Housing Patterns and Oil Prices

I am in a constant struggle to keep up with my magazines. I read, and I read, but they keep coming in the front door faster than I can move them to the recycle basket. So, I just read, today, an article in the March 2008 issue of The Atlantic. The article was entitled "The Next Slum?" It was written by Christopher B. Leinberger who, according to the blurb at the end of the article, was "a visiting fellow at the Brooking Institution, a professor of urban planning at the University of Michigan, and a real-estate developer." There is a reference to Mr. Leinberger's latest book, The Option of Urbanism, published by Island Press in November 2007. If you like the article, you might want to think about getting the book.

The basic thesis of Mr. Leinberger's article is expressed in this paragraph: "For 60 years, American have pushed steadily into the suburbs, transforming the landscape and (until recently) leaving cities behind. But today the pendulum is swinging back toward urban living, and there are many reasons to believe this swing will continue. As it does, many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and '70s - slums characterized by poverty, crime, and decay."

The article makes sense to me, in part because I have an example of the phenomenon Leinberger describes in my own family. One of my sisters recently moved to a condo in the downtown area of one of Seattle's suburbs. Leinberger may be exaggerating this trend, partly because he may be making some doubtful assumptions about how many people really like urban living. (He does have some survey data to support his contentions, though.) But I think he may be right about the general trend to slowing suburban growth, and renewed growth in urban centers. (I might also note that some of his statements are consistent with Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1962), which I recently read. Jacobs's book is a classic critique of urban planning. It's available in a Modern Library edition.)

This growth wouldn't necessarily be in the old urban centers. Leinberger mentions Reston, Virginia, White Plains, New York, and Lakewood, Colorado. A few years ago, Joel Garreau, who writes for the Washington Post, published a book called Edge Cities, about the growth of these suburban centers. What Leinberger is now adumbrating may be an extension, or an intensification, of the edge city phenomenon. Here's a link to Leinberger's article:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/subprime/2

Leinberger himself doesn't refer to energy costs as a motivator for the movement he describes, as he is focusing on the subprime lending crisis as an accelerator. I don't think it takes a lot of imagination, however, to see how "lifestyle centers" would be made more attractive by higher charges at the gas pump.