Another edition of, “I live in the nicest ghetto ever”

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/subprime

If I read the article right, the 100-word summation is,

People spent too much money on McMansions in the burbs, then defaulted en masse and split; this leads to an overall decline. In the mean time, everyone now wants to live in hip “walkable” urban areas (closer to where they work) despite the considerable price premium; but as oil causes everything to get more expensive, there is no price advantage for the suburbs anymore. Land-grabs and difficulty in retasking means there’s no easy solution to the big suburban developments that are growing empty over time. The upside is that walkable urban environments may make people healthier and control population growth.

I note a few things from this. We left our apartment in Merrifield as a pair of mondo condo buildings were under construction and a giant urban development project was planned (to create, you guessed it, a walkable town center-type development), to move to the ‘burbs. At the time, we knew that the market was headed down, and it seemed a safer bet: we’d rather be stuck in the burbs for 5 years, say, than get stuck in a condo we simply can’t unload. Conventional wisdom says condos are a harder property to get out of; if we outgrew it (or just wanted to move) before the market was ready, we would be stuck. Now, arguably, the condo was the safe bet and the suburban townhome the risk.

I don’t regret heading to the ‘burbs. I do think it’s now going to take a lot more work to make the strategy pay off: we’ll have to upgrade the house faster, for example, to ensure it’s competitive against other homes in the area should we want to get the hell out, or, settle in for the longer haul and hope a market correction just happens.

The Dulles Rail Project (and Tysons rail) is essentially dead, but if the logic of the article is correct, it would end up being a potent rejuvenator of the ailing Loudoun and Fairfax suburbs: get people the fuck out of their cars, shuffle them around by modern mass transit, let them walk around. But NoVA wisdom rejects this, of course: only brown people use mass transit, so everyone recoils at the thought of their precious tax dollars being used to benefit those people. (File under, “pouring money into food stamps is a better economic boost than mailing out checks, but try getting anyone to give money to brown people”).