (in and out of the Sunbelt) - where people are presently willing to fork over 2 year's salary plus an arm and a leg to get their kids in. It would come down to what you can offer me that other places can't.
There are a lot of places in the Sunbelt that are doing that, and have been for quite a while. Some of those cities are a bit atomized culturally, and seem a bit rootless in the race to remake themselves, but - to their credit - a lot of that is based on watching other cities. Another example: Charlotte's business community quietly began to voluntarily integrate a few years before the passage of the civil rights act. This wasn't based in anything ideologically lofty - it was the city's business leadership at the time looking at TV, and seeing Birmingham every night, and thinking "That looks bad." Translation: that will carry a stigma that will take years, perhaps generations to shake off, and though it was an unscientific assumption, it also turned out to be right: Atlanta and Charlotte took off, while Birmingham has been rather moribund ever since. And the same can be said for several other Sunbelt cities that did not adapt so adroitly: Memphis, New Orleans, Mobile have all been rather stagnant in comparison with places like Nashville, Huntsville, or Raleigh.
The same thing has gone on in the Midwest: Madison, Ann Arbor, Columbus (which has out annexed any number of Sunbelt cities), Indianapolis, and the Twin Cities metro have all done variably well, which any number of their close neighbors have not.
So it's not a matter of regional supremacy. It's what cities - in ANY state or region can adapt at many levels quickly, versus those who can't.
Location: livin' the good life on America's favorite island
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Jason_show
There's a massive influx of Latinos and Mexicans into the South.
and your point is?
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