Will Real Estate Developers Build Our Mass Transit?
In his piece “Here Comes the Neighborhood,” real estate developer Christopher Leinberger (who also wrote the lauded 2008 piece “The Next Slums?”) brings up a point that’s in his frequently mentioned, but definitely important in the discussion of the long slow death of suburbs and the urban renaissance: “Two-thirds of all households today consist of singles, childless couples, or empty-nesters, and that proportion will rise over the next 20 years. All of these groups tend to prefer walkable urban housing.”
The Rock Creek Railway did not make any money, but it was essential to attracting buyers to Newlands’s housing developments. In essence, Newlands subsidized the railway with the profits from his land development. He and other developers of the time understood that transportation drives development—and that development has to subsidize transportation.
…the idea has merit, particularly when you consider that residents, not developers, may be the ones driving the change. Right now, most states already have laws that permit local voters to create “special-assessment districts,” allowing property owners to vote in a payment for infrastructure upgrades by charging themselves, either in the form of temporarily higher property taxes or onetime fees.
- http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/06/here-comes-the-neighborhood/8093/2/
