American Dream Is Moving Out of the Suburbs and Could Leave Home Values Behind
Housing is back in the national spotlight, with the housing recovery a dominant narrative and focus for the broader economic recovery.
Fresh from a speech in Phoenix proposing to overhaul mortgage finance, while insisting 30-year mortgages be widely available to borrowers, President Obama will answer the public’s questions on housing policy in a roundtable with the Zillow (Z) CEO today. (Disclosure: Yahoo and Zillow are partners and you can see the roundtable at 1 PM EST on Yahoo!.)
Related: Home Flippers Come Roaring Back
So one might imagine this housing rebound taking place in suburbs all across the country – the middle class communities so emblematic of the "American Dream" of home ownership.
But in fact, in 2011 -- for the first time in 100 years -- the rate of growth of the suburban population was actually lower than the rate of growth of the urban population.
Related: Did Bernanke Just Kill the Housing Recovery?
That’s just one fact journalist Leigh Gallagher cites in her new book "The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream is Moving." In the book, the assistant managing editor of Fortune magazine argues the suburbs – at least as we know them – are ending.
“What I found is there is this pretty monumental shift happening,” Gallagher tells The Daily Ticker. “The suburbs worked for many years, there’s a reason why most Americans lived there, but they kind of overshot their mandate. We spread too far out… in suburbs that started to become more designed like supersized Stepford subdivisions.”
Related: “This Is Not a Normal Housing Market”: Economist Michelle Meyer
So where are people going and why? And what does this mean in context of the housing market for homebuyers and sellers? Check out the full interview in the video above with Gallagher to find out.
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