Energy Prices Change the American Dream

An article entitled, "Gas Prices Apply Brakes To Suburban Migration," by Eric M. Weiss in yesterday’s Washington Post details some of the ways in which high energy prices are changing the way Americans are choosing to live. These prices have the potential to shift the fundamental development and land use paradigms that have shaped American society for the second half of the 20th Century. In other words, the American Dream of moving to the suburbs or, a more recent phenomenon, the exurbs, could be going by the wayside.

Cheap oil, which helped push the American Dream away from the city center, isn't so cheap anymore. As more and more families reconsider their dreams, land-use experts are beginning to ask whether $4-a-gallon gas is enough to change the way Americans have thought for half a century about where they live.

"We've passed that tipping point," U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters said.

Since the end of World War II, government policy has funded and encouraged the suburban lifestyle, subsidizing highways while starving mass transit and keeping gas taxes much lower than in some other countries.

Americans couldn't wait to trade in the cramped city apartments of the Kramdens and Ricardos for the lush lawns of the Bradys. Local land-use policies kept housing densities low, pushing development to the periphery of metropolitan regions and forcing families who wanted their dream house to accept long commutes and a lack of any real transportation choices other than getting behind the wheel.

Even the way the government pays for roads and transit is dependent on gas taxes, which is effective only if Americans keep driving.

"There is a whole confluence of government policies -- tax, spending, regulatory and administrative -- that have subsidized sprawl," said Bruce Katz, director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. A gallon of gasoline costs more than $8 in Britain, Germany, France and Belgium, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Much of the price difference is due to higher taxes.

But there's been a radical shift in recent months. Americans drove 9.6 billion fewer highway miles in May than a year earlier. In the Washington area and elsewhere, mass transit ridership is setting records. Last year, transit trips nationwide topped 10.3 billion, a 50-year high.

Home prices in the far suburbs, such as Prince William and Loudoun counties, have collapsed; those in the District and inner suburbs have stayed the same or increased. A recent survey of real estate agents by Coldwell Banker found an increased interest in urban living because of the high cost of commuting.

Brookings says transportation costs are now second only to housing as a percentage of the household budget, with food a distant third.

The people are leading the revolution, but land-use experts wonder whether a government policy so etched into the American fabric will follow.

"When people bought homes, they punched the numbers and said can we afford the mortgage payment and taxes," Katz said. "This new paradigm is going to have families being more deliberate about the cost of transportation spending and energy costs. That's a new phenomenon in the United States. That will be the change that will change development patterns."

On Friday, August 1, at a panel on Energy and the American Way of Life, NDN heard from Shyam Kannan and Greg Kats, both of whom discussed this very subject and touched on the policies, practices, and technologies that can bring about changes in buildings and land use that can reduce energy use – combating both high energy prices and climate change.

What this article doesn’t mention are the secondary effects these changes will have on society. If more people are moving into cities, urban policies will have to change, urban schools will have to improve, and infrastructure and services will be rethought.

These new living patterns also have the potential to fundamentally alter American politics. How and where one lives is a tremendously important factor in the formation of values and voting behavior. In other words, people who live in cities vote differently from people who live in rural and exurban America. If suburban and exurban migration truly becomes a thing of the past, so will the more than half century of politics that goes with it.