San Francisco Chronicle -  May 14, 2006

Suburbia will survive a gas crunch
It thrived in the 1970s, will adapt to latest spike

redictions of the demise of suburbia, choked to death by high gasoline prices, may be greatly exaggerated.

Conventional wisdom suggests that high prices at the pump mean less driving and, hence, the withering of far-flung suburbs, whose residents must drive to jobs, shopping and recreation.

For today's warriors in the fight against sprawl, there's a silver lining in this: The soaring price of gas evokes images of a nation retreating back to its urban past, with chastened suburbanites abandoning their SUVs and shopping malls for the comfort of dense cities and mass transit.

Philadelphia Inquirer commentary page editor John Timpane, for example, suggests that high prices at the pump will lead to a return to the much mythologized urban past. He calls it, "Driving us back to the way we were."

Author and prominent new urbanist guru James Howard Kunstler paints a dark future for the suburbs. He warns that suburban places "are liable to dry up and blow away" because of rising energy prices. "Let the gloating begin," he proclaims, predicting a catastrophic future for the sprawling communities that so offend him.

Even more temperate people babble on how the boost in energy costs represents a bonanza for dense cities. CNN recently published a study that suggested that the "best cities" in an oil crisis are those much-loved traditional cities such as San Francisco, New York, Boston and Chicago.

Yet in reality, these fears -- or hopes -- may well prove misplaced. Higher energy costs could make people look for work closer to home, which for most of them is the suburbs.

Perhaps the best way to test the thesis of higher energy prices constricting suburbia is to look at the experience of the 1970s. In that decade, Americans faced an even steeper price rise than that anticipated by almost anyone today. Worse, we were hopelessly unprepared for it, and far more jobs, particularly high-paying ones, were located in the urban core.

So what happened? People reacted, but not by jumping on mass transit in big numbers. In fact, transit use continued to decline from 6.4 percent of commuters to 5.3 percent between 1970 and 1980.

Nor did people move en masse to traditional older cities. In fact, the 1970s proved to be the only decade in the 20th century that overall urban population declined. Suburbanization proceeded apace, with jobs and people heading out to the hinterlands.

The energy-stricken '70s, notes Michael Carliner, an economist with the National Association of Home Builders, produced no discernible clamor for smaller houses or urban spaces. Driving, even by long-haul commuters, did not change much, although people did shift to more efficient, often foreign-made, cars.

Given this past experience, it's logical to expect more of the same this time. Higher gas prices will lead to fewer monster SUVs and more efficient cars, whether hybrid models or simply smaller, lighter versions of conventional cars. Home builders also may get smarter, as they did in the 1970s, using better insulation, double-paned windows and more efficient appliances, something that Carliner suggests might actually make new homes more attractive to buyers.

One compelling piece of evidence that we won't lose our reliance on automobiles: Even with a 23.7 percent increase in gas prices between 2004 and 2005, vehicle miles, according to the U.S. government, basically remained unchanged while gas consumption grew slightly.

Another thing that is unlikely to change is the trend toward urban decentralization. The evidence over the past two years shows a growing number of people moving from the largest cities to middle-sized and smaller communities.

Ultimately, higher energy prices cannot overcome the realities created by the car-oriented declustered environment in which we now live and work. As Paul Larrousse, director of the National Transit Institute, admits, the option for effective transit use has faded as the nation, and its jobs, have "spread out."

Then there is the little, often neglected fact about what most people like. In California, according to a 2002 Public Policy Institute Survey, well over 80 percent of adults prefer a single-family house. Most surveys find that what people want is privacy, space and, if they can get it, a walkable community closer to work.

In most cases, they will give up walkability for privacy, and even give up shorter commutes for privacy, space and good schools. Most people do not see dense urban living as a preferable option, no matter how much hip theorists, architects and planners think they should. Devotees of urban density, as planner William Fulton has suggested, live "a niche life" attractive to no more than 15 percent of the population.

It is not reasonable to expect people to give up their dream of a house in a low- or moderate-density area. This trend is somewhat universal; dreams of a "Latino based" urbanism -- engendered by the fact that poorer Latinos live in dense, transit-oriented areas -- are the product more of academic daydreams than a matter of Latino preferences. The powerful desire among immigrants to own a home, in fact, has done as much as anything to boost the U.S. single-family housing market.

Nor is this simply an American aberration. Wherever people have enough money to buy a suburban house, they will do so. This is true even at far higher energy prices than we can anticipate over the immediate future. Gas in Western Europe, for example, runs around $6 a gallon, yet virtually every major city there is experiencing rapid sprawl and increasing car use, albeit in largely more energy-efficient models.

So if we are going to have an increasingly suburban and even exurban future, we need to figure how this can work in a high-cost energy environment. One sensible solution lies in the continuing transformation of suburbs from their old role as commuter bedroom communities into places that offer a larger array of jobs, cultural and commercial opportunities.

Finally, more attention needs to be placed on the critical role of something that did not exist in the 1970s -- the Internet -- which is revolutionizing traditional geography.

This is not a new idea. In his landmark book "The Third Wave" a quarter century ago, Alvin Toffler first envisioned the rise of the "electronic cottage" with huge effects on everything from family life and community stability to air pollution and traffic congestion.

Although it took many years for Toffler's vision to be taken seriously, today it is becoming a reality. Between 1990 and 2000, the number of Americans working full time at home increased by 23 percent to over 4 million. An additional 20 million worked part time at home. Overall, according to the Hudson Institute, telecommuting is growing at about the rate of 15 percent per annum, most of it among the self-employed.

The impacts of telecommuting -- the only form of commuting outside of driving alone to go up over the past two decades -- on energy consumption could be profound. If you take New York, which accounts for more than a third of mass-transit commuters in the country, out of the picture, telecommuters already outnumber transit commuters.

Traditional cities with large well-educated populations and high levels of connectivity, such as San Francisco, can benefit more from telecommuting than relying on the advantages of commuter rail. Indeed, some analysts believe that home-based businesses may prove to be the hidden growth industry for the city's economy.

For one thing, this allows city-based firms to assign work more easily in places that are growing, such as the suburbs, or in more robust regions outside the Bay Area, without giving up the pleasures of urban life. Firms still can tap the city's unique work force without having to endure its extraordinary costs and regulatory obstacles.

Suburbs also can benefit from the digital option. Single-family houses frequently have the "extra room" critical for work at home, and for people with children, the advantages of flexible hours and less commute times are significant.

Some developers already see this as a critical aspect for the next generation of suburban developments. Ladera Ranch in southern Orange County, for example, has incorporated such mixed usage in its floor plans, with separate entrances for business clients.

These changes should inspire planners, architects, policymakers and those concerned about the environment to think about suburbs in positive and creative ways. Given our need to cut energy consumption, we need to think less about dragooning Americans back into the cities and more about finding ways to make all communities more self-reliant and less energy consuming.

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