Some believe high gas prices will force a migration back to cities. Don`t bet on it.
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 badnews as signaling what they have long dreamed of - the demise ofsuburbia.

In a March Atlantic article, Christopher B. Leinberger, a visitingfellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor of urban planning,contended that yesterday`s new suburbs will become "the slums" oftomorrow because high gas prices and the housing meltdown will forceAmericans back to the urban core. Leinberger is not alone. Otherpundits, among them author James Howard Kunstler, who despises suburbanaesthetics, and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, see the pain insuburbia as a silver lining for urban revival.

Not so fast. The "out of the suburbs, back to the city" narrativerests more on anecdote than demographic or economic fact. Yes, high gasprices and rising sub-prime mortgage defaults are hurting some suburbancommunities, particularly newly built ones on the periphery. But thesuburbs remain home to a majority of Americans and a larger proportionof U.S. families - and people aren`t leaving those communities indroves to live in cities. Even with economic growth slowing, manysuburbs, exurbs and smaller towns, especially those whose economies aretied to energy, are continuing to do better than most cities in termsof job creation and population growth.

The ominous predictions that the end of suburbia is at hand echo thosein the 1970s, when there was also a run-up in gasoline prices. Then itwas neo-Malthusians such as biologist Paul Ehrlich, the author of "ThePopulation Bomb," who argued that the idea of suburbia wasunsustainable because it eats up so much land and energy. But suburbangrowth continued as people bought more fuel-efficient cars andcompanies moved jobs to the periphery, which cut commuting times.Contrary to pundits` forecasts, during this decade of high energyprices, the country`s urban populations, for only the first time inrecent history, actually fell, according to a census analysis byeconomist Jordan Rappaport at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

But today`s gas prices, at more than $4 a gallon, are the highestever, and the prospects of them significantly dropping any time soonare slight. The conditions for an exodus from suburbia to the citieswould seem ideal once again.

Nevertheless, since 2003, when gas prices began their climb,suburban population growth has continued to outstrip that of thecentral cities, with about 90% of all metropolitan growth occurringin suburban communities, according to the 2000 to 2006census.And the most recent statistics from the annual American CommunitySurvey, which is conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, show no sign of asignificant shift of the population to urban counties, at least through2007.

The flat condominium markets in most large urban markets areanother sign that people are not streaming into cities from the suburbsand buying. Many condo projects in such cities as Los Angeles, Chicago,Miami and San Diego have either been canceled or converted intorentals, with many units remaining vacant. As a Southern Californiacondo developer told me recently, lower house prices are not going tomake people more disposed to buying apartments.

But the biggest reason the suburb-to-city narrative is not followingthe script of the urban boosters and theorists has to do withemployment. Living close to your workplace makes sense, not onlybecause it cuts commuting costs and reduces greenhouse-gas emissions -by saving time, it also gives people more time for family and leisureactivities.

The problem for many cities is that they lack the
www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-kotkin6-2008jul06,0,1038461.story