Prices for homes are down again, and the decline shows no sign of stopping. But not all homes are equal in the falling market, and there's a new factor that's helping to determine which areas fail and which areas thrive.
But even in regions that have taken a beating, some neighborhoods remain practically unscathed. And a pattern is emerging as to which neighborhoods those are. The ones with short commutes are faring better than places with long drives into the city. Some analysts see a pause in what has long been inexorable — urban sprawl.
The direction that America took after World War II -- the dissolution of residential cities and the building of a vast system of highways and suburbs -- allowed families to have the illusion of a "more natural" setting (and to discretely exercise their prejudices), but it came at a monstrous cost. From the beginning of this urban exodus, city planners, environmentalists, and everyone with the foresight to see two steps ahead had warned that the strain on the infrastructure, the displacement of agriculture, and the damage to the environment were all insupportable. But no argument seemed capable of stemming the unidirectional flow from cities to suburbs.
Now