***Where do I start? No right-wing racist policies involved in suburban sprawl? It was exclusively the left-wing? So all the right-wingers stayed in the big cities?

The left have now painted themselves into a corner (using soy based paint, of course) in that the remaining white leftists that continue to vote democrat are located in the near suburbs and live in hypocrisy.

***And there are no White people who “continue to vote Democrat” living in NY, SF, Boston, Chicago, LA, Seattle, etcetera? Have you BEEN to Manhattan?

The left have now painted themselves into a corner (using soy based paint, of course) in that the remaining white leftists that continue to vote democrat are located in the near suburbs and live in hypocrisy. Single mother leftist professionals, the biggest voting bloc of the left, drive around in big SUV’s because they crave security and comfort.

I don’t expect this to be met with a lot of enthusiasm but there you go. Deal with it.

It still feels like the 80s, 90s, and 00s to me in terms of inner core versus suburbs/exurbs. I love living in a walkable, mass-transit heavy neighborhood. But as I near that child-rearing part of my life I feel the suburbs calling. Despite all the massive, amazing gains DC has had in the 2000s it’s still the case that the public schools in DC are pretty bad (President Obama, just like Bill Clinton, refused to use them.) I also find it hard to afford a family-sized structure (sorry I’m not going to put a family of 3-4 in an 800 square foot condo) on my middle class salary.

So yes I really like living in the inner core where I almost never need a car and can walk/Metro everywhere. But unfortunately raising a family is still tough/way too expensive in the inner core and so I guess I’ll soon move from a pretty green/walkable life to the car-centric sprawl life of my childhood in suburbia.

Haven’t YOU learned the lessons of Spengler? The rampant growth of cities and urbanity is a major sign of cultural and civilizational degeneration. In other words, urbanism IS decline:

“Writing in the early twentieth century, Oswald Spengler described the character of world cities as follows: ‘Spirit is non-existent in these cities. They are land in petrified form.’ Cities play a particularly tragic role in Spengler’s Doomsday scenario entitled The Decline of the West. For Spengler, cities were places where life ossified because the bodies, souls, and spirits of their inhabitants grew barren there. For this philosopher of history, the rise of the city heralded the start of the decline, not only of the West, but of all civilisations.

Spengler gave two reasons for his belief that the proliferation and growth of cities is an indication of the impending downfall of society. Firstly, he believed that by settling in cities, societies would enfeeble themselves both spiritually and culturally. He considered cities to be petrified, static structures in which social life could not flourish nor cultural renewal take place, let alone that they could be a source from which spiritual greatness could emanate.” – http://www.goethe.de/ges/phi/prj/ffs/the/sta/en3042692.htm

SPENGLER WRITES: “What makes the man of the world-cities incapable of living on any but this artificial footing is that the cosmic beat in his being is every decreasing, while the tensions of his waking- consciousness become more and more dangerous…this then, is the conclusion of the city’s history; growing from primitive barter-centre to Culture-city and at last to world-city, it sacrifices first the blood and soul of its creators to the needs of its majestic evolution, and then the first flower of that growth to the spirit of civilization–and so, doomed, moves on to final self-destruction.” – http://www.duke.edu/~aparks/SPENGO.html

An anecdotal example is the $18,000 a year my wife and I pay in day care, which would be greatly reduced by grandparents back home (as you’ll soon find out). That plus the higher real estate costs and higher marginal tax rate pretty much wipe out the extra earnings we make.

I am also not sure about your foreclosure premise. Foreclosures have generally been the worst in two areas, the poor part of the inner city and new development exurbs. Why is this? If a new development started in 2005 all of the loans would have 2005-2009 vintages. Those vintage loans have huge problems in most of the country, if one controls for the percentage of bubble year transactions I am not sure the difference would be as great, as condos in Miami indicate.

The inner city’s problems have more to do with predatory lending opened by the bubble years, immigrant communities seem to have been pretty hard hit.

All that said, I do think the inversion will happen in a number of cities. As it has in Manhattan and SF. The big driver will be reaching the metro size limit of the auto technology’s ability to deliver competitive mobility. The result is unlikely pretty in a number of exurban areas with few comparative advantages or a diverse tax base. More metro wide funding of services would be a big help, though the upper middle class newly ensconced in the cities won’t like the idea anymore in the future than they do now in the burbs.

I suppose this is probably unconstitutional to do without paying the banks off. But it worked in previous centuries, and it would work as a practical matter right now. Perhaps a constitutional variation on this could be found.