what will suburbia look like in 40 years?

You guys seem to be underestimating the desire that people have to put their kids in good schools. The flight out of Dallas was driven by parents, not desire for cheaper square footage.
 
Historically, suburbia is the end result of a variety of complicated factors - schools among them - but it's wrong to suggest that they're the sole or the most important factor. What drove the initial suburban expansion-

The generally grimy and unsavory character of the late-industrial inner city. A clean tract house on a shaded street was a major improvement to people who grew up in tenements, or whose parents grew up in stinking slums underneath smokestacks. The escape from the city was on in earnest by the 1920's, although the earliest suburbia was driven by a different mode of transportation - streetcars - and shared many characteristics with the more dense inner city compared to the suburbia we know today.

Cheap land and energy. This goes almost without saying, but with low land and transportation costs, sprawl is virtually unhindered by economic factors.

Geography. Most american cities were not constrained naturally by geographic barriers. This is especially true of southern and midwestern cities.

Cultural Factors. The rugged individualist ethos, the distrust of shared spaces, the sacrosanct nature of private property, the white picket fence, and dozens of other cultural factors mostly unique to America combined to create a situation where the suburban lifestyle was the social norm. The inner city in popular culture was marginalized and degraded as centers of vice.

Government policy that was disproportionately weighted towards private modes of transportation. Think of the expense of building the interstate highway system...there has never been an analogous investment in creating a mass transit infrastructure. In fact, much of the transit infrastructure as it was built ca. 1920 was built with private money and managed by for-profit transportation companies. What killed the streetcars in nearly every major city? As early as the 20's, governments began to step in and stop the (private) streetcar companies from raising fares, which led to deferred maintenance, which led to degradation of service, - while at the same time subsidizing the streetcar companies competitors by building free roads. By the mid 50's, streetcar transportation was in such a sorry mess that it was possible for GM and other automobile companies to gobble up the streetcar companies with barely a belch.

Good schools were and are certainly a factor preventing inward movement towards the city, but they weren't a leading factor that created the rush away from the city.

The thing all those factors share in common? Except for geography, they can all change. Most are in the process of doing so. Land and fuel are not so cheap anymore. The post industrial inner city is no longer unhealthily polluted. Government policy can be changed given enough public demand for it (and we saw the beginnings of that when gas prices spiked earlier this summer). Compare and contrast Sex and the City with Taxi Driver, or Leave it to Beaver with Desperate Housewives to see the ways popular culture views inner city vs. suburbia.

I'm not saying that there will be a shift towards denser urban environments that will be anywhere near as rapid as the shift away from them - but make no mistake, the shift will happen. In the short to mid term - 40 years, we'll see more dense suburban developments clustered along rail transit or already built out freeway corridors. The city will not be as downtown-centric as it was in the pre suburban era, but it will evolve into higher density nodes of mixed-use development along convenient transportation routes. The exurban fringe that was built out in the 90's and 00's will be hit pretty hard. The inner suburbs and inner cities and downtowns will be the winners.
 
You're talking about over the last 100 years. I'm referring to the exodus we've seen in the last 10-20 years, creation of true suburbs.

The sprawl outward is a result of all of the factors you mentioned but until inner (or closer) cities solve the education issues the only increase you will see is younger professionals who dont have children or that can afford private schools or the poor, minority folks growing at their current rate (which will increase the inner city population but it wont be because people are moving back).
 
nath05:

I am not sure what I just read, but it sounded really good!!!!

The only thing that I didn't see in your post was anything about Telecommuting. Being in the industry, I have seen it go from almost non-existent to over 10% of the workforce. It is becoming less expensive and more effiecient to for companies to have Teleworkers. I could link a thousand articles and studies but it is almost Happy Hour!!

I predict by 2028 about 2/3's of white collar workforce will be working at home at least one day a week.
 
nath05 pretty much nails it. I might have added something about tax policy that encouraged and facilitated the purchase of single family homes, but that's about it.
 
Don't forget...Austin's first unplanned suburb was the Niles Road/Enfield area.
The first planned 'burb was Hyde Park followed by Travis Heights.
 
"if we could just get all the blacks and mexicans to move into one place and stay there, everything would work out fine... "

We're discussing suburbia, not utopia. Keep it straight.
 
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