#slurb

Perfectly usable housing destroyed to make way for very expensive new construction!

When I was a child, the valley was almost totally truck farms, but now it is mostly slurb.

While Columbia and Reston were supposed to be models of future development outside the central city, in the end they have proven to be little more than standard slurban tract developments with a few minor modifications. For example, lot sizes in Columbia were a little smaller than the norm for the area. In the recent past, reducing lot sizes has become routine in new tracts. This scene of new housing under construction in the 1960s could have been taken almost anywhere in the US. Whatever “sprawl” (a term I despise) may be, these so called “new towns” did nothing more than redirect it slightly. Both were located at the exurban fringe in the 1960s when construction started, but now both are inside the slurban belt that extends well beyond them as the Maryland slurbs of Baltimore and Washington have merged and extended west almost as far as Frederick, Maryland more than 50 km further out. 

Suburbia in the Palouse, Pullman, 1978.

original: mrlovenstein.com