Christopher Leinberger on “the death of the fringe suburb”

Christopher Leinberger, a Brookings urban planning guru who’s done some work in Albuquerque’s downtown, made an argument in the New York Times this weekend that seems largely about larger cities than ours but might apply here as well:

DRIVE through any number of outer-ring suburbs in America, and you’ll see boarded-up and vacant strip malls, surrounded by vast seas of empty parking spaces. These forlorn monuments to the real estate crash are not going to come back to life, even when the economy recovers. And that’s because the demand for the housing that once supported commercial activity in many exurbs isn’t coming back, either.

By now, nearly five years after the housing crash, most Americans understand that a mortgage meltdown was the catalyst for the Great Recession, facilitated by underregulation of finance and reckless risk-taking. Less understood is the divergence between center cities and inner-ring suburbs on one hand, and the suburban fringe on the other.

I’m not sure if Albuquerque is large enough for the outer edges of the city to count as “fringe”, but on a drive this afternoon (see the picture above, taken at a strip mall at 98th and Central on the west side) I was struck by the kind of empty Leinberger is talking about.

In the picture above, ignore the “GRAND OPENING” sign. The place is empty, forlornly so.