More on the Decline of the Exurban Lifestyle
Submitted by
CalculatedRisk on Tue, 06/24/2008 - 9:40pm (119 comments)
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In regards to the Inland Empire, I tell my friends who want to buy that it will be the right time when the foreclosures being purchased out there now are foreclosed on a second time.
But I think I may have to revise that to when they've been foreclosed on a third time...
So depressing...
We see the price of gas on every street corner and what we spend on our credit card statements every month. But even at $5.00/gal and 20 mpg (25 cents/mile) the cost of gas is still less than half the cost of owning the typical vehicle.
If the math doesn't work now then it probably didn't a couple of years ago either; we just didn't notice since those other costs are buried in maintenance, insurance and depreciation.
tonights only positive spin...drastically reduced commute time due to less traffic congestion... and a 2008 4x4 4dr tahoe for $5k... and a home for 50 off might make the burbs look attractive again.
Likewise in San Diego the decline in prices is very strongly correlated to the distance from the large job centers on the coast, especially Downtown, La Jolla, and Del Mar.
One mile away and closer, prices are below their frothy 2006 peaks, but still high. Go five miles inland, and they are down 20-30%. Once you get to neighborhoods that are a long commute to job centers, you see declines of 50-70% from the peak.
Greg
I'd submit that your observations are as much related to the "froth" associated with the turnover/purchase rate as the driving distance involved.
Lower priced (typically not near the coast) and new homes (also typically inland) saw much higher sales during the last few years than the higher-end/coastal areas and a larger percentage were purchased close to the peak.
As I noted before, any lifestyle dependent on low gas prices - and low gas mileage vehicles - is becoming uneconomical.
You didn't mention just about every truly rural lifestyle. What the heck will this do to places like Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas?
p.s.: I know this is a little OT, but I can't help but reiterate that our government (as currently configured) is also highly dependent upon low gas prices and low gas mileage vehicles.
Robert Reich's Blog: The Great Pendulum of Economic Outrage Is About to Swing Again
Now the pendulum of outrage is swinging back against large corporations. America is heading toward another era of regulation. The real question is how smartly we go about it, and whether we can keep the pendulum from swinging too far.
The second quarter 2008 Core Mortgage Risk Index (CMRI) is 16 percent above the same period a year ago, having increased for the fourth consecutive quarter. The CMRI forecasts delinquency risk and is now 47 percent above a base period near the end of the last recession. Although higher now than then, the CMRI is likely to continue rising over the next 18 months, said Mark Fleming, chief economist for First American CoreLogic. The primary driver of increasing risk has been home price depreciation. The economic slowdown and possible recession has reinforced the rise in mortgage risk as well. The riskiest markets in the country are typically characterized by double-digit home price declines and deteriorating labor markets. By far the most noteworthy trends are the continued rapidly rising risks in California, Florida and other cyclical markets and the persistence of mortgage risk in the Midwest, added Fleming.
First American - Press Release
Im with picosec, yet again.
They sort of gloss over the main takeaway, in the article where Zandi is talking about capitalizing the (negative) return on gas into house prices. But they totally miss taking the next step and the article wanders off point.(Not that Zandi is any good at anything but rear view mirror economics, as of late.)
The fall in exurb prices will attract people to the area, in equilibrium. But for now, more people leave for gas prices and move inward, higher vacancies result in the exurbs while homes don't sell, prices fall.. but slowly. That aspect of the decline creates the disequilibrium, but eventually, prices fall back to where the marginal change in gas prices becomes almost insignificant. But during the adjustment period, it can be mistaken for a behavioral change, when it's pretty purely a short term, economic expediancy.
Why insignificant? Think about it....central SF prices, for example, will likely remain ridiculous, even if 20% is shaved. In oakland, you might go 40%. Meanwhile, in Tracy, Stockton, etc, prices fall 70%. We're talking a few hundred thousand dollars (probably on average, 350k). What is the value of that, earning 10% on average, with cyclical variation (conservatively?) vs $1500 a year in gas, for 30 years, assuming gas prices rise 5% a year. (reasonable?) Still, no contest.We're looking at 1.5 mil future dollars vs less than half a mil for the capitalized gas savings.
Now, how we put a price on time is a different story, but mostly, it's not linked to gas prices-at least not directly. However, it does reduce ability to do other work, through increased time spent commuting, so, it is not as clear cut a quantification.
But that's not what this article is about.
Id be interested in a local from a lower price area doing the comparison. I still think the bulk of this behavior was in high priced markets. I coudl very well be wrong on that however.
A Quarterly Forecast of U.S. Residential Mortgage Risk and its Impact on Local Economies
http://www.facorelogic.com/uploadedFiles/Newsroom/Innovations_Newsletter/CMRM_Q1_2008_V15.pdf
The geographic concentration of
mortgage risk is currently being driven by a
combination of deteriorating economic
conditions, accelerating home price
declines, and increases in foreclosure and
collateral risk. These declines have led to a
self-reinforcing feedback loop where lower
prices lead to more defaults and excess
housing inventory, which causes demand to
decline and prices to fall further. This
downward cycle is posing difficulties for the
economy including the impact of the
housing downturn on personal wealth and
consumer spending.
Let me see if I can anticipate a few comments -
'Just more flawed reporting, since peak oil is a flawed belief, no one wants to use transit, live closer in, or live in less space. And even if someone does, it is because they are too stupid to recognize that exurbia is the most exalted form of human existence, or jealous that they don't live that way themselves.
Any problems of exurbia are either caused by too much governmental meddling, or no governmental meddling.
We have been hearing about how flawed exurbia is from people who simply don't possess my superior knowledge or analytical skills. And whatever data they can muster is inferior and easily ignored in the face of my superior hand waving techniques.
For example, let us imagine building millions of electrical vehicles using technologies which don't yet exist, powered by nuclear plants which don't yet exist, distributed over a power grid which currently is unable to bear the additional load. This solves the problems of exurbia, unlike those deluded idiots that think European style mass transit, carrying millions of people easily and efficiently, could actually work in the U.S., with the exception of the occasional urban hell where no one would want to live, like New York City.'
Did I miss anything?
Oh yes - 'Anyone that disagrees with any of my pontificating is a troll, one who is simply ignorant and unable to handle real data used by a real genius, though I am far too modest to call myself a genius, except in the case of those to stupid to recognize my self-satisfied brilliance.
Another thought that, while a bit off-topic still relates...
We talk of a gain or loss in a home sale as if one were the converse of the other. But in reality, the vast majority of the time it'l be the home-owner's gain and the lender's loss.
Individuals don't lose a few $100k; they don't have it to lose 'cause worst case (not to minimize that because it's still catastrophic) they're not going to lose more than they're worth.
Percentage-wise the homeowners may lose a lot of their net worth, and that may be disasterous to their futures, especially if they're boomers with retirement in the not-to-distant future.
