There are many jobs in this. The Five Points redevelopment is an example of what she’s talking about. It’s a lot better than building more sprawl: safer, less expensive, more jobs, less energy cost, more energy independence, better health, and more community.

Georgia Tech Professor Ellen Dunham-Jones spole January 2010 at TEDxAtlanta, Retrofitting suburbia

In the last 50 years, we’ve been building the suburbs with a lot of unintended consequences. And I’m going to talk about some of those consequences and just present a whole bunch of really interesting projects that I think give us tremendous reasons to be really optimistic that the big design and development project of the next 50 years is going to be retrofitting suburbia. So whether it’s redeveloping dying malls or re-inhabiting dead big-box stores or reconstructing wetlands out of parking lots, I think the fact is, the growing number of empty and under-performing, especially, retail sites throughout suburbia gives us actually a tremendous opportunity to take our least-sustainable landscapes right now and convert them into more sustainable places. And in the process, what that allows us to do is to redirect a lot more of our growth back into existing communities that could use a boost, and have the infrastructure in place, instead of continuing to tear down trees and to tear up the green space out at the edges.

Here’s the video:

For instance, here in Atlanta, about half of households make between 20,000 and 50,000 a year. And they are spending 29 percent of their income on housing and 32 percent on transportation. I mean, that’s 2005 figures. That’s before we got up to the four bucks a gallon. You know, none of us really tend to do the math on our transportation costs. And they’re not going down any time soon.

Here in Lowndes County, those proportions are probably no better.

What’s driving the market in particular — number one is major demographic shifts. We all tend to think of suburbia as this very family-focused place. But that’s really not the case anymore. Since 2000, already two-thirds of households in suburbia did not have kids in them.

It’s probably even more so here, since so we have so many retirees.

…basically the Boomers want to be able to age in place, and Gen Y would like to live an urban lifestyle, but most of their jobs will continue to be out in suburbia.

They don’t have to be, if we stop building highways to the next county, build new developments with stores and jobs, and retrofit what we’ve got.

The other big dynamic of change is the sheer performance of underperforming asphalt. Now I keep thinking this would be a great name for an indie rock band. But developers generally use it to refer to underused parking lots.

Like Five Points. Add solar panels on those building roofs and parking lots and streetlights and cut energy costs and promote energy independence even more, while providing still more jobs. This is apparently already planned for another part of Five Points.

There’s another retrofitting opportunity at the old Pine Grove Elementary. Why let it sit and molder when it could be a hotel, art space, apartments, a megawatt solar generating facility, or all of the above?

-jsq

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