Soulless Suburbs At The Tipping Point

We’ve talked before about the decline of the suburb and what the future holds for these sprawling acres of mini mansions. Richard Florida points us to analysis Business Week and Zillow.com did of housing values, and how they’ve held up comparing the core city, inner and outer suburbs.

Business Week reports:

Annual price changes in most of the largest metro areas, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, San Francisco, Seattle, Baltimore, Washington D.C., and Philadelphia, followed a similar pattern: Values were most stable within a 10-mile radius of the center of the city, but generally worsened with each successive radius ring as far as 50 miles from the center of the city.

Here’s where it gets interesting. There were a few anomalies where values started increasing at the 40 and 50 mile mark – outside of Boston Denver and San Diego amongst other areas. A commenter on Florida’s blog pointed out that many of the areas composing Boston’s suburbs are actually very old towns and villages, and that their organic structure will hold value over “purpose built” suburbs. Could this be the beginning of a re-vitalization of the small town?

From Florida’s comments:

Boston is a very old (by North American standards) city surrounded by very old towns and villages. They may be suburbs now, but they were never settled as such. These towns (like Concord or Boxford, MA, for example) have a more organic structure and will hold their value more than purpose-built suburbs that are really farmland that was cleared for cheap housing. Part of the attraction of living in a city is a sense of community and place, “soul” for lack of a better word. The real crash will happen in “soulless” suburbs and exurbs; as the economics of energy change, $200,000 four-bedroom homes in the middle of nowhere don’t look so cheap anymore.

[via Richard Florida's Creative Class Group]