Death of the fringe suburb

"Drive through any number of outer-ring suburbs in America, and you’ll see boarded-up and vacant strip malls, surrounded by vast seas of empty parking spaces," says Christopher Leinberger. "These forlorn monuments to the real estate crash are not going to come back to life, even when the economy recovers."

"And that’s because the demand for the housing that once supported commercial activity in many exurbs isn’t coming back, either," Leinberger, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution, writes in an op-ed piece in The New York Times.

Demand has shifted,  and it's not going to shift back to what it was several years ago, Leinberger argues, citing a National Association of Realtors survey showing that only 12 percent of future homebuyers want the "drivable suburban-fringe houses that are in such oversupply."

The future, he contends, is in walkable, more centrally located neighborhoods in cities and inner-ring suburbs. One lesson Leinberger draws from this is that Congress should give metropolitan areas the flexibility to finance the kind of transportation they need—such as bus and light-rail systems—rather than mandating that the bulk of federal aid be spent on roads.