But dollar-wise, it's the lenders who will lose the most, and have the most to gain from bail-outs.
I came here to bitch and moan. Thanks, that is all.
"You didn't mention just about every truly rural lifestyle. What the heck will this do to places like Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas?"
Um, yeah, they are doing just fine, thank you, because (per Case-Schiller indices in fly-over country) mortgage is only 25% of household income and they don't mind "doin nuthin'" on the weekends due to cut-back in discretionary spending.
This is the start of evidence of what that guy, James Howard Kunstler, has been writing about for years. Essentially he has been saying that the American dream is the biggest misallocation of investment ever, since it is built on an expectation of permanently low oil prices. This whole country's way of life has been developed on the expectation that travel across long distances will always be cheap. Trillions and trillions of investment has gone into that over decades and we will have a very painful depression and rebuilding, since that wealth has been wasted......
Of course (whisper it) California could always just rebuild the street car network that used to connect cities, small towns and suburbs over most of the state and that the auto industry was allowed to buy out and shut down in order to bury its competition... Oops, no, that's only good for people -- no giant corporate windfalls in sight. How could I be so silly?
You didn't mention just about every truly rural lifestyle. What the heck will this do to places like Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas?
In a "truly rural" lifestyle people live at (farm) or near (small town) their places of work.
What you're talking about is ex^2urban.
U.S. Population 300 million - 25 barrels of oil per person per year.
China Population 1.3 Billion - 2 barrels of oil per person per year.
India Population 1.1 Billion - 1 barrel of oil per person per year.
Even a small increase in energy consumption by China, India, and the rest of the developing world, is going to put a huge strain on the worlds ability to meet that demand. Imagine how much oil will need to be pumped if the average Chinese and Indian were to use 6 barrels per year.
Prices have nowhere to go but up. Mr. market is going to cause a lot of pain for a great many people.
A digression inspired by rent-to-own and Ozymandias, above.
Current automotive technology - not projected or vaporware - is producing cars which travel about 220 miles on an overnight charge requiring a bit less than five dollars' worth of electricity. That's today. And these are fast, attractive and luxurious automobiles.
The automotive battery arrays in current production use ordinary household current, and may be recharged without degradation for some fifteen years, assuming an average of fifteen thousand mile-per-year usage.
Battery technologies or battery replacement technologies in the pipeline may, if they make it to maturity, improve on those figures but, as they stand, they are good enough for us to live and travel very much as we do now with no concessions whatever. I should point out that most recharging is done overnight when the grid is under light demand and generating capacity is idled - so no, the "additional" power consumption poses no problem.
The overall market doesn't see this at present, but the option to step away from the gas pump - either mostly or entirely - is available now. See Tesla, Fisker, and A123 systems.
burnside -
please, do send me the name of your local electrical car dealer. I don't need a car off the lot - one delivered in a couple of weeks is acceptable. Part of a normal production of 100,000
of the same base model would do fine.
Even better, do the sort of math that works out the charging load of even just every 4th IC car being replaced with an electrical one - then look at California ISO ( California ISO: System Status ). And electricity isn't isn't exactly free - that 'light' demand exists due to coal or natural gas not being burned or water not running through a turbine. Nuclear is obviously trickier in this context, as nuclear plants are definitely baseload facilities - conceivably, a large enough number of nuclear plants could provide the base load required for overnight charging. As a certain dawg once worked out (assuming you trust his numbers, and my memory), California (not the U.S.) would require 40 new nuclear plants to generate enough energy to replace all IC vehicles. World production of nuclear plants, ca. 2005? 26.
I would also suggest some work from Stuart Staniford - The Oil Drum | Four Billion Cars in 2050? (a physicist, by the way) - quite an interesting, if still somewhat optimistic overview of the subject. Why optimistic? He discusses 4 billion cars in 2050, when I doubt that today, the world even possesses 4 billion bicycles.
Of course electrical vehicles have been and will be developed, and that their use will grow - just not in any time frame that I would consider 'soon.
In choosing a house, do people value their commute time rationally? Some study 20 years ago said 'at a dime an hour' - maybe it's been updated.
rent-to-own,
You won't raise any serious objections to your points from me. I don't expect an electrified Lotus Elise to appear in very many garages any time soon. And I don't pretend to take up the cudgel for exurbia.
My point was, in many ways, your own. Except I want to make the case that electrically-powered cars are not awaiting technological breakthroughs and, simultaneously, that market penetration (if such be our future) is vanishingly small now and likely to progress (if at all) at a pace well-suited to the accommodations it will require.
Of course I think it's nice I don't have to give up anything beyond the exhaust note in order to vacate the world of ICEs. Unfortunately, the Tesla dealer/service facility closest to me is still some three hours distant so my silent, impossibly rapid and smart-looking future remains an agreeable prospect.
Obviously, I don't propose overnight power is free. Only that it requires no additional infrastructure to deliver, which is why the per KWH rates are often reduced on many grids in the nighttime hours.
The Tesla and Fisker's Karma are trendsetter phenomena. If there's an early-adopter phase (and I don't know that there will be), then they will take the market.
If we get into coal/thorium/wind/solar here, I have to start my own blog.
I have often thought that electric cars powered by nuclear power stations are probably the way forward. But is this change going to arrive soon enough to rescue the high energy consumption American Way of life?
California, California, California,
California, California, California,
California, California, California,
California, California, California,
California, California, California,
California, California, California
Had enough yet, or should I go on?
I agree, a lot of this blog is focused on California. Maybe that is because CR lives there? Or perhaps because it is the most populous state in the US? Maybe more is written about California by journalists and there is less out there about other places? It is not the centre of the universe.
How does the rising energy prices hurt the globalist movement?
First let me explain how I understand what has happened:
a) The market flows to places where labor is cheap (ie. China/India)
b) Resources are diverted to places where labor is cheap.
c) Products shipped out of places where labor is cheap.
It seems like expensive energy would be a detriment to targeting cheap labor markets since it takes a lot of energy to shift resources to those markets and then ship end products out of those markets. In that end if we believe the "world wide Clinton/Bush global conspiracy" one would think this energy crises would be short as they attempt to preserve this globalistic view.
In short: does high energy price make it more beneficial to manufacturer "stuff" locally?
rising gasoline prices are crushing hopes of a housing recovery in this area, east of Los Angeles
But I thought when you cut rates it just solved all your problems and made everybody rich and happy. WTH?
Were we misled?
Oz-I don't know, the NY Times writes quite a bit about NY too. Perhaps the fact that the #s for NY don't show the world ending make them less worthy of attention.
Of course there's always Canada, otherwise known as Saudi Arabia with water.
For those that own a home in a remote location, work in construction, and drive a low gas mileage vehicle, this must feel like a depression.
