This week’s article isn’t online yet, for which I apologize. Christopher Leinberger looks at the forecast for suburbia, particularly the more recent, far-flung areas of sprawl, which are typically remote from long-established lines of public transportation. If you’d asked me what I expected two years ago, I’d have pinned change on rising energy costs. It looks, though, as though what began as the “subprime” mortgage crisis has actually tilted the trends.

At Windy Ridge, a recently built starter-home development seven miles northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, 81 of the community’s 132 small, vinyl-sided houses were in foreclosure as of late last year. Vandals have kicked in doors and stripped the copper wire from vacant houses; drug users and homeless people have furtively moved in. In December, after a stray bullet blasted through her son’s bedroom and into her own, Laurie Talbot, who’d moved to Windy Ridge from New York in 2005, told The Charlotte Observer, “I thought I’d bought a home in Pleasantville. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that stuff like this would happen.”

¶ Christopher S Leinberger on the Future of Suburbia, in The Atlantic.

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