Adaptive reuse

What will save the suburbs?

This New York Times article brings up a good point that now that the housing market has met a meltdown, what will happen to those houses in suburbia? And those bog boxes that sit empty?

It occurred to me while reading this that a long term plan and way to urbanize these neighborhoods and prevent further exurbia expansion would be to change by-laws to heavily promote urbanizing neighborhoods by allowing 2-4 story buildings to abut the street, thereby turning the current home on the property into something akin to a carraige house. Of course, this would create a domino effect for needed additional infrastracture and also a disincentive for extending suburbia would have to be implemented as well.