I can't imagine spending an extra $2,000 or so a year on gas "feels like a depression."
thats the difference of having $2k be 7-10% of your income versus less than 1%
I can't imagine spending an extra $2,000 or so a year on gas "feels like a depression."
Well lucky you. Don't ruin your beautiful mind with bad thoughts.
your in Christ,
Isamu
burnside -
good points in turn. We will be looking for and finding any number of alternatives to how things are done today.
Perhaps the major difference I have with many here is a belief that necessary changes in America will focus much more on living within our means, in a wide variety of senses.
Water is one of my favorite examples, and I come from Northern Virginia. No one seemed to care about where clean water would come from, since such problems take years to become apparent, while the profits in bulldozing the watershed is measured in quarterly increments - and it was easy to ridicule anyone pointing out limits in a world of seemingly infinite growth.
We will be living differently, the only question is whether those changes will be voluntary or not. And whether those changes are seen as a gain or a loss. Personally, I would think not spending 2+ hours a day in a car commuting would be a gain, but it seems many Americans disagree.
r-t-o,
I'm not holding my breath on those substantive changes. We swing from periods of end of the world self-abnegation to imagining we should be covered with kisses and bathed in champagne. Without passing through even brief periods of evident sanity.
Or am I cynical?
There's no bad news, look for a rally in the markets today.
Trichet folded it seems.
There's more to BEN than the beard.
YLSP writes:
(sorta rambling response to a general post here, sorry for going on)
How does the rising energy prices hurt the globalist movement?
Nationalism springs from competition and scarcity. Without it, most of your social organizations will be bound by ideology, not locale. The years to come will be boom times for national identity and closed borders.
Globalism in the one-world sense was already on the ropes because a unified world government is just flatly impossible to put under steerage. There's too many interests to reconcile into workable policy.
Globalism in the sense that the little brown people were always exactly as smart and capable as you and are now becoming educated and industrialized and thus able to exert their will to be something other than a low-cost resource center? That is here to stay.
First let me explain how I understand what has happened:
It seems like expensive energy would be a detriment to targeting cheap labor markets since it takes a lot of energy to shift resources to those markets and then ship end products out of those markets.
This might be so but I do not expect heavy industry to roll back into Pittsburgh as a result. It's more likely to get pushed up the supply lines than to get pushed back in history.
Maybe you will see more flexible, portable factories dropped on top of major resource outputs or maybe you will see more expendable ones thrown up and torn down. Or maybe big factories that don't depreciate for a century or more are the way of the future to offset the massive build-out costs.
It's definitely true that America has de-industrialized, so a previous industrial heritage is mostly worthless to us, we'll still have to pay the training costs and the tooling costs.
Even if highly efficient mfg facilities win out and it's top-dollar tooling that proves to be the biggest economic winner, there's no real reason to think America will re-tool into a successful model. We're broke, ignorant and divided; the Manchu China of our era. I think we're destined to a resource export economy or industrial-imperialist export economy where we don't capitalize the factories or see their output.
In that end if we believe the "world wide Clinton/Bush global conspiracy" one would think this energy crises would be short as they attempt to preserve this globalistic view.
IMO, the "Alex Jones Viewpoint" is a comfort myth. However much you rail about it, when you are talking about the global anything conspiracy, you are positing someone in charge. I think if there's any such conspiracy in the world, they had ought to be shit-scared, because matters have slipped far beyond their control.
In short: does high energy price make it more beneficial to manufacturer "stuff" locally?
Interesting questions probably best answered on a case-by-case basis. For stuff that spoils or otherwise doesn't survive long ship times, yes, it's going to get closer.
On the other hand, trains and boats are very efficient. Dryfly is right on the money here, process efficiency in btu per output unit is going to become crucial.
Because energy is less efficient if you have to transport it, to make up for transport costs, what's really going to count for most goods is efficient process and an integrated energy-industrial complex. If that happens in Goa or St. Louis will not matter as much as long as it won't rot on the looooong but fairly efficient trip to its destination.
If it'll rot or break on a long, rough trip, I'd say that you're about to either get it from local sources or witness dramatically curtailed availability.
Watch out - that is the sort of expression that will wake sleeping dawgs. And he will be happy to inform you of how silly your suggestion is, because really, mass transit is just a giant boondoogle or figment of someone's fevered imagination.
That's right, because remember, mass transit is built on direct and indirect subsidies, not like cars.
Nope, no billion dollar connectors, giant parking lots at facilities backed by state bonds, massive bureaucracy dealing entirely with the vehicles and their transitways, or laws that tolerate a toxic volatile petroleum distillate vendor on every street corner here helping out the cars.
(that's rent-to-own I'm responding to, sorry RTO)
It's not just California. We're even seeing it here in NY Metro, where exurbs without mass transit are starting to wither away
I'll say it once again as a reminder. As people leave exurbs, one of the biggest financial hits will be to the muni revenue bond market.
There won't be enough debt service to pay off all the bonds used for exurban infrastructure including roads, sewers, water, schools, hospitals, etc. There's no support for these bonds except a combination of debt service payments and muni bond insurance, which is now effectively gone.
Bondholders will be bag holders.
The move away from exurbs isn't temporary, cyclical or a fad. It's permanent.
Exurbs are a luxury the U.S. economy and governments can no longer afford.
If you have a classroom full of 50 kids and 45 of them do their homework and contribute to a learning environment and 5 of them are party boys that are destructive and disruptive to the rest, who do you hear about?
We all know from the housing debacle that a vast numbers, probably the majority, of Americans are not very bright (although some may with to say they have been 'misled') since they took on financial obligations any fool sould have known they could not fulfill, but now we have another confirmatory piece of evidence...this:
Yahoo! 404 - Page Not Found
On Iraq they prefer a warmonger who wants to stay there occupying this US colony for 100 years if need be! This is sheer madness, of the sort that got so many into a mess in housing. Foolishness rarely comes alone; it is usually part of a pattern.
Consider the other direction of this too- workers who have to commute long distances to resorts, theme parks, industrial areas well outside of cities are also reconsidering whether the drive is worth the job. Businesses that are out-of-the-way are going to be hurting too.
Wonder if the concept of companies building towns/ ameneties in their back yards could come back into vogue.
California, California, California,
Make it stop! You people are worse than New Yorkers!! ha!
I think that what's been written here hits a point - this is a phenonmenon of high-priced areas right now. Here in !CA (not CA for you non-programmer types), we see the same thing happening. But we have a pretty good tansit infrastructure around the inner core, that gets more sparse as you travel out. But it still covers a wide swath. The city is still expensive, but the further out you go, the worse the price drops get.
I think, though, that as prices move down people will again choose to move out there. Last week a unit sold in a friend of mine's building in Boston. A one bed condo around 600 sq ft at 407k in a not-so-fab section of town. For that money I could buy a 3 or 4 bed somewhere not too far from the city now. So what do you think people will do? The price of gas doesn't even come close to that difference.
