Mr. Kotkin needs to breathe some fresh air.
He who likes to quote the Census, has failed to read the ews that by 2042 America will be a minority-majority country and the way they are educated most don't pass high school let alone college. How will there be sustainable infinite suburbia under this scenario?

Secondly, America's current majority is aging. The suburbs are low on services, they need to be near places where there are services. Suburbs have inadequate public transit services. if there are any growth areas they will be the near services that have better transit facilities. hey, the Census has shown a trend in that direction already.

Mr. Kotkin in his article comparing Houston and New Orleans made a good point African immigrants were per capita wage earner leaders in the U.S. during the 1990s-citing Census figures. Hey how come that is the case. Is U.S. failing where Africa is succeeding? That is a question e might have asked;but, didn't cnsider. The reason this might be the case is that these African immigrants dn't contain many poor Africans, those go to Europe. Anmerica tends to attract the middle class, who are better equiped to handle life in America. America needs to grown its indigenous African-American middle class, that is the message. The place to start is to improve education. After all manufacturing jobs are diminishing;and American natives need to fill all those retiring shoes as well.

Whatever model you want to use one change needs to happen. The public must be educated to the reality that housing is not a part of a strong economy but an indicator of one. When enough people make enough money to afford ownership housing is strong. When those conditions are not met housing is weak. The whole sub-prime loan scam was nothing more than an attempt to disguise a weak economy by propping up the housing market with credit that borrowers could not afford in the long run.

I see the concept of living and working in the same neighborhood as Utopian given the complete lack of job security we're subjected to. When the average worker can count on keeping a job for most of the working life then living near work makes sense.

No doubt public transportation would be preferable to many but I suggest that the current model of major routes and rigid bus schedules must give way to something more on the line of the Jeepney system in the Philippines. Many smaller vehicles running on many routes without long wait times are usually fed from out of the way neighborhoods by motorcycle or tricycle type vehicles with space for carrying the days shopping. The cost is a fraction of your normal bus and you will get where you need to go in around the same amount of time it would take to drive. No more frustration driving and stopping for monster buses with only a few riders or the subsidizing from the taxpayer.

It is my opinion that what we need is a whole new housing model. We need to change the way we live completely and to do so quickly and economically we must change the way we build. Robotic Construction Model is a new way to build a new type of building etc., etc. Only invention and innovation can change our direction. New ideas are terrifying because they tend to destory old ideas. Old ideas with powerful vested interests, those vested interests are in fact most of our problem.
roboticconstruction.com
HJR2

Hello!
"The Economist mentions that the housing bubble destroyed about $4 trillion in wealth"
wealth is not destroyed, it is meerly transferd from one entity to another.
The money wa not destroyed or lost it was transfered.
So stop with the bullshit already!

This is pretty weak tea from both of them. It seems easy enough to enunciate a national policy of federally guaranteed mortgages, for houses and condos, that would allow low income and those on fixed incomes to have and own housing- and this mortgage pool should be directed at building energy-efficient housing near new transit lines.

We can see plainly now that it's not a matter of cost, as the $4 trillion was, indeed, not 'lost', but stolen, some resting quietly now in Swiss bank accounts, some being invested in the expanded ownership of America by our wealthiest 5% of the people. In a rather astounding graphic I saw recently, the poorest 40% of us own less than 1% of the wealth of the nation. Spending several trillion straightening this out would be a prudent investment in ourselves.

Simply responding to Joel Kotkin is not enough. He drags the debate into a past that never was. We need to think about the future.

There's another option for housing policy that achieves what both sides of this issue want: limited-equity cooperatives (aka low-equity cooperatives). Low-equity coops constitute the most successful form of housing the USA has ever known. Defaults are nearly nonexistent. Occupants are owners, but at the cost of renting. Monthly costs rise very slowly. For example, in the beautiful duplex 3-bedroom cooperatives of Park Forest, Illinois, a friend of mine moved in for the $800 cost of a share in the coop, plus $1200 for the upgrades the previous owner had made (about the same amount of security deposit and advance rent a tenant pays). His monthly costs were $185 -- covering his share of the mortgage on the entire cooperative complex, property tax, maintenance, insurance, and contribution to the reserve. His monthly costs had risen to just $235 when he moved out 8 years later and bought a single-family house without any government assistance thanks to all the money he was able to save over the years owning a low-equity cooperative. And as a low-equity coop owner, he enjoyed the same tax breaks as any home owner (deducting his share of the interest he paid on the coop's mortgage and property tax).

Nixon put the nix on these with his moratorium on all housing programs and the real estate lobby has successfully kept funding down and discouraged development of low-equity cooperatives. Low-equity coops offer the best of renting (mobility and relatively low cost) and the best of homeownership (tax deductions, financial stake in the community and all the other benefits attributed to homeownership except huge profits). They were so successful in the 1960s that the federal government returned over $30 million in mortgage insurance payments because there were no defaults. And you can make low-equity cooperatives out of any type of housing: single-family detached, attached, and multiple-family.

It's a sad commentary that neither political party recognizes the value of such a rational housing policy. It's too bad that the real estate lobby owns both the Democrats and the Republicans.

I am very glad to see these lovely and beautiful detail.