When I was about 15, my parents came a hair's breadth from buying a house in a tony subdivision of our town with one of those manufactured names like "Crow Creek Estates," or "Pleasant Meadow Mews." The house featured all the amenities of the day: jacuzzi tubs in all four bathrooms, recessed lights in the chef's kitchen, and a deck with views onto a private golf course. And it was very, very big.

But according to an article in the March issue of the Atlantic, that house -- or at least houses just like it across the country -- could be well on its way to being a bona fide slum. Its floors have probably begun to warp, its asphalt-shingle roof is probably in disrepair, and its thin wooden frame is probably about to collapse. But, the article suggests, just because it's uninhabitable doesn't mean it won't be inhabited.

The author of the article, Christopher Leinberger, suggests that as affluent professionals return to the urban centers their forbears fled just a few decades ago, the suburbs they leave behind will inevitably fall to rat-infested ruin. And the McMansions that CEOs and investment bankers once clamored for will be divided up into low-income rental units.

Meanwhile, American cities will have to provide real estate for this onslaught of new residents. Arthur Nelson, Director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virgina Tech, believes that as much as half of the real-estate development on the ground in 2025 will not have existed in 2000.

Leinberger anticipates such a future with the zeal of a child two weeks before Christmas: "It's exciting to imagine what the country will look like then," he writes.

Exciting is one word for it. Scary is another one. If the suburbs become the new slums, what will become of the people who gravitate there for lack of resources to survive in the city? At least in the cities, they have the luxury of public transportation, proximity to a wide variety of jobs, and access to community support. In the suburbs, they'll be far more alienated than their predecessors -- claims of upper-middle class ennui notwithstanding.

Moreover, what does this mean for our cities? Along 4th Avenue in Brooklyn, a four-lane thoroughfare connecting the borough's downtown to the peripheral neighborhood of Bay Ridge, massive, pre-fab condos are sprouting like mushrooms after a heavy rain. They're enormous and don't appear to have any more structural integrity than the cheap, suburban estates they're replacing. What will happen when they start falling apart?

Photo: Joyce Dopkeen for the New York Times