So I hesitate to call this a trend of the future, just a temporary reaction to what's going on. And, btw for the dwags, mass transit ridership has exploded here. And that is definitively related to gas prices.
The move away from exurbs isn't temporary, cyclical or a fad. It's permanent
And what is happening to all that vacated housing? Is it just sitting empty?
tj & the bear writes:
You didn't mention just about every truly rural lifestyle. What the heck will this do to places like Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas?
Animal transport! If you have land, animals are the perfect solution to this problem. Fuel is local forage, capital buildout for replacement units is built into every female.
Especially if we insist on continuing toward an ethanol "economy" where you are burning the feed for many many draft animals per unit of fuel for a mechanical conveyance, there's just going to be too much advantage to putting the feed directly into a beast of burden instead. Now, imagine what you can get when you gengineer your mule.
The only thing that will hold back widespread adoption are insane animal rights douchebags doing their best to destroy society, and people's unwillingness to be "old fashioned" and admit that a mule is cheaper than a Geo Metro.
although I too believe that long term the exurbs will go the way of the dinosaur, I also have my doubts that it will occur now.
instead, this is America's second great energy shock (first one was the Oil Embargo in the 70's). As we slide into recession, and pull China/India etc with us, I believe we will see oil demand destruction and the cost of oil will fall.
the problem is that it won't fall back to $40 or probably even $60 again... it'll likely fall to like $70-100 or something.
and then when we emerge from recession we'll do well for a while and then get another energy shock... and then another and another. the shocks will likely come more and more often and last longer. And oil prices will never fall as far post-shock as they were pre-shock.
due to this you'll see a slow degradation of the exurbs. just my 2c.
but there are more problems with exurbs than just energy. Because everything is so spread out it becomes expensive to give various services. the ratio of people to service drops too low. I watched a Mayor's conference on TV and it was discussing the problem with supplying the less dense suburbs and the exurbs with water (the pipes are expensive) and roads (again, roads expensive) and electrical lines and fire support and almost everything else.
this is attenuated significantly if the exurban area uses well water, if they aren't connected to "the grid", if they don't have fire/police/waste service and so on. but I tend to think of those areas as rural and not exurban.
And what is happening to all that vacated housing? Is it just sitting empty?
The affluent exurb of today is the slum of tomorrow. It'll be bought up by the state at the insistence of the ignorant, proved unsalable, and then turned into housing for the poor to justify the bail-out.
Too far away to get anywhere without a vehicle you can't afford, you can just stow the poor in their little Ryan Homes suewtos, patrol the crap out of the access routes to keep them in their place, and send out mass transit a few times a day that takes people to and from the city center in predictable, easily-searched packets.
in other words:
the european model
Oh. Banlieues.
Yah, pretty much. Keep the exploited where nice people don't have to see them and where they don't obscure the view of major cultural landmarks. Build a big myth about how everything is better now since you don't have to see the slums. Pretend widespread discrimination doesn't exist.
Byzan. And that differs from the US traditional pattern of stowing them in the inner core how exactly? Change in location only.
On the electric car front, I checked out the Tesla website.... 109k for a base model electric car.
The technology may be here, but it is going ot have to come down substantially in price before folks start adopting it....
due to this you'll see a slow degradation of the exurbs. just my 2c.
The issue here, yearning, is that most of the country is constucted on this principle. Ever been to Houston? By my definition of ex-burb everything in Houston is an ex-burb by driving distance. Here the euro-model is very evident, but we're one of the oldest urban area around and ex-burg means about an hour of driving. That's what you have to do to get anywhere in Houston on a regular basis.
or even Ohio. My brother drives at least 1/2 hour to 45 mintues to get anywhere. And public transport of the euro-model is no where to be found. What to do in these areas?
I agree that the suburban/exburban lifestyle is the biggest misallocation of capital ever, but most of the country is built on the premise that transportation is cheap. When it isn't and masses of people are living in that situation, what happens next?
A pretty fair proportion of jobs can be done from home. The barrier is often petty bosses who fear loss of control over workers if they can't barge in on them at will. Once it sinks in that higher gas prices are permanent (even if oil falls some, gas will stay high as refiners need desperately to expand crack spreads) that will spur change. If you only have to commute in 1 or 2 days a weeks, the exurb calculation is much more favourable.
Of course, that implies bandwidth growth. Could CSCO boom again?
Yearning to Learn -
nope, since
a. There is no 'European' model
b. France is the nation that came up with the idea of building cités (there is an accent in there), then stuffing those who aren't French looking enough into them - concrete jungle is a fine name, sadly. And strangely, the cités are outside of cities, being essentially suburbs with high rises
c. France isn't Europe, regardless of what most Americans believe
ipodius, exactly.
Which is why I expect we'll try to break the cheap transportation conundrum rather than set out to rebuild the entire country.
This one is a gem, "Before it was we spend too much time driving. Now, its we spend too much time and money driving"
Time has value--and when folks discounted that value in exchange for the percieved benefit of living large in the stix, well--something's gonna give.
I just can't figure out why a two hour commute was bearable when it cost ten dollars/day, but unbearable at twenty. Taste, I guess.
In the middle '80s, I got a job near Seattle. I found a rental in Issaquah (a 20 mile commute) and moved away from my boyhood home in Anacortes (80 miles away). I only stayed in Issaquah for six months, after I found that the morning commute on a clogged I-90/I-405 was exactly the same duration as my commute in from Anacortes. Time you get only once--money comes and goes adn comes again.
I moved back to a place on the Golf Course, with beach rights, and a killer view of the bay. Only when the commute began to suck even worse did my wife and I relocate (12 wonderful years later) Now, we live in a rental in Arlington, VA. We use less than 10% of the fuel we used to, take the Metro into work and school, and are thrilled that someone else is paying our HOA dues.
Our commutes are about a half hour each way--but someone else is driving, and we can read the paper, or a book, or whatever. Time matters--money comes and goes.
Byzan. And that differs from the US traditional pattern of stowing them in the inner core how exactly? Change in location only.
My feelings exactly. If we had any sense at all, we'd bulldoze that crap flat, not bail it out. It's not an evil conspiracy that'll make it happen, it's the fact that people want to bail out houses that make you poor just by living in them due to locational factors, and then nobody will tear them down once they were bought with tax dollars.
burnside: Look at how much could be saved just by carpooling/ridesharing. Even an SUV is a relatively efficient mode of transportation if you put 4 riders in it. No technological breakthrough needed.
burnside -
'I'm not holding my breath on those substantive changes.'
Neither am I, at least in the sense of them being planned for or voluntary in the sense of being guided.
And I am not holding my breath in terms of the nightmares that I think a lot of Americans will be experiencing in the next decade, as a number of certainties crumble around them.
