In the midst of the hearing, one of the MPC staffers even referred to New Hampstead as “N.H.” for “No Houses”.

The city of Savannah annexed the New Hampstead property back during the boom years and spent $10 million or so on infrastructure. About the only development that the area has seen — and the only serious development it seems likely to see for years — is the new New Hampstead High School. I have suggested that the choice of a location so far from the homes of its students was one of the worst public policy decisions we’ve seen in years. It runs neck and neck with the decision to invest all those millions in infrastructure in a massive new development that will still not be needed for years, even under the most optimistic assumptions about population growth.

About the time there’s a true demand for homes at New Hampstead (assuming that time ever comes), we’ll likely be at a point when we’ll need to reinvest in all that infrastructure.

Of course, the costs of updating infrastructure are shared by pretty much every neighborhood, whether it is well-populated or not. The great suburbanization of America in the latter half of the 20th century has left us with sprawling roads, sewer systems, electric lines, water pipes and more that will all need repair, maintenance and replacement that will come at greater and greater cost.

The same problems confront private development, of course, and it’s common in American cities to see one or two or more rings of suburban development, once shining and new, that now are in desperate need of reinvestment.

Given the likelihood that energy costs will continue to increase and that taxpayers will balk at funding massive infrastructure upgrades for lightly populated suburban areas, America’s pattern of suburban and exurban development feels increasingly like a house of cards. Add in the changing tastes of younger Americans, who are opting for more walkable, more bikeable neighborhoods, and an increase in suburban blight seems almost inevitable.

The Strong Towns Blog has an excellent post this week about the “Second Life Cycle Blues” as they are playing out in the Minnesota towns of Baxter and Brainerd (neither of which I have visited, by the way). Author Charles Marohn moved years ago from being a professional encouraging sprawl and now gives “speeches around the country explaining the illusion of wealth created during the first life cycle of auto-oriented growth.”

From Marohn’s piece:

Baxter’s future growth, as with any purely auto-oriented community’s future growth, is predicated on being able to attract new residents (along with their first life cycle revenue) by offering low taxes and a high quality of life. What happens when taxes go up? Or what happens when services are trimmed back? How fragile is this house of cards?

[…] Detroit’s population is 706,585. Some simple math tells us that the average Detroit resident is financially supporting the maintenance of 5.1 feet of street, a burden they are not able to meet.

As reported, Baxter has 81.2 miles of street to maintain. Now the average Baxter resident is more affluent than the average Detroiter (though they also spend many multiples on housing and transportation), but with only 7,642 people, the typical Baxter resident is expected to sustain 56.1 feet of street. That is eleven times more than in Detroit. […]

Services will be cut. Taxes will go up. That’s the second life cycle blues. And in a self-reinforcing downward spiral, the things that once made Baxter officials look like geniuses will now make them look incompetent. Not only will those brand new strip malls that have been empty for six years not fill up but, as maintenance is deferred and things start to fall apart, the growth will continue to slow and move to the next hot place. They may try to reignite it with some aggressive subsidy scheme, but paying to lose money will only hasten the race to the bottom.

This is not just a story about Baxter and Brainerd, but one that taxpayers and public officials need to understand.

It’s still a mystery to me why folks in Pooler and other more populated areas of West Chatham didn’t chime in more forcefully on the location. They seemed too easily satisfied that the system was following through on a pledge to build a high school west of I-95, and I’m pretty sure relatively few affected families actually took the time to see how isolated the school is. There have been some dubious public policy decisions in the Savannah area over the last decade or so, including the city’s investment of millions of dollars for infrastructure for New Hampstead, but the decision to spend $30 million on a school there is right up there with the worst.

Anyway, I lost that battle.

New Hampstead High School will no doubt be full when it opens tomorrow, and it will be a major draw for West Chatham families, no matter how far away it might be. From today’s Savannah Morning News:

West Chatham area residents will have a new high school. New Hampstead High School is a sleek, high-tech, eco-friendly school built to serve 800 students. Although it has a temporary classroom wing for now, revenue from the next five years of education sales tax collections will be used to build a third classroom wing that will expand capacity to 1,200 students. A 450-seat auditorium will also be added.

