This post highlighting Streets Blog article relates to our featured article asking for more bicycle infrastructure. https://www.baltimorespokes.org/article.php?story=20111004135137190
Highlights:
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“What were seeing right now is an inability to look at how we live and how it relates to our problems, and financial problems,” said Kunstler Tuesday during a speaking engagement with the Congress for the New Urbanism. “Production homebuilders, mortgage lenders, real estate agents, they are all sitting back now waiting for the, quote, bottom of the housing market to come with the expectation that things will go back to the way they were in 2005.”
But despite massive government expenditures to restart the old economic engine driven by suburban homebuilding, recovery is elusive, Kunstler said. The author of “The Geography of Nowhere” and “The Long Emergency” argues that suburbanization has been a multi-decade American experiment, and a failed one.
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In its new booklet Curbside Chat, Strong Towns asserts that since the 1970s, the suburban growth that powered America’s economy operated much like a Ponzi scheme. In towns across the country, politicians traded the short-term payoffs of sprawling development — namely increased taxes — for long-term maintenance obligations that are just now coming due. And they’re coming up short.
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“Our problem was not, and is not, a lack of growth; Our problem is sixty years of unproductive growth,” said Marohn. “The American pattern of development does not create real wealth; it creates the illusion of wealth. Today we are in the process of seeing that illusion destroyed and with it the prosperity we have come to take for granted.”
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“We now have to do things differently.”
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https://dc.streetsblog.org/2011/10/06/new-urbanists-no-economic-recovery-without-smart-growth/oldId.20111007020657171
Biking in Baltimore