And, odd as this might sound, I'm not betting against America, which till now has been a sucker's bet. Which I will bet against is an economy that is based on debt and waste - but then, such economies have never lasted over the long term, regardless of how attractive they were to those at the very top of the system.
Aotc,
Well of course that does happen when people share both a neighborhood and a place of employment. Or at least all live along some sort of arterial.
But we've largely gotten away from those circumstances.
I imagine a great number of people are experimenting with how much less driving is possible or practical. Right this minute.
ipodius | 06.25.08 - 8:41 am | #
When it isn't and masses of people are living in that situation, what happens next?
http://www.dni.gov/nic/PDF_GIF_2020_Support/2003_11_06_papers/panel2_nov6.pdf
Weak States include an array of nation-states that may be inherently weak because of
geographical, physical, or fundamental economic constraints; or are situationally weak because
of internal antagonisms, greed, or despotism. Weak states typically harbor ethnic, religious,
linguistic, or other tensions that may at some near point be transformed into all out conflict
between contending antagonisms. Their ability to provide adequate amounts of political goods is
diminished or diminishing. Physical infrastructural networks are deteriorated. Schools and
hospitals show signs of neglect. GDP per capita and similar indicators have fallen or are falling,
sometimes dramatically. Levels of venal corruption are high and escalating. The rule of law is
honored in the breach. Civil society is harassed. Despots rule.
byzantine . . .
ok. just lock me in a room with the brandy and pistol.
few additional (minor) details to add to rent_to_own's
a. REM: cités is an old word, you want Carcassonne cité, not the bastide, if you want the dreaming, possibly over-restored walled city experience.
b. They stuffed their universities with similar high-rises out there too - ah, '68.
c. Even around Paris it's not as tidy and hidden as all that. 19e Arrondissement (among others) in the city and Mantes-la-Jolie (see behavior of Limay and Le Pen) for proof of that.
d. Sweden/Norway have some scarey tall-building suburbs, so don't limit those to FR either.
ok. just lock me in a room with the brandy and pistol.
As my man Rakim says, "It ain't where you're from, it's where you're at."
I do think a lot of people are going to kill themselves directly and indirectly, but I think it offers a lot of potential if you're not going to boo-hoo over "no more casual dining".
This is the part where vested interests that have a lock on resources and influence crumble and individuals can carve places for themselves on the "new frontier" of the increasingly ungoverned state. Just choose Shu Han and not Cao Wei and everything will go well for you. =)
The trick is to live in the country, and work in the country. It is indeed possible. Every town has a hospital, government offices, business owners,bankers, attorneys(unfortunately) and other high income professions. There is literally no need to go to a big city.
Amazing how people forget that most Americans used to live in cities, within living memory. In a small or medium city, you could walk or take a streetcar to your light manufacturing job, stop at the grocery store, walk your kids home from school. Not til GM bought up all the streetcars in America and tore them down did that start to change.
I'm also amazed that alternative energy isn't already the next new bubble.
California is the center of the universe. You see housing tracts going up in Dubai, Pakistan, Chile, Italy and China....it all looks like Newport Beach. Sorry...there is plenty of built evidence that everyone wants to be like us.
Report fromt he field: Atlanta
A colleague (Builder of Spec McMansions) just closed one of his houses in inventory for 13 months...selling price $425,000.
Cost of construction and land $850,000
He negotiated the short sale with his lender...he has three more...young guy in his 40s, new baby...looking for a job.
I can't say anything about the house, can't bring myself to ask too much about it, but typically they are multi hip brick veneer and 7,000 plus sq feet with no trees.
Would it work for one spouse to stay home? Said spouse would manage the household to cut costs, growing a garden, cutting meal costs via home cooking, spending time looking for insurance and other bargains. Home cleaning/yard work could be eliminated.
I think such a spouse could make up for his/her paycheck.
re: above. I forgot to say it is ex-urban location. There is no longer a pool of buyers for his market (south of the airport).
The article misses a couple of fun facts about Elizabeth.
People are drilling new wells twice as deep as the old and not hitting water.
It's windy "all" the time, not so sure the kids would enjoy their "freedom" to play in the yard.
Pictures of a single house look quaint, but when you go out there and take in the whole scene it looks like houses fell from space. It is not attractive, even in a rural way.
The article mentioned this but glossed over it. Elizabeth is an hour from the Tech center, WHICH IS IN THE SUBURBS!
Douglas county is a complete, developer planned/demanded, cluster****. Kuntsler is right.
There is a piece of the equation that people seem to leave out -- at least, this is true in the East: it isn't "exurbs vs. urbs," as if your only choices are big houses 10 miles from an urban center, versus cute gentrified urban neighborhoods (and banlieues for the dusky folk).
There are also many older suburbs just outside of urban cores, particularly in the East, which are part of the solution (lower commute times, often served by existing public transport networks, etc).
The "problem" is that people moving into these ideal older suburbs are just going to have to get used to smaller houses. say, 1300 square feet instead of the 4000 to which they've become accustomed. Which means they're going to have to get rid of some of their precious stuff. You won't be able to have a home theater room AND a family room. Their kids might even have to (gasp!) share a bedroom.
If Americans can tear themselves away from their fricking gigantic houses, they can find a happy medium in inner-ring older suburbs, a lot of which have pretty good schools still and safe streets. Yeah, you get smaller yards with that, so your kids can't have their own deluxe playhouse - they'll have to walk to the park.
I don't think Americans are at that stage of thinking yet, though. They are still attached to the bloody STUFF - the bulky, large, expensive items that they desperately need bulky, large, expensive cars to bring back from the mall.
It's unrealistic to think burbs and exburbs will disappear.
If everyone moves back to the city home prices will go up but how can exburbanites afford a higher mortgage in an imploding credit environment? They won't be able to move back closer to the core because they won't be able to afford it!
Furthermore, here in Montreal, downtown homes are going for 500K or more vs. 250K-300K in the exburbs. Let's not forget that those downtown homes were built 100 years ago, need huge renovations and cost a bundle to heat. As a matter of fact, it can cost 2000K more to heat these centennial homes than a new house in the suburb/exburbs.
The city's infrastructure is crumbling. The highways, water system are in total disrepair. For the last two years we've even been getting smog in the winter. Evidently, the city is trying to find new ways to tax its people. And with a credit contraction the financing won't get any better. Service charges galore...
Actually many companies are announcing moves to the burbs and exburbs as business owners already live there and refuse to move to the city.
If home prices decline by 10-20K in the burbs, exburbs it gives a buyer 5-10 years more gas affordability.
Since we're going into a consumer recession, oil prices will decline as the world reduces its production of stuff. I think most people have trouble understanding how much oil this global real estate bubble consumed. Gasoline consumption might be sticky but manufacturing consumption can turn on a dime. With China cutting its oil subsidies, I think we just got a whiff of what's coming.
