Boarded up homes, cracked sidewalks, pot-holed streets, litter blowing across unkept yards - the symptoms of urban decline, right? As it turns out, these symptoms are popping up in the suburbs as the fallout from the subprime mortgage crisis sets in. And there’s empirical data supporting this diagnosis.
The data comes from the United States Postal Service (USPS), which tracks occupied homes and apartments by zip codes. USPS considers a unit vacant when no one receives mail at that address. If the unit is still vacant after 90 days, it is considered inactive.
When researchers grouped the data into urban, suburban, and rural areas, they found that the suburbs had more declining zip codes between 2002 and 2006 than the other areas. They “found more new declining zip codes in all suburban regions during the recent recession than in the previous period and determined that outer ring suburbs sustained the largest increase of new zip codes with a net decline in housing occupancy. In contrast, the total number of declining zip codes in central cities decreased.”
These trends add up to this: “Places that had prospered in more recent times, including Sunbelt cities and remote suburbs, have begun to see declines in occupied housing stock as well and were, in fact, the places hit hardest by the subprime lending crisis” (Hollander, Polsky, Runfola, “The New American Ghost Towns,” Land Lines, April 2011).
