The Bust Belt

19 September 2008 - 7:00am

How exurban expansion paves the way for the next housing crisis.

"Tucked in a desert valley 100 miles southwest of Las Vegas, the town of Kingman, Arizona has persisted for over a century, first as little more than a railroad siding, then a Route 66 fill-up point, enjoying its quiet, arid life with dignity.

In recent decades, its 28,000 residents have watched nearby Sin City transform from a gambling oasis into a sprawling desert metropolis of two million people, a crowd rapidly butting up against the area's geographic limits and water supply. All the while, Kingman persisted in isolation, due to the intervening desert and the winding, two-lane bottleneck of highway 93 as it crosses the Colorado River at Hoover Dam.

Now that's all going to change."

Full Story: The Bust Belt
Source: Culture11, September 17, 2008
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For the past half century we have been building communities for the wrong reasons. We built them to sell cars. This created all sorts of problems.