Is America's love affair with the "exburbs" over?

By Andy Sullivan

GAINESVILLE, Virginia (Reuters) - Jean Bell didn't plan to take care of her neighbor's lawn when she moved to this cluster of brick townhouses hard by the freeway.

But the house next door has sat vacant for the past year and a half, and the bank that owned it wasn't keeping it up. So the retiree and her family have mowed and watered the grass to deter the burglars who have hit nearby developments.

"We all have to watch each other's homes because we don't want the property values to go down any more," Bell says. "It's scary, and I really don't know what's going to happen."

Thirty-five miles from downtown Washington, it's easy to find signs that America's relentless suburban expansion may have petered out.

Raw earth and blank concrete pads mark house lots that have sat unsold for three years.

Streets remain incompletely paved and poorly lit, the legacy of a builder that declared bankruptcy.

And transient renters have replaced homeowners who were forced out by the foreclosure crisis.

Is America's love affair with suburbia over?

Though the recession has left few areas of the United States unscathed, the sprawling neighborhoods out on the far edges of the United States' metropolitan areas have been especially hard-hit. Property values are falling, crime is rising, and the roads remain as congested as ever.

Some planners say the hard times are spurring a long-term shift away from the car-centric sprawl that has defined increasing swaths of the landscape since World War Two.

Rising prices for transportation and home heating, the declining number of two-parent households with children and a growing disillusionment with long commutes will prompt more Americans to choose smaller housing within walking distance of shops and mass transit, they say.

In this scenario, some of today's developments intended for aspiring middle-class families could become tomorrow's slums, warehousing those who can't afford to live anywhere else.

"What we're already seeing is these new, very cheaply made suburbs showing how little resilience they have to economic fluctuations. I see them becoming not only more desperate, I see them becoming potentially nonviable," says Jeff Speck, an urban planner and co-author of "Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream."

In the Washington region, real-estate agents say many of those who can afford it are choosing smaller houses closer to their jobs.

FEWER PEOPLE MOVING TO OUTER SUBURBS