Suburbs

Cheap mortgages and cheap gas built this sprawling landscape of tan and gray stucco homes, iron gates and golf course communities. And the people who flocked here over the last decade -- upwardly mobile young families in pursuit of lower taxes and wholesome neighborhoods -- emerged as a Republican voting bloc crucial to President Bush's 2004 reelection.

It's sandstorm season in Cairo, one of those humbling days when the desert wind known as the khamsin seems determined to reclaim the city. A hot, mustard-colored haze engulfs the capital. Residents seal up their windows, and those who venture outside don surgical masks or clutch tissues to their faces against the tide of sand, flying garbage and urban grit. The same sandstorm blows outside Tarek Atia's suburban dream home.

Every afternoon, when Karla Schroeder walks her two boys home from school, she takes note of the new real estate signs springing up on neighborhood lawns. These days, they're not what she's used to seeing, and she's not happy about the change. Along with a great many "For Sale" signs are new ones that say "Foreclosure." A few weeks ago, she was startled by a bright orange sign that said "Auction."

THE suburbs, long derided as cultural wastelands, are experiencing a renaissance. And buyers are drawn to them like dieters to a scoop of Cherry Garcia. No longer just sprawling residential tracts fanning out from nominal downtowns, the reinvented suburbs of Pasadena, Fullerton, San Fernando, Burbank and Irvine -- to name a few -- are pedestrian-friendly villages featuring vintage architecture mixed with new designs, mom-and-pop stores next to national chains, plus jobs a lot closer to home.

Some questions have pat answers -- such as, "Does this dress make me look fat?" (\o7Of course not\f7.) More tricky is the question of whether a person's \o7address\f7 can make her fat. Many urban planners and health researchers think it can. In study after study, they have all but concluded that urban sprawl -- malls miles away, homes too far away for people to walk to shops, schools and parks -- contributes to obesity.

Still no word on whether a stitch in time really does save nine, but a UC Irvine professor has uncovered evidence to support another famous proverb, "Good fences make good neighbors." In a study of 15,000 Americans, economist Jan Brueckner found that suburban living is better for people's social life than city dwelling. The less crowded a neighborhood is, the friendlier its residents become, the report says.

Dozens of wildfires broke out across Greece, burning olive groves, cutting off villages and sending residents fleeing Saturday as one of the largest blazes swept perilously close to the capital's northern suburbs. The fires north of Athens were reported in an area more than 25 miles wide. Authorities were forced to evacuate two large children's hospitals, campsites, villages and outlying suburban areas threatened by blazes that sent huge clouds of smoke over the capital and scattered ash on city streets.

Re "Where to hear 'Hi, neighbor!': in the suburbs," Nov. 27 The article on the UC Irvine survey about suburbs, which showed that they have more sociability than cities, should be a challenge to conventional New Urbanist thinking. But it would be nice if the study would also get the same data for small towns and farmsteads. Suburbia is in many ways the duplication of the farmstead life in an urban area. It does not, however, bear much resemblance in its culture to that of the small town.

Students in urban public school districts are less likely to graduate from high school than those enrolled in suburban districts in the same metropolitan area, according to research presented Tuesday. The report by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center found that about 75% of the students in suburban districts received diplomas, but only 58% of students in urban districts did. In the Los Angeles metropolitan area, the gap was even wider, with 78% of students in suburban districts and 57% of those in city districts graduating.

While millions of American families struggle with falling house prices, soaring gasoline costs and tightening credit, some environmentalists, urban planners and urban real estate speculators are welcoming the bad news as signaling what they have long dreamed of -- the demise of suburbia. In a March Atlantic article, Christopher B. Leinberger, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor of urban planning, contended that yesterday's new suburbs will become "the slums" of tomorrow because high gas prices and the housing meltdown will force Americans back to the urban core.