Richard Florida:

On the other side of the crisis, America’s economic landscape will look very different than it does today. Will the suburbs be ineffably changed? Which cities and regions can come back strong? And which will never come back at all?

No place in the United States is likely to escape a long and deep recession. As the crisis deepens, it will permanently and profoundly alter the country’s economic landscape. I believe it marks the end of a chapter in American economic history, and indeed, the end of a whole way of life.

Suburbanization was the spatial fix for the industrial age. It made sense, for a time. How do we move past the bubble, the crash, and an aging, obsolescent model of economic life?

Instead of resisting foreclosures, the government should seek to facilitate them. We can’t stop the decline of some places, and we would be foolish to try. We need to let demand for the key products and lifestyles of the old order fall.

Jane Jacobs:

When a place gets boring, even the rich people leave.

Paul Romer:

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

Peter Schiff:

We need a serious recession in this country, and the government needs to get out of the way, and let it happen.

Verlyn Klinkenborg:

Someone from the future, I’m sure, will marvel at our blindness and at the hole we have driven ourselves into.

Alec Dubro:

The personal automobile must be abandoned, and quickly.

From a year ago:

Fundamental changes in American life may turn today’s McMansions into tomorrow's tenements.

Have you seen "Revolutionary Road"?

Hopeless emptiness. Now you've said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.

My father’s experiences were broadly shared throughout the country. Although times were perhaps worst in the declining rural areas of the Dust Bowl, every region suffered, and the residents of small towns and big cities alike breathed in the same uncertainty and distress. The Great Depression was a national crisis—and in many ways a nationalizing event. The entire country, it seemed, tuned in to President Roosevelt’s fireside chats.

The current economic crisis is unlikely to result in the same kind of shared experience. To be sure, the economic contraction is causing pain just about everywhere. In October, less than a month after the financial markets began to melt down, Moody’s Investor Services published an assessment of recent economic activity within 381 U.S. metropolitan areas. Three hundred and two were already in deep recession, and 64 more were at risk. Only 15 areas were still expanding. Notable among them were the oil- and natural-resource-rich regions of Texas and Oklahoma, buoyed by energy prices that have since fallen; and the Greater Washington, D.C., region, where government bailouts, the nationalization of financial companies, and fiscal expansion are creating work for lawyers, lobbyists, political scientists, and government contractors.