Trying To Solve Albuquerque’s Sprawl By Building A Development The Size Of Manhattan
Stan Alcorn
Stan Alcorn is a staff writer at Co. Exist and a multimedia journalist based in New York City.
Mesa Del Sol’s is the New Mexico city’s attempt to keep its residents from spilling out into the surrounding desert. Instead, it’s sprawling, by building a massive urban development to take the place of suburbs.
When the housing crisis hit, it stopped sprawl in its tracks. In 2006, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, new permits for single-family homes began what would become an 80% slide. But at the same time, at the edge of the city, construction workers were breaking ground on a very different approach to stopping sprawl: a vast development called Mesa del Sol.
The plan had evolved since its genesis in the early 1980s, but it boiled down to a simple premise: Instead of stopping home builders from transforming distant desert into residential exurbs, the government would give them competition. They would build the largest and most ambitious New Urbanist development in the Southwest.
http://www.fastcoexist.com/1681723/t...of-manhattan#2