Foreclosure Crisis Spurs Quest To Reinvigorate Suburbs

In the mythologized version of recent American history -- which is to say, the part where the suburbs devolved from the wholesome backdrop for family life into ground zero for a devastating foreclosure crisis -- we essentially got what we asked for.

Americans demanded gleaming houses on individual squares of lawn far removed from urban centers, and the people who finance and construct real estate delivered the goods. This is how we wound up with expanding rings of suburban sprawl orbiting every metropolitan area. This is how we turned ever-larger swaths of open space into grids of look-alike homes, the inventory that came to be tinder for the foreclosure inferno. The developers, bankers, salespeople and their government enablers were merely working to satisfy a public craving.

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