Urban areas see revival in housing construction
— -- A substantial amount of housing built this decade has shifted from open fields on the edges of suburbia to dense central cities and their nearby suburbs, a new government study suggests.
The change suggests that a much-publicized urban renaissance in the past 15 years is more than an isolated trend, some urban analysts say.
In more than half of the 50 most populous metropolitan areas, communities at the urban core have captured a significantly larger share of their region's new residential building permits since 2002 than in the first half of the 1990s, according to an analysis by the Environmental Protection Agency.
"It's a very striking trend," says John Thomas, an EPA policy analyst and author of the report. "It seems to be holding up the first year of the real estate market downturn."
Long-standing patterns remain: A large share of residential construction still takes place on farmland on remote fringes of metro areas. In most regions, new housing in urban core neighborhoods accounts for less than half. Nonetheless, there was a consistent increase in housing in urban centers from 2002 to 2007, and the trend could transform growth patterns in some places for decades to come.
"For years, there was just one model — homes in auto-dependent suburbs," says David Goldberg with Smart Growth America, a national coalition that advocates denser development to allow easy access to jobs and services on foot or mass transit.
Changes in demographics, high gas prices and longer commutes on congested roads are generating more interest in smaller homes in urban settings.
"The development industry finally began to create the kind of in-town products that people were looking for," Goldberg says. "It also reflects the investment that a lot of metro areas have made in rail transit systems."
The battered economy presents challenges — downtown housing is struggling with vacancies just as exurban subdivisions are, says Joel Kotkin, a presidential fellow at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., who writes about urban history and trends.
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