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With gas over $4, cities explore whether it's smart to be dense
Ana Campoy, Wall Street Journal
Sacramento's 'Blueprint' for Growth
Draws National Attention
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SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Gasoline was less than $2 a gallon when Mike McKeever brought his gospel of bikes, light rail and tightly packed neighborhoods to this state synonymous with cars, freeways and suburban sprawl.

"The development industry was very concerned," says Mr. McKeever, head of Sacramento's regional planning agency. "The environmental community was openly negative," concerned that it was "just more talk, talk."

Seven years later, with gasoline hurtling past $4 a gallon, Sacramento has become one of the nation's most-watched experiments in whether urban planning can help solve everything from high fuel prices to the housing bust to global warming.
(7 July 2008)

Will gas prices drive homebuyers away from suburbs?
Elizabeth Rhodes, Seattle Times
As gas prices climb, homebuyers increasingly will choose to live closer to work, and that eventually will depress suburban home prices while strengthening in-city values, a Portland economist predicts.
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... A Portland economist predicts that buyers soon will choose where to live based on what they would spend for gasoline.

That, eventually, will devalue suburban housing while strengthening in-city home prices, says Joe Cortright, whose Portland consulting firm, Impresa, recently released a report saying as much to U.S. mayors.

"The new calculus of higher gas prices may have permanently reshaped urban housing markets," said Cortright, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit Washington, D.C., think tank. "What this really means is that as people move, they're going to look for places that enable them to drive shorter distances and avoid places where they have to drive a lot.

"I expect this to be a subtle process. I don't expect everyone to put their suburban houses on the market all at the same time."

But the thinking has started, according to a national Coldwell Banker survey of almost 1,000 real-estate brokers. Last month, 93 percent said rising gas and oil prices were "a concern to their clients," and 78 percent said higher fuel costs are increasing their clients' interest in urban living.
(7 July 2008)

Suburbia's not dead yet
Joel Kotkin, Los Angeles Times
While millions of American families struggle with falling house prices, soaring gasoline costs and tightening credit, some environmentalists, urban planners and urban real estate speculators are welcoming the bad news as signaling what they have long dreamed of -- the demise of suburbia.

... Not so fast. The "out of the suburbs, back to the city" narrative rests more on anecdote than demographic or economic fact. Yes, high gas prices and rising sub-prime mortgage defaults are hurting some suburban communities, particularly newly built ones on the periphery. But the suburbs remain home to a majority of Americans and a larger proportion of U.S. families -- and people aren't leaving those communities in droves to live in cities. Even with economic growth slowing, many suburbs, exurbs and smaller towns, especially those whose economies are tied to energy, are continuing to do better than most cities in terms of job creation and population growth.

... The ominous predictions that the end of suburbia is at hand echo those in the 1970s, when there was also a run-up in gasoline prices. Then it was neo-Malthusians such as biologist Paul Ehrlich, the author of "The Population Bomb," who argued that the idea of suburbia was unsustainable because it eats up so much land and energy.

... The growth of telecommuting, fed by technological advances, further ensures that suburbia has a future.

... Continuing high energy prices will likely change the nation's geography, but not in ways some urban theorists are predicting. Rather than cramming more people and families into cities, they may instead foster a more dispersed, diverse archipelago of self-sufficient communities. From here, that looks like a far more pleasant scenario not only for suburban and exurbanites but for urban dwellers who don't want to live under dense conditions reminiscent of 19th century industrial cities or the teeming metropolises of the contemporary Third World.
(6 July 2008)