America's Other Housing Crisis: Undercrowded Suburbs - The Atlantic: The reality is that most of the housing stock and most of the land area of America’s metro areas is made up of relatively low-density suburban homes. And a great deal of it is essentially choked off from any future growth, locked in by outmoded and exclusionary land-use regulations. The end result is that most growth today takes place through sprawl. While urban density can house some people—mainly affluent and educated ones—the bulk of population and housing growth is shifted farther and farther out to the exurban fringe. That leads to more traffic and longer commutes, and the social and environmental consequences that flow from them, as this old suburban-growth model is stretched beyond its limits.
There's a disconnect between America's telecommunications infrastructure and this residential development pattern. The exurbs frequently suffer from cable company redlining and outmoded legacy telephone company copper cable plant. In addition, homes are often served solely by substandard, costly wireless services as landline providers concentrate on building fiber connections to multi-family dwellings (known as MDUs) in densely populated urban cores.
This is a point of overlap between telecommunications policy and regional planning. Modernizing telecom infrastructure at the fringes of metro areas to fiber to the premise (FTTP) can play a big role in reducing daily commute trips to urban centers by making it easier for knowledge workers to work in their residential communities.
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