Checking over at the Congress for New Urbanism’s web site, in the wake of Kunstler’s comments, I come across these astonishing statistics:
Married couples with children now account for less than 25% of American households. Fifty percent of all households in America contain one or two people. Last year, 9% of all homes were purchased by […]

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Interesting:
Which brings me back to the New Urbanist annual meet-up last week in Denver. … For years, their stock-in-trade was the greenfield New Town or Traditional Neighborhood Development (TND), a severe reform of conventional suburban development.  That sort of reform work was only possible when 1.) the continued expansion of suburbia seemed utterly inevitable, requiring […]

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WSJ reports that across the country, malls are turning into ghost towns due to the recession/depression. And of course there are plans to build two new major ones here.
Been curious to follow that discussion, because a lot of people seem to want Manheim Township commissioners to prohibit the construction of new shopping malls because we […]

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Sort of taken aback at some of yesterday’s election results. The West Lampeter referendum, can’t say I was too surprised - the margin of victory was less than 400 votes out of more than 4,200 cast. You could really characterize it as small town Lancaster County versus a growing Lancaster County - with the latter […]

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Coming into town along Columbia Avenue or sometimes Marietta Pike, I’m struck by the number of big, stately homes for sale in the School Lane Hills area.
Some of them have been on the market for quite some time. And I don’t know that I attribute that to the general economic downturn, the fact that all […]

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“Another shop center eyed for Fruitville.”
This was always in the cards. I’m sure the objections will be the familiar ones - what do we need another shopping center for! Save farmland! But this piece of property is more amenable to large-scale commercial development than virtually any other site in Lancaster County - bordering Route 30, […]

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Atrios:
One of the enduring mysteries to me is how so much of our population voluntarily chooses to live in places where walking - or even taking a cab - home from a bar, any bar, really isn’t an option. While I believe there is a shortage of walkable communities in many parts of the country, […]

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One thing you can argue about (and we HAVE argued about) is whether a stadium actually transforms a city or not.

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Hm.
Economics teaches that scarcity or rationing leads to higher prices. Smart growth policies ration land for development through the use of urban growth boundaries and prohibitions or restrictions on building on vacant land. In such an environment, higher house prices can be expected. …
<snip>
Demand, in and of itself, does not increase price. But, when higher […]

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And this, originally appearing in Harvard Design Magazine. But apparently it works the same everywhere:
The project-specific complaints follow familiar patterns too. The traffic in every neighborhood is, apparently, already intolerable, no matter what the transportation consultants say about “level of service.” The project will only worsen it, infringing upon residents’ inalienable right to uncongested streets. …
<snip>
A […]

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Veddy interesting forum over at the NYT’s Freakonomics blog on the future of the American suburb - whether, in the era of high energy prices, it’s destined to collapse, to evolve, or just keep on keeping on.
Perhaps the most interesting response to the question of what our suburbs look like in 40 years comes from […]

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Hm. From the Bucks County Courier Times:
It’s being touted as the hot new trend in development — as a way to build high-density housing while reducing traffic, increasing mass transit use and enhancing overall quality of life.
It’s called transit-oriented development — TOD to those in development circles. It’s meant to “fully capitalize on [a transit […]

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So the Yokel, apparently back from a vacation in the Boston area (or perhaps just using The Google), has a piece from the Reading, Mass., newspaper on how that community is trying to implement it’s own version of “smart growth”:
“The idea of a Smart Growth District in downtown is born out of the community’s interest […]

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Except that here in Lancaster County, the moment the head of the regional planning agency goes to meet with developers he’s instantly called a sell-out, obviously shilling for the building industry.

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Discussion last night about how Lancaster County’s economy seems to weather the economic storms better than most. There are reasons for that, but also limits.
So I was curious to see this piece linked on Atrios, about rising retail vacancies:
Strip malls, which are usually anchored by grocery or drug stores, saw average vacancies spike 0.5 percentage […]

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Ah, the Yokel rides again. As if there were any doubt.

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Ah, well.
I see LancoYokel spent his Sunday penning a critique of last week’s print output. Which is fine. Though I’ll stay away from the criticism of the convention center piece because I unfortunately will probably be writing more stories about this issue as we go down the line, and as a general rule I mostly […]

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If you spend any time on Good Drive, you’ve probably noticed it: The new stoplight at Noll Drive.

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Via Atrios, more news of the death of suburbia:
As the realization takes hold that rising energy prices are less a momentary blip than a restructuring with lasting consequences, the high cost of fuel is threatening to slow the decades-old migration away from cities, while exacerbating the housing downturn by diminishing the appeal of larger homes […]

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Interesting. Kunstler gives an interview to NPR in which he talks about the “end of surburbia as we know it” - a consistent theme with him - and says this:
Kunstler says that big cities will become more population dense at their centers and along waterfronts, but they’ll essentially contract as people will move to smaller […]

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