All these homes that were built have surely come from misallocated capital but it's now a sunk cost. And there is too much resource value in them to pretend they don't exist.
Some cities will fail, some exurbs will thrive. The opposite is also true. The world is not black and white as many would like it top be.
I live near Durham, NC and after reading some of the comments here, I am contemplating the benefits of actually living in Duke LaCrosseville. One of the benefits is that at night time the tracer fire is really pretty and somewhat exiting. Of course, I did get somewhat nervous a month or so ago, when I asked a Durhma cop how far it was to Brightleaf Square ( a local shee-shee shopping area downtown) and he replied...I don't know...nobody has ever made it before. Yea! I want to move downtown.
Great discussions & ideas here, all...
With regard to plunging prices in the exurbs, my wife and I have fantasized about buying something in Clear Creek County, up in the mountains just west of Denver. From what I can tell, prices in the small towns we're interested in haven't dropped at all, at least insofar as the official RE listings are concerned. But then go to the Denver Post foreclosure listings for the county, and there's plenty of 'em. It would seem to indicate a disconnect between asking price and reality, which I suppose is the definition of stickiness.
It would seem to indicate a disconnect between asking price and reality, which I suppose is the definition of stickiness.
bluestatedon | 06.25.08 - 10:17 am | #
"askin' ain't gettin'"
And what is happening to all that vacated housing? Is it just sitting empty?
Because that would be the first time in history that people up and abandoned their homes when their situation became untenable.
yours in Christ,
Isamu
Has anyone read Joseph Tainter's "Collapse of Complex Societies"? He concludes that the fall of the Roman Empire was pretty slow and soft, and that basically, people in the provinces were begging the barbarians to take over. For the average person living under the thumb of the late Emperors, there was just no good return on the investment in social and administrative complexity any more. In Tainter's view, "collapse" was the only adaptation to circumstances that made any sense.
You could say the same thing of the finance world really. All this complexity, all these instruments, all this trafficking in paper... just isn't WORTH the trouble any more. When the financial system collapses, no one will notice - or care.
burnside...Bingo! If even a small fraction of cars were charging overnight the existing grid wouldn't be able to handle it. The whole grid is going to have to be rebuilt...Og gee...no free energy lunch. Time for all the waco's to go back to consulting their New Age Crystal for a free feel good approach.
Geoff: The fall in exurb prices will attract people to the area, in equilibrium.
Similarly, if the exurbs become depopulated, commute times will fall, as roadways empty - meaning that gas costs will go down, given its correlation with gridlock and commute time. My feeling is that many commuters will drive a smaller car before they start either renting $3,000 one bedroom apartments, or buying $700,000 one bedroom condos in Megalopolis.
The model that may become obsolete is the one of suburbs and exurbs feeding into Megalopolis. The suburbs may now completely displace Megalopolis as centers of commerce, leaving Megalopolis to the slum-dwellers and yuppie singles who love urban chic. The question here is how Megalopolis will pay for its money-losing mass transit schemes and satisfy its transit unions' insatiable demands without businesses to pay taxes.
Megalopolis has become increasingly obsolete since the invention of the car, the massive investments in the interstate highway system and the advent of cheap telecom. The real irony would be if it were high oil prices, rather than any of the preceding factors, that finally delivered the coup de grace to Megalopolis.
My previous comment was meant to be address to rent_to_own. Sorry.
?: Actually many companies are announcing moves to the burbs and exburbs as business owners already live there and refuse to move to the city.
Thank you. That is exactly what I've been thinking.
Mal, I think that's an interesting point. I keep hearing media analysts argue against "mark to market" for some of the more complex bets (I guess that's the appropriate term) that financial institutions are selling. They say, "Just because it doesn't sell now doesn't mean it's worthless." But maybe it is - if it's a bet that's already gone bad, say, that mortgage-backed securities would become more valuable by a certain date, wouldn't that be the equivalent of a losing ticket in the fourth race at Monmouth Park?
ZIRP-USA: California is the center of the universe. You see housing tracts going up in Dubai, Pakistan, Chile, Italy and China....it all looks like Newport Beach. Sorry...there is plenty of built evidence that everyone wants to be like us.
It's not that everyone wants to be like Californians - it's that since the beginning of time, what has distinguished people of means from people without means is space. Rich people have always had mansions. Poor people have generally lived in confined spaces. What cheap chemical power - in the form of the automobile - has wrought is mass affluence. Really rich people can have mansions in city centers. Merely middle-income people can have nice homes in the suburbs. The commonality with California is merely a coincidence - the real driver is increased affluence in those countries, which has made private automobile travel practical for an affluent minority of the population.
And when all those business and commerce etc. move to the exerbs and they finally get the infrastructure built, we've got urbs.
wondering if there has been a significant uptick in sales of single home power generation and other "off grid" stuff
by those willing to live in an empty suburb-
re: real rural places like wyoming, montana, et al, lots of those folks already use generators and have wells because they are a necessity. i doubt those folks are bothered much by the prospect of collapsing infrastructure or disappearing suburbs
Inland area of California (and any exurb, really) have no hope of recovery unless those cities can lure actual jobs so that people have a reason to live there. The problem for the outlying areas is that they approved bucketloads of residential construction projects and spent no time luring middle class wage jobs to the area. Sure, the built lots of fast food and grocery stores but those only supply service level jobs. So, everyone had to commute into OC or LA proper to find work.
I've long been an advocate for taxing people who live more than 20 miles from their place of employment in SoCal. The burden they place on the freeway system costs everyone in the area in lost time and productivity since the entire freeway system becomes a large parking lot for 4 - 5 hours a day.
Looking at it from a cash flow point of a view, a drop in housing prices does not equal to an equivalent amount of money in my pocket.
The drop in mortgage payments has to be greater than the rise in gasoline and energy costs, not to mention the rise in property taxes. McMansion's are sensitive to gasoline price due to distance from job sites, and even more sensitive to energy costs. Heating and cooling costs >> gasoline costs.
Or looking at another way: you can't finance gas by selling your old gas for a huge profit.
rent_to_own, your 3:11 a.m. entry was great entertainment.
There are exurbans who live in picturesque isolated places (perhaps not as isolated as mp's location) whose business model permits them to work from home. They represent a specific (and quite attractive) lifestyle choice. Presumably they are not impacted by increasing fuel costs in any way. They are also probably not a very large number of people and they probably do not live in places like Stockton. Then there are the long commuters. These "exurbans" are really just downscale suburbans. Their neighborhoods have levied a high cost in loss of arable agricultural land, reducing the capability of urban centers to produce a reasonable percentage of their own food needs locally. IMO this is the most serious cost of these "exurbs."
