![]() ![]() The Messy (But Actually Scalable) Way Forward ![]() Ultimately the most likely prospect for the high-dollar suburban retrofit model is that it creates small pockets of success, surrounded by an ocean of dysfunction-homes declining in value, streets crumbling, neighborhoods slowly but steadily becoming worse places to be. But each such project is a time-consuming and expensive gamble that requires a big, well capitalized developer and an engaged City Hall to pull off-not to mention some bonafide market demand for the end product. Sure, it offers elegant design solutions to renovate key suburban sites-for example, old shopping malls-into master-planned new developments with a traditional urban form. The "suburban retrofit" movement that is in vogue among some planners is not an answer that can scale to meet the extent of the problem. The transportation costs to living on the suburban fringe are high, even with cheap gas. The buildings are often not built to age well or to be adaptable-think of big-box store buildings literally only designed to last 15 years. Their development pattern is fragile: these places are vulnerable to decline over time because their main selling point tends to be cheap housing and/ or simple newness, more than intrinsically distinctive qualities. There are a lot of reasons to think that outlying suburbs are the places most likely to go the way of Detroit in the future of many metro areas. The inexorable math of decline is simple: If we find we’ve built more than we can afford to maintain, it's not all going to be maintained. By running highways and stroads through the city, building far-flung bedroom communities, and demolishing historic buildings for parking lots, you thin out the tax base: the source of revenue to keep the lights on and the streets paved. The staggering population collapse and resulting dysfunction of the Motor City has specific historical, racial and economic antecedents, but the underlying fragility that made Detroit’s fall so unusually precipitous and total is a product of the Suburban Experiment approach to growth, of which Detroit was an early pioneer. We've written for years at Strong Towns that we are all Detroit. The public infrastructure is there, but the people-and tax base-are not.) The comparison earned me some irate emails from Lehigh residents- How DARE you suggest we have ANYTHING in common with Detroit?! We Are All Detroit. (Lehigh Acres is this way because only a smattering of the lots were ever built on in the first place, on a grid of streets that extends miles into featureless scrubland. In the 2016 essay, I compared the visual appearance of much of Lehigh Acres to that of Detroit, Michigan-specifically, the infamously "hollowed out" sections of Detroit where houses long abandoned have been demolished and what's left is an eerie patchwork of weed-strewn lots with one home here or there. ![]()
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