Gas prices, South Sound edition:
Thurston Regional Planning Council senior planner Pete Swensson said home-buying decisions can change when consumers are faced with higher fuel prices.
A likely result is that the county’s urban housing market could strengthen while the rural housing market softens, Swensson said.
Home Hunters Realty of Olympia broker Helen Wilkins agrees. She said that if gasoline prices continue to rise, it could result in a huge influx of people wanting to live closer to town.
“It’s all about the cost of getting to work,” Wilkins said. “We used to measure everything in miles and time, but now it’s five gallons to the office.”
Paul Krugman recently wrote, ” some major public transit systems are excited about ridership gains of 5 or 10 percent. But fewer than 5 percent of Americans take public transit to work, so this surge of riders takes only a relative handful of drivers off the road.”
But sometimes I wonder if the coming growth in transit use in America will be exponential, not linear. As more people move closer in, it will have a multiplier effect: more goods and services closer in, which attracts more people, etc., etc. It only took 10 or 15 years for the American middle class to abandon the cities. It could easily take less than that for a healthy majority to move back.
Update: More on the coming deluge:
In a survey of its agents by real estate brokerage Coldwell Banker, 81 percent said they are seeing more interest from prospective buyers in urban living because of high gasoline prices. Fifty-four percent said access to public transportation is more important to their clients now.
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