There are many jobs in this.
The

Five Points redevelopment
is an example of what she’s talking about.
It’s a lot better than building more sprawl:
safer, less expensive, more jobs, less energy cost, more energy independence,
better health, and more community.

Georgia Tech Professor Ellen Dunham-Jones spole January 2010 at TEDxAtlanta,

Retrofitting suburbia

In the last 50 years, we’ve been building the suburbs with a lot of
unintended consequences. And I’m going to talk about some of those
consequences and just present a whole bunch of really interesting projects
that I think give us tremendous reasons to be really optimistic that
the big design and development project of the next 50 years is going
to be retrofitting suburbia. So whether it’s redeveloping dying malls
or re-inhabiting dead big-box stores or reconstructing wetlands out
of parking lots, I think the fact is, the growing number of empty and
under-performing, especially, retail sites throughout suburbia gives
us actually a tremendous opportunity to take our least-sustainable
landscapes right now and convert them into more sustainable places. And
in the process, what that allows us to do is to redirect a lot more of
our growth back into existing communities that could use a boost, and
have the infrastructure in place, instead of continuing to tear down
trees and to tear up the green space out at the edges.

Here’s
the video:

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