Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
But in the U.S., practically everyone has a car. Saying an area is isolated because it's car oriented kind of misses the point. A place in the U.S. is more isolated, most of the time, if it isn't car oriented. Jobs, amenities, and increasingly social services, are in the fringe, not the core.
The rising poverty in American suburbia is just the "hole" of the donut pushing further out. It isn't some "death of the suburbs" it's usually the undesirable zone just moving further out due to core gentrification and suburban aging housing stock.
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Just because practically everyone has a car, doesn't mean that the fact that you have access to very little if you don't have a car isn't a problem.
I mean, I don't know, maybe I'm overestimating how much of a burden car ownership is for low wage workers. But just because they have a car, doesn't mean they can afford it, just like how many people got a mortgage during the bubble but that didn't mean they could afford it. Maybe the low-wage workers have to make big sacrifices to keep those cars like cuts to home maintenance, working multiple part time jobs and not having time to raise their kids.
It's true that the "donut hole" has been expanding outwards pretty much ever since American cities reached a size where they had more than just a few neighbourhoods. Still it would be worth asking if it's expanding faster than it used to, like with gentrification for example.
I'm also wondering if we'll reach a tipping point where the size of the middle to upper class suburban ring beyond the ring of declining suburbs will start to shrink. That mostly has to do with the competition between the appeal of urban cores vs outer suburbs - and also between more close in SFH neighbourhoods and outer suburbs. There's also the question of how well the suburban job centres will be able to replace the urban ones (and close in "suburban" ones like Uptown Houston). Increasingly that's the only way to go for the outer suburbs because even if they're "only" a 30-40min drive to the core without traffic, it could be double or triple that during peak times.
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