Steven Yoder has a very interesting piece at The Fiscal Times on how the “Housing Crisis Could End Suburbia As We Know It.” A taste:
Nationally, the unemployment rate in exurbs rose by 126 percent during the recession, versus 113 percent in urban areas. House prices in the suburban fringes have not come back like those in the city cores, according to a recent Wall Street Journal-Zillow analysis. And while no one has tracked poverty rates in the exurbs themselves, poverty is rising faster in the suburbs as a whole than in cities: The number of suburban households in poverty grew 53 percent between 2000 and 2010, compared with 23 percent in urban areas, according to Brookings.
No one seems willing to bet that exurbs will grow anytime soon. In its 2012 report on real estate trends, the Urban Land Institute notes that real estate investors have no interest in suburban office parks and commercial real estate in farther-out suburbs because they see little chance of economic recovery or higher rents there.
But even as life on the edges gets harder, people who might like to leave for houses closer in are stuck because they can’t sell their homes, says Frey, who recently analyzed new mobility data from the Census Bureau. The twenty- and early thirty-somethings are putting off getting married, having children, and buying homes because they’re not getting well-paying jobs and can’t get mortgages because of tight credit standards, he says. Worse, for the first time since at least the 1930s, a succeeding generation of buyers – Gen X – is smaller than the one that went before it – baby boomers, according to McIlwain. “Even if there were no housing recession, you would still have a drop in demand from those move-up [buyers],” he says.