re: The Future of the American Suburbs

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Seems urban blight will soon be exported to the ' burbs.


That's already happened in Metro Atlanta (South DeKalb, South Cobb, western Gwinnett, Clayton County).

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City is expensive and suburbs are trending down. I agree. Where should someone go to raise a family inexpensively near Atlanta?

Back-flipping robots exist now. None of this matters. We are all doomed.

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As a real estate novelist

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GODDAMNIT FONZ!!!!

Newnan?

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Any thoughts?

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I'm thinking that major American cities will start looking like European cities at least as you get closer to the city centers. Meaning, that the desirable places will be in the established areas like in NOLA everything west of the Industrial Canal with the slums and lower income types in the outer ring of suburbs like a New Orleans East and Kenner...it's already happening.

A lot of communities are recreating “town squares.” I feel it is a compromise between urban and suburban communities.

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Amazon has taken over North America. In twenty years, every strip mall will be gone, including grocery stores. Restaurants and the service units will remain.

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And you think this will impact only the suburbs?

People with money and good paying jobs will still live within the city. New Orleans for instance would not have 1700 sq ft houses in questionable parts of town going for $500k+ if this was not the case. Obviously, living in a bigger city is not for everyone though.

I think more leisure time and more people working remotely will see smaller towns and suburbs reborn.

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You're obvious young and naive

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Not so young or naive. I was raised in real estate from birth. I was reading plat maps when most kids were reading Curious George. Both my mother and father are in real estate full time. My dad does big land deals and commercial sales. My mother focuses on residential.

I became an appraiser after graduating college.

When the market crashed, I became a marketing consultant for real estate agents across the nation while I traveled out of the country for a few years, trying to write the next great travelogue. That's where real estate novelist comes from...and Billy Joel.

Came home and got into the sales business with my family. We did not work well together, so I'm back to marketing and market analysis.

I still keep my hand in appraising. I did 6 BPOs this week for some extra mad money.

What is going to happen to all these strip malls and big box stores is something that comes up when real estate people get together to shoot the breeze. It's pretty much accepted that Amazon, Shipt, etc. will kill off brick and mortar stores. We just differ on how all this soon to be vacant of functional obsolete real estate will be transformed or absorbed back into the market.

I think the days of the 150,000+ suburban city are numbered. There's just no need for them. People will either move back to the city or to smaller community nodes of around 15,000 people with a largely decorative main street/city center.

But that's 50 years off. The blight will happen well before that.