Justin, who commented on the previous post, hopes we (the country) are finally getting it together.
(To fill you in: I’m at a conference on “The Next City” in Cambridge, MA, sponsored by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Nieman Foundation and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.) We’re now listening to economist Chip Case of Wellesley University, creator of the Case-Shiller Index of real estate. More about him later.)
Keith Schneider — a Michigan-based writer and blogger (ModeShift.org) who free-lances for the New York Times and founded the Michigan Land Use Institute — opined that unless the country does get its act together, the whole country will be like Michigan. That is, suffering deeply.
By getting its act together, he means stronger transit and not jettisoning the already-built infrastructure in cities such as Detroit and Cleveland, and building in ways that aren’t as expensive for public infrastructure as the years of low-density sprawl growth has been.
He noted that the problems the whole country is now seeing, such as foreclosures and declining incomes, were first visible in the outer-outer suburbs of Detroit. (And, I should add, in the new starter home subdivisions ringing Charlotte.)