The future of suburbia is bleak

The future of suburbia is bleak unless towns and cities act to animate them by densifying and intensifying them to make them more economically, socially and environmentally sustainable places.

Here’s the story of Hemet, a suburb of Riverside California. What happened there is that folks who can’t afford to live in LA have driven further and further away til they’ve found a place where it is affordable to either rent or buy.

Unfortunately, investors have also found Hemet; their neglect of their buildings and their poor vetting of tenants have led to an explosion of petty and more serious crime, once again proving that no value (in real estate or for that matter in any other sphere of human endeavor) can be created unless there is peace, order and good government.

Here’s Alana Semuels description of life today in Hemet. Her article, The Places That May Never Recover From the Recession, appeared in The Atlantic (December 2017), https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/12/suburban-poverty-and-recession/549350/.

Prof Bruce

Bruce M Firestone, B Eng (civil), M Eng-Sci, PhD, Ottawa Senators founder, Real Estate Investment and Business coach, ROYAL LePAGE Performance Realty broker, 1-613-762-8884 bruce.firestone@century21.ca twitter.com/ProfBruce profbruce.tumblr.com/archive brucemfirestone.com

MAKING IMPOSSIBLE POSSIBLE