Drivable sub-urbanism has been the dominant form of development in the past sixty years. But cities are thriving and Americans are looking for more housing options. According to The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream (published by Island Press, November 2007), empty nesters and Gen Xers are looking to live in lively, urban neighborhoods within easy walking distance of work, school, shopping and entertainment.
Facts from The Option of Urbanism:

• Real estate and infrastructure, including government buildings, accounts for 35% of wealth in the US and is the largest asset class in the economy.
• There are only two options for real estate development and the built environment (drivable sub-urbanism and walkable urbanism).
• Drivable sub-urbanism has been the defacto domestic policy of the country since the 1950s.
• Growing demand for walkable urbanism has resulted in a large gap between the current limited supply and much larger pent-up demand, boosting per square foot premiums for walkable urban residential, office and retail space from 40 to 200 percent.
• More than 80 percent of recent residents in downtown Philadelphia and Detroit are college educated.
• Recent research in selected metropolitan areas shows that 30 to 40 percent of households want to live in walkable urban communities, but only 5 to 20 percent of the housing supply is in that category.

The generally unintended but negative consequences of drivable sub-urbanism include:

• Automobile dependence, leaving us with essentially only one means of transportation
• Social segregation: lack of access to jobs for many lower income and minority households leaving a concentration of poverty
• Environmental effects: land consumption at an estimated ten to twenty times the underlying population growth; the creation of heat islands due to so much land under asphalt; water quality degradation due to the runoff from all that asphalt
• Climate change due to the unproven but intuitive connection between low-density, car-based development and green house gas emissions
• Health implications: increases in respiratory diseases, obesity, and car accidents
• Economic effects: strained personal finances and declining infrastructure
• Oil dependency and foreign policy implications

The unintended consequences of walkable urbanism are the degradation of the suburbs. Leinberger wrote in the March 2008 issue of The Atlantic Monthly “many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions … may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and ’70s—slums characterized by poverty, crime, and decay.”
For more information on this title, please visit www.theoptionofurbanism.com. To request a review copy, please contact Caroline Dobuzinskis, Content Marketing Coordinator, Island Press at cdobuzinskis@islandpress.org, or by phone at 202.232.7933, ext. 12.