Wall Street Journal Article.Suburbs a Mile Too Far for Some
Demographic Changes, High Gasoline Prices
May Hasten Demand for Urban Living
By JONATHAN KARP
June 17, 2008; Page A18
Pasadena, Calif.
Abandoning grueling freeway commutes and the ennui of San Fernando Valley suburbs, Mike Boseman recently found residential refuge in this Southern California city. His apartment building straddles a light-rail line, which the 25-year-old insurance broker rides to and from work in Los Angeles.
Archstone
Next Stop? For residents at Pasadena's Archstone Del Mar Station on Southern California's Metro Line transit system, downtown Los Angeles is a 26-minute ride away.
Richard Wells is more than a generation older but was similarly attracted to the Pasadena apartment building. The British-born scientist retains what he calls a European preference for public transportation despite his nearly 30 years in California. Plus, he said, the building's location means, "I can walk to a hundred restaurants, the Pasadena symphony and movie theaters."
Messrs. Boseman and Wells embody trends that are dovetailing to potentially reshape a half-century-long pattern of how and where Americans live: The driveable suburb -- that bedrock of post-World War II society -- is for many a mile too far.
In recent years, a generation of young people, called the millennials, born between the late 1970s and mid-1990s, has combined with baby boomers to rekindle demand for urban living. Today, the subprime-mortgage crisis and $4-a-gallon gasoline are delivering further gut punches by blighting remote subdivisions nationwide and rendering long commutes untenable for middle-class Americans.
Just as low interest rates and aggressive mortgage financing accelerated expansion of the suburban fringe to the point of oversupply, "the spike in gasoline prices, layered with demographic changes, may accelerate the trend toward closer-in living," said Arthur C. Nelson, director of Virginia Tech's Metropolitan Institute in Alexandria, Va. "All these things are piling up, and there are fundamental changes occurring in demand for housing in most parts of the country."
Christopher Leinberger, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and a developer of walkable areas that combine housing and commercial space, describes the structural shift as the "beginning of the end of sprawl."....