As for the genuinely rural, a simple change of the motive stock can reduce the burden of rising fuel costs impressively. Italy has one of the most daunting natural topographies in the world and yet it has a vibrant agriculture with readily available local product for every urban area. People who need to get around in offroad environments use much lighter four wheel drive Fiats and accomplish everything that needs to accomplished. For many years the classic farmers vehicle in France was the two-cylinder Citroen 2CV. The seats could be quickly removed and the top peeled back to permit carrying virtually any load. The absurd devices used in the U.S. consume a significant amount of fuel merely to move their own bulk.
California, California, California...
Let me raise you with one Wyoming. We were on a road trip out in Wyoming and in one rest stop the nice owner apologized for the lights being out in the bathroom. She'd sent her son to buy light bulbs, and expected him back by evening. That was at 2pm.
Can you imagine what the high gas prices do to "truly rural" living, if the next store selling any kinds of supplies is a two hour drive away?
We stayed in a small bed and breakfast in Utah last year, and the owners told us that this was their last season, since they had to drive almost two hours to the chain supermarket and the last independent food store in town had closed down the same spring. The "bed and breakfast" simply could not afford paying for the breakfast of their guests anymore.
Just some examples... but this is going on all over truly rural areas of the country and on future road trips I expect to see many more new ghost towns.
Zheng-
"It's not that everyone wants to be like Californians - it's that since the beginning of time, what has distinguished people of means from people without means is space."
OK....then since the beginning of time, have those villas in China, Italy, Chile, Abu Dhabi looked like they are California homes. Since the beginning of times, have those homes in Abu Dhabi used architects from California? Probably not. Hence my point....
Mass influence buys not only space, they co-opt aesthetic image, and today, regardless of ethnicity, religion or culture, the world seems to for some reason co-opt the image propagated by Paris Hilton, Ryan Seacrest, and the cast of the "OC". That has more to do than the exurban used of space.
over_educated writes:
On the electric car front, I checked out the Tesla website.... 109k for a base model electric car.
Um... I think most of us realize that the Tesla is an impractical high-end aspirational sports car. The only thing that may save their business model is the high-end part since the rich will stay relatively rich.
If you just want a plug-in electric, buy a used Prius, violate the warranty (though there are tricks to avoid it), and modify it to plug-in electric. Battery replacement and charger ~$5k. Total
Sarah,
Rebuilding California's streetcar and interurban networks may make sense (the interurbans especially), but they weren't killed by GM. They were killed because for most routes buses were cheaper and faster on most routes for 40 years and because on a few routes the perception that buses and cars were more modern led to some bad policy decisions (removing the Key System from the Bay Bridge, for example). By the time NCL started buying up streetcar services they were already dying off and died off at about the same rate weather NCL bought a city's system or not.
Aheadofthecurve: The jobs that can be done "working from home" are mostly administrative, sales/marketing, and some categories of "computer stuff". Essentially those that require only a computer and/or phone.
OTOH, I believe that large organizations cannot be run that way, i.e. without a modicum of personal (and specifically face to face) interaction between peers, not necessarily along reporting lines. Communication over email and even phone is far less effective, except for routine stuff like exchanging elementary facts.
The significance of management in executing the business is generally vastly overemphasized, and the contribution of the many informal workplace interactions and relationships is just barely acknowledged to exist.
My fear is that oil prices will fall back to the $80-90 range and stay there for a year or 2 due to slower growth, allowing many people to pretend that the run to $135 was all the fault of (you choose) speculators, Arabs, Democrats, Republicans, aliens, etc. All of a sudden those cheap SUVs will look like great deals and we'll be no closer to a solution.
I like Tom Friedman's idea (the Libral leader in Canada has a similar proposal) the the government enact a tax that will kick in if gas goes bleow $4/gallon to keep it at that level or above. To protect low income people, there would be an income tax/FICA rebate. Those who chose to conserve would see $$s in their pocket.
ArtEclectic: "I've long been an advocate for taxing people who live more than 20 miles from their place of employment in SoCal."
I suppose you then also advocate paying everybody unemployment assistance who cannot find a job within 20 miles?
Or is this more of a "let them eat cake" kind of comment?
I believe it is very premature to claim that suburban or exurban life is somehow going to vanish because of high enery prices. People in the US are not going to start living like the Japanese in little closets anytime soon.
Most American families want a yard to throw a football with their son or to let their dog run. We have the luxury of plenty of space in this country. That isn't going to change anytime soon.
Energy is making up a growing % of a household budget and will force some changes. These are likely to be efficiency improvments that are now cost effective. Drive a more efficient vehicle, carpool, install more insulation in your house, get a geothermal heat pump etc. It is greatly exaggerated to think that folks are going to decide to change their entire lifestyle and move to some condo in a "smart growth" area because gas is more expensive. I sure hope not because American culture is based on back yard BBQs and kids playing football in the yard.
R. Timm -
'These are likely to be efficiency improvments that are now cost effective. Drive a more efficient vehicle, carpool, install more insulation in your house, get a geothermal heat pump etc.'
I guess Americans will just HELOC for the necessary improvements, hey?
Or maybe just charge it?
Or use some of their savings?
And I love how you think American culture is based on things that no one from the 1776 to 1900 would have any real idea of. Or how NYC is not part of America.
The suburbs are still the best place to raise kids. Kids need a yard and a Labrador dog. The only ones who regret moving away from the urban circles are couples without kids who spend their hour long commute wondering why in the world they bought a 5000 sq ft house with 3.5 bathrooms. I'm already hearing from boomers, who's kids have moved out, how they hate spending their time commuting and cleaning the big house and yard.
The demise of Exurbs has been greatly exaggerated.
Americans are used to spending virtually nothing on fuel (and energy generally). They're shocked (Shocked! Like Inspector Renault about the gambling going on...) that they now have to spend almost half the lease payment on their BMW every month on gasoline. Ultimately, they (We!) are just whining, and once we get used to spending money on gasoline, we'll change behavior a little (buy more fuel efficient cars, build a few new train lines) and get back to our lives.
Will Exurbs be less desirable? Only slightly. People who spend 90 minutes one way on a commute aren't going to balk at spending a few extra bucks, when it means their kids don't have to mix with the riffraff at school. Exurbs are -nice- that's why they're popular.
It isn't like all the new-urbanist anti-automobile nutjobs are suddenly going to be right about anything. Oil is just a little bit more expensive now, so Exurban dwellings will be somewhat less desirable (and less expensive as a result, with the money going to Canadian oil producers instead).
