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I wrote this post to illustrate the changing times and the flaws of the mega-project. I think we will see more small development, building by building, block by block in the future because credit conditions will require it. Our local governments need to plan for those market conditions and use the strenghts of the private sector, rather than asking them for things they're not well equipped to do.

The District could ask for so many concessions from the developer during the bubble years due to the factors I mentioned in the post. However, those days are over and are not coming back in our lifetime.

We need to plan for the future in order to avoid a scenario with as many negative unintended consequences like the last time we had a huge contraction of credit during the Great Depression. Since our forebears didn't plan for the eventuality that the economy would return to health, we got uncontrolled, unplanned car-dependent sprawl that is not sustainable and is becoming a greater and greater millstone around our collective neck by the day. Since there was no planning, there was a 60-year overbuild of the (formerly) most fashionable and most subsidized housing product around. That's part of the reason why space in walkable places is now so much more expensive than in car-dependent places: there is too much car-dependent products and too few walkable urban products with respect to the market demand.

During this downturn, we need to focus our plans on sustainable growth and a diversity of real estate products, all in a walkable urban human-scale street grid. Otherwise, our great-grandchildren will have a mess that we can't imagine now. Much like we have this suburbia/traffic/alienation mess that our great-grandparents had no way of comprehending in their day.

by Cavan on Mar 9, 2009 4:22 pm • link • report