SkyscraperPage Forum - Eight Ideas For Future-Proofing The Suburbs

A Manifesto For A New Suburbia

Nov 11, 2019

By Alissa Walker

Read More: https://www.curbed.com/2019/11/11/20...suburbs-cities

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Curbed asked eight experts to share ideas for rethinking suburbia, from eliminating single-family zoning to densifying sprawl to reducing carbon footprints, even undoing the long-term impacts of segregation and facing the realities of rising poverty:

• Getting rid of mandatory single-family zoning is good, but lost in the recent conversation is that we’ll need a better option in its place. Form-based zoning codes can help create the mixed-use, pedestrian-oriented development that many of today’s young singles, empty nesters, and families and influential companies are seeking. — Steve Davis - Smart Growth America

• Just the simple act of allowing the necessities of everyday life (food, education, nature, recreation) to be within walking distance of suburban homes would be a radical step towards unwinding that system of emissions. — Adam Terando - Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Center

• Three of the most important needs for older adults are accessible supportive housing, proximity to medical care, and social engagement. All these needs are easier to address in spatially compact communities. — Jenny Schuetz - The Brookings Institution

• Many subdivisions have homeowners’ associations, or HOAs, which present an opportunity to scale up interventions like turf replacement or green infrastructure retrofits from the individual yard to the neighborhood. — Unfortunately, many HOAs have landscaping rules that might prevent these actions. — V. Kelly Turner - Luskin School of Public Affairs, University of California Los Angeles

• “Built-out” suburbs should shift decisively to retrofit their land-use framework to emphasize suburban retrofitting. — Zone for creative redevelopment of those 20th-century white elephants, such as dead and dying shopping malls. — Provide incentives for “re-inhabitation” of other vacant and discarded commercial buildings. — Increase resilience, repair environmental damage, and build community ties by regreening degraded landscapes. — June Williamson -
Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York

• The first step toward combating suburban poverty is recognizing that it’s there. — Struggling suburbs do not have sufficient capacity or resources staff, tax base, philanthropic or nonprofit infrastructure to go it alone. Working collaboratively with neighboring jurisdictions can help smaller, less-resourced suburbs stretch limited capacity. — Elizabeth Kneebone -
Terner Center for Housing Innovation

• As suburbs become more diverse, school boards and superintendents need to ask how their systems can listen to all voices and empower principals and teachers to meet increasingly complex student needs. — Sean Gill - Consortium for Policy Research in Education

• In our Creating Moves to Opportunity project, we found that families receiving additional housing search assistance were more than three times more likely to move to high-opportunity areas. — David Williams - Opportunity Insights

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