Victorville, CA is a textbook case of the housing bubble gone wrong. Moving forward, Warren Karlenzig argues that places like Victorville show the need to consider a new paradigm of density and efficiency moving forward.
Karlenzig writes, "Victorville, California [is] a virtually 100 percent auto-dependent city of 107,000 that grew from 64,000 in 2000. Real estate prices started to crash in this Mojave desert community in 2006 when gas hit $2 a gallon. Victorville is now one of the foreclosure capitals of the nation, as home prices fell from an average of well over $325,000 in 2007 to under $125,000 in 2009."
"Victorville is by no means an isolated example. The amount of suburban and exurban development that occurred in the 1990s and early 2000s when fuel prices hit their historic low prices (see graph below) has created a massive expanse of excess houses and infrastructure requiring untold resources."
FULL STORY: Death of Sprawl, Part 2: How Exurban Meltdown helped bring down the US Economy
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This six-course series explores essential urban design concepts using open source software and equips planners with the tools they need to participate fully in the urban design process.
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