Recycling the Suburbs

The American suburb as we know it is dying. Shopping mals and big-box retail stores are going dark. An estimated 148,000 stores closed last year, the most since 2001. Kaid Benfield a director of the smart-growth program at the Natural Resources Defense Council says, "as much as possible, we need to redirect development to existing communities and infrastructure, otherwise we're just eating up more land and natural resources." People want to balance the privacy of the suburbs with more public and social areas, but the result will be a U.S. that is more sustainable-environmentally and economically.