This is precisely why I moved to an urban area. Granted, the public transportation isn't as great as say, NYC, but it gets the job done. I bike to the train station, bike to the farmers market and walk distances that are closer. However, my Job is more than 35 miles away, yest still accessible via major commuter trains running on electric lines.....(this shall give you a hint on where I might be)
Anyhow, I grew up in the burbs and I hated it because people were so closed off and unfriendly. There was no sense of community and you hardly, if ever, knew your neighbor. This is going to force people to start bonding to organize car shares, community gardening and other things that will ease the burden of Exurb living. If not, the Exurbs will decay like the cities did in the 80's and become the new slums for the poverty stricken. We're already seeing that in neighborhoods experiencing a huge glut of foreclosures.....
People who spend 90 minutes one way on a commute aren't going to balk at spending a few extra bucks, when it means their kids don't have to mix with the riffraff at school.
I think few people would care if it was just a matter of "mixing". The problem is that kids get beaten up. And occasionally hospitalized or dead.
The suburbs are still the best place to raise kids. Kids need a yard and a Labrador dog
God, I hope that was snark, because it's soooooo wrong. In fact, the burbs vs. urban living ha zero to do with how ones kids turn out. While growing up in the burbs, there were more kids strung out on heroin or other substances then sober ones at my sister's HS graduation. Why? because their parents were too busy keeping up appearances to pay attention. Had nothing to do with having a lawn and a dog....
Those exurban homes make perfect sense already, if you ignore the cost of time; the cost differential is already enough to justify even the most extreme existing alternative technology.
A Tesla is $105K. Solar panels sufficient to provide a half charge of the battery (100 mile round trip commute) would be $40000. ($8 a watt by 5000 watts; 5 hrs a day = 25kwh )
So for $150K I have a zero gas cost.
A 3000 sq ft home in my coastal neighborhood costs about $1.2 Million minimum; similar homes over the hill from me with larger lots and good views are now going for maybe $700K.
So the difference is $500K. At 6% thats $30000 a year, which would buy a new Tesla every 4 years.
Actually, I already own a hybrid, and the cost of gas is just not much of an issue; but I have chosen a job near where I want to live to cut the time of the commute.
"Amazing how people forget that most Americans used to live in cities, within living memory. In a small or medium city, you could walk or take a streetcar to your light manufacturing job, stop at the grocery store, walk your kids home from school. Not til GM bought up all the streetcars in America and tore them down did that start to change."
That was back when cities were liveable and had jobs. Now, we have cities that barely have anything other than shady corner markets in them.
cm writes:I suppose you then also advocate paying everybody unemployment assistance who cannot find a job within 20 miles?
Or is this more of a "let them eat cake" kind of comment?
Do you even live in SoCal? If you can't find a job within 20 miles your home you need to rethink your skill set or make better housing decisions. Let's turn the tables: I'd say it's a little more elitist for those who bought homes in Rancho Cucamonga and are commuting into downtown LA every day. There is plenty of housing for the same price they paid for Rancho Cucamonga - just fewer brown and black children that your kids go to school with? The only reason anyone in SoCal can't find housing within range of their job is because they are being a snob.
The whole exurb movement was mostly about white flight. Why do you think the Republicans were targeting this segment so heavily in 2004?
ArtEclectic-
it wasn't about white flight, no, no, no.
It was about making sure that America's purity of essence was not compromised, it was about protecting the children, it was about labradors and BBQs and football.
It was about freedom through HOAs, it was about security in numbers, it was about the right to keep, bear, and when warranted in the eyes of the weapon owner, use arms in the defense of the American Way. The American way of debt, the American way of having mine while deriding anyone that thinks we are all citizens of a republic which not only grants benefits, but requires sacrifices.
It was about making sure that the stickers on the SUVs about supporting the soldiers were kept clean and shiny, while the 'riff-raff' as one poster here called the largest recruitment pool for our military, were fighting for their right to drive.
Exurbia as the logical extension of suburbia - paradise on earth, paved not only with good intentions, but pure hypocrisy wrapped in self-satisfaction strong to prevent any introspection.
But even at $5.00/gal and 20 mpg (25 cents/mile) the cost of gas is still less than half the cost of owning the typical vehicle.--ps
I'm glad I'm not the only one to notice this. If you're driving a $4,000 car, depreciation is not the big a deal. In a brand new car, though, depreciation predominates. I cannot understand people who drive late model cars being affected by gasoline prices. If $150/mo in extra fuel costs is causing them problems, they would have had problems anyway from some other thing. The price of things going up and down by $100 or so is a normal part of life.
This is quite an entertaining comment thread. Just to add a bit more opposition to the pronouncement that "suburbs are the best place to raise children" I grew up in a very swanky suburb in the best high school district in a mid-sized city in California. It was boring. It was unengaging. Drug use among the smarter kids was rampant for those very reasons. Yes, I survived but I have many times envied my adult peers who grew up in more urban environments for their palpably superior social skills and the specialized programs and events they profited from during their teen years. Suburbia breeds safe mediocrity. You who raise your kids in that unchallenging environment are handicapping them.
what flaminia says
My Mexican border town is a suburb of San Diego and the kids in my hood are a maladjusted bunch of skateboarding slackers not even well kempt or articulate enough to work retail jobs. Schools out and they loiter everywhere drink and experiment with drugs. Parents? Oh their inside in front of the 63" flat screen. I love our big yards and the (relative) quiet but I feel lucky to have grown up on the streets of Washington, DC.
The NYT article is so misleading it borders on lying. The people quoted in the article live in Elizabeth, Colorado, and Elizabeth is NOT a suburb of Denver. Elizabeth is a good 35 miles outside the real Denver suburbs. It is a rural town with a long drive on two-lane roads through a great deal of prairie and farmland. A suburb of Denver (SE - the Tech Center) is their destination for work.
A science teacher at my son's high school said he didn't even want to talk to the stupid teachers at the school who lived way on the other side of town because they were too foolish to spend any time on - and that was when gas was $2/gallon.
I think it will take more than $4 gas to have much of an effect on the urban/exurban equilibrium.
In Ireland, gas is running at about EU1.30 a liter which works out around $7.50 a gallon. But exurban sprawl is rampant, with people commuting 30 and 50 miles in a country with no interstates, just two lane blacktops with stone walls.
It boggles my mind, but it also tells me that the motivation to own a piece of land is strong, strong, strong.
Of course, more expensive gas affects the "exurban lifestyle" but that's just the beginning...
Increased fuel costs will be soon be coming in the form of heating costs for the McMansion that is the integral part of the exurb lifestyle. These McMansions are a commodity and their real estate value is not tied to their in-town location but to the house itself. There are loads of these newly-minted homes out there and their values are and will continue to plummet. Just like the SUV going the way of the do-do bird so will McMansions.
How about shopping in the exurbs -- lots of big box stores. How are they doing - Bed, Bath and Beyond; Home Depot; Circuit City? These stores/corporations are having LOTS of problems. Vacant and partially filled strip malls may be in the future; And then where will everyone shop?
I think exurbs will always be there but they've been overdeveloped and reflect the excesses of what will soon be America's former self.