Economic turmoil alters development landscape
New Urban News Article with images and sidebar, 10/1/2008
The US lending crisis has cut homebuilding nearly everywhere, but walkable, transit-oriented developments are suffering least.
Housing construction across the US has dropped to its lowest volume since 1991, and many new urbanist developments are seeing their sales fall off. The latest Standard & Poors/Case Shiller Home Price Indices, released at the end of September, show that prices of existing single-family houses in 20 large metropolitan areas sank by a stunning 19.5 percent in the past two years.
Traditional neighborhood developments (TNDs) and other new urban projects have been wounded like the rest of the real estate industry, but generally not as severely. The downturn is more acute in the automobile-dependent fringes of metropolitan areas than in walkable, transit-connected locations.
One notable new urbanist undertaking that has run into financial difficulty is the 214-acre Vickery development in Forsyth County, Georgia, about 35 miles north of downtown Atlanta. Designed by Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. and modified by Tunnell-Spangler-Walsh & Associates, the mixed-use Vickery project is well regarded by new urbanists in the Southeast, yet it has skated on the edge of foreclosure.