But now I’ll be curious to see what the new high school’s traffic impacts are. School opens tomorrow — Monday, August 27 — and I’d encourage West Chatham drivers to be extra alert about the changing patterns. There could be a few unexpectedly gnarly spots, including on some roads where drivers are used to little traffic and high speeds.

Click here for the absurdly early bus schedule. Busses are scheduled to arrive at the school at 7 a.m., which means that some students will be picked up as early as 5:50 a.m. No high school students should be going to school that early. It’s nuts.

Of course, lots of students will be driving or carpooling with other students — or will get dropped off by parents.

The surge in early morning and mid-afternoon traffic is bound to have some sort of impact.

Click here for a big version of the countywide high school attendance zones. Here’s a large detail of the zone for New Hampstead, with the school marked by the little schoolhouse:

So how will drivers end up accessing the school?

• At the bottom center, you can see the intersection of 95 and 204/Fort Argyle. Some students and staff might come up 204 and cut across Bush Road and then take a left on Little Neck Road. Some will go further out on Fort Argyle — 4.4 miles — and come at the school from the undeveloped neighborhood. But as I understand it, there is no direct access from any road besides Little Neck, so we’re going to have drivers turning onto Little Neck at a normally deserted intersection and then turning into the school.
• Quacco Road has a lot of residents along it, but there’s no direct access from Quacco to Little Neck. Neither road has direct access to 95. So some of those drivers might go all the way down to 17/Ogeechee Road and then turn on to Little Neck. Students in the eastern or southern portion of the attendance zone might go that way for the most part.
• The straightest shot to the school will be for students in Bloomingdale, but they’ll be putting additional cars on the overpass at exit 155 on 16.
• And exit 155 on 16 is going to see a fair bit of additional stress, since it seems likely that lots of Pooler residents bound for New Hampstead will get on the interstate rather than go through Bloomingdale. There are some tricky sight lines at the end of that exit ramp, and there will be a surge of cars between 7 and 7:30 each weekday that need to turn left after making the exit.

It’s worth keeping in mind that all these distances are larger than they might appear here. The school is about 9 miles from downtown Pooler, about 4 miles from Bloomingdale, and about 7 miles from the intersection of Little Neck and Ogeechee.

By the way, I’ll note that it’s possible that not a single student will be able to bike or walk to this school.

I’d appreciate feedback from West Chatham residents about how things go in terms of traffic and access.

This isn’t just aspirational — it’s not just me and other urban advocates trying to tell people how to live. In the days of increased gas prices, long commutes on increasingly congested roads, more single person households, a new emphasis on sustainability, and a growing desire to live in places that are walkable and bikeable, homebuyers and renters are making different choices than they were a decade ago.

And homebuilders are adjusting.

From the USA Today’s Subdivisions go urban as housing market changes:

Why are the giants of the building industry, the creators for decades of massive communities of cookie-cutter homes, cul-de-sacs and McMansions in far-flung suburbs, doing an about-face? Why are they suddenly building smaller neighborhoods in and close to cities on land more likely to be near a train station than a pig farm?

A housing industry slowly shaking off the worst economic conditions in decades is rethinking what type of housing to build and where to build it. It’s a response to a new wave of home buyers who have no desire to live in traditional subdivisions far from urban amenities.

The nation’s development patterns may be at a historic juncture as builders begin to reverse 60-year-old trends. They’re shifting from giant communities on wide-open “greenfields” to compact “infill” housing in already-developed urban settings.

The article deals directly with the argument about whether we are seeing a paradigm shift or just a cyclical change in demand brought on by the housing bust and the deep recession. It seems pretty clear that these trends — noted above — aren’t purely cyclical.

Sure, there will always be people who want the suburban lifestyle of the late 20th century, but it’s a lifestyle fraught with hidden costs both to individuals, to their families, and to society as a whole.

Let me close by saying that a metro area like Savannah has largely avoided the worst of these issues. Even our farthest flung suburbs really aren’t that far from downtown, and there are pretty straightforward ways to retrofit many suburban areas so that they would have more amenities that are increasingly attractive to today’s households.

One exception seems to be the planned New Hampstead community off I-16, in which the local public schools decided to site a new high school even though there’s literally no one living in the neighborhood yet. We sure can’t afford to make decisions like that as we consider the new realities of housing demand.