Submitted by stanleycrane t3_zyqh6k in Futurology
What is the anticipated lifespan of a suburban home anyway? In the city, old homes tend to be bought up by a developer, torn down, and replaced with newer residential or commercial buildings. In suburban neighborhoods this seems less likely to happen. The neighborhoods are often laid out with few entrances, road patterns that are less than intuitive, and in other ways that specifically preclude the development of anything but many similarly sized houses within them (not to mention past and current zoning laws that have helped to make the suburbs what they are).
As these suburban houses reach the end of their lifespan, what will come next? Will they simply be replaced one-by-one with a new house? Will whole neighborhoods be bought up and demolished, since most of the houses in them were likely built in the same decade anyway? Will cities continue to grow enough to make such purchases likely? Will there be a new way of integrating different types of housing in these areas as our laws and values change?
The suburbs seem like such a fixture in the American mind, but can they last indefinitely? Will they fade away slowly, one old house at a time, or more abruptly 100 or so years in the future?