Posted on 08/15/2006 9:32:24 AM PDT by LouAvul
Rising fuel costs are being blamed for everything from soaring utility costs to lower retail sales and higher airline tickets. And now, experts say high gas prices could reshape U.S. cities.
"Most analysts believe that crude oil prices in the $50s and $60s will be with us for some time," says Stuart Gabriel, director of the Lusk Center, a think tank at the University of Southern California devoted to studying real estate forces and trends. There's even talk of crude hitting $100 per barrel -- or 10 times what it sold for in the summer of 2005.
Once the realization soaks into the American consciousness that high-cost gas is here to stay, Gabriel predicts, those high commute prices will pull more homeowners -- even young families -- to live in central cities and create a push for more public transportation.
(Excerpt) Read more at realestate.msn.com ...
I see Manhattan clearly becoming an island of the rich (and white) dotted with housing projects for the poor. Brooklyn/Queens becomes a middle upper class area, many young people but also many immigrants. The Bronx remains a dump.
I think you're right. I don't know how LA will do. Probably start a massive mass transit initiative, like Washington, DC servicing the outlying burbs.
The fear that I have is that we'll start seeing the same patterns in the burbs as we're now seeing in many rural communities. That is, significant depopulation trends, an aging population and a falling away of basic services.
The difference -- and it's a big one -- is that rural communities have very little infrastructure to maintain while the burbs have bigass, complex infrastructures that are getting increasingly expensive to maintain. Judging from many of the posts I've read on FR, even public schools are becoming a burden. Folks are straining to pay property taxes that will probably only increase...
Let's hope not.
Where I live is still funneling into the best public school in the county (which is why housing has increased so much in my side of town vs the rest)
Wait until the price of gas gets up to 6.00 a gallon. That's $0.20 a mille in a cambry, $20 per hundred miles. A slack in demand would, however,bring prices down. A developer with a hundred houses to sell, might anticipate this and offer a good deal NOW. More retailers might open up in the vicinity, to catch shoppers unwilling to drive further. Suburbs might turn into real towns.
The projections keep changing. The rule seems to be that the greater the prosperity, the lower the birth rate.
Yeh i was amazed to hear that also. I must have been asleep that whole summer.
I think suburban areas with good commuter links to large cities and established village/small town centers will always remain viable. Those developments that are pure subdivions development islands dependent on highways alone to reach areas of employment will have problems.
Between Archer Daniels Midland and the oil cartel and the EnvironMentalistas working the "rural cleansing" concept to death... we rural residents will soon surrender and for evermore be known as the "subdudes!"
This is especially true for those striving with new boxes created in Schwartzenegger's Sierra-Nevada CONservancy without any "Hydrogen Highways," or "Hydrogen Hummers," or "Global Warming Fighter Solar Panels" by Arnoiled!!!
While it's true that increasing prosperity seems to lead to decreasing birth rates, there is significant lag, and lots of places aren't rich yet. Many of the Moslem parts of the planet are having an average of 7 or 8 kids per woman.
bttt for future reading.
There are trade-offs.
We can shop from home. Often the prices are better on-line. Getting fed-ex or UPS to deliver can be handy sometimes.
While it is not perfect, telecommuting can help even if it does not totally replace actual commuting.
Many work at home several days per week and then visit their clients directly at their job sites.
Health care must be good enough to diminish the death rate among the children and the old.
I'm in flyover country aka deep in cornland
1/3 of co-workers are Indian. My specialty is COBOL - DB2. Mainframe is still where most development exists that actually gets into production at the Fortune 500 I work at.
The "Fact and Logic" skills of both Indians, older Americans and younger Americans vary. But in general, younger Americans are generally better qualified to coordinate and facilitate people. They have a hard time grasping large, complex sets of information. They can only deal with facts sequentially, one at a time.
In general, older Americans are the most qualified in the logic department. In general, Indians fall in the middle. But it should be noted that the way Indian immigranats are not necessarily typical Indian IT workers. They tend to have better American-English than those still in India, which is scary as the single biggest obstacle of the Indian immigrants is their lack of communication skills to communicate with the rest of us. (But at least it isn't as bad as that of the Chinese who are fewer in number here and have much worse communication skills.) It isn't just the pronounciation of words. It is the paragraph structure of the cultural paradigm.
Part II, Chapter 4.
Honest demographers have been screaming for years that "world population" figures are based on outrageous exaggerations of the population of China and India, but the global socialists 'don't need no steeenking facts.'
Who can honestly call $3/gal gas expensive in todays economy? It's equivalent to the $0.22/gal of the sixties.
Seems more like a death-grip.
"The most productive citizens live in the suburbs. They will move their work there. The socialist cities will be annihilated."
From your lips to Socialist tin ears, LOL!
We live "out in the boonies." And yes, the cost of gasoline has been a factor in our budget over this past year, but we can feed ourselves out here by gardening, gathering, hunting, butchering, fishing, baking bread, canning and preserving, cooking from scratch, etc.
Husbands commute to "work" is about 13 minutes, but he could easily lose the office space and just work from home if it really comes down to it. As an Accountant, I am always "crunching the numbers" to see if our "lifestyle" remains worthwhile; it does. ;)
I work from home with four 'streams of income' (egg sales, book sales on Amazon.com, Bookkeeping & Farm Stand sales) and a fifth income stream in the hopper if the Local Florist within 5 minutes of our farm hires me to both man the shop & grow cut flowers for her. Fingers crossed!
I totally pity the Libs in Big City USA who couldn't feed and dress themselves if their lives depended upon it. Can anyone even brew their own cup of morning coffee these days?
Sure doesn't look like it from where I'm sitting, but I'd be MORE than happy to brew it for them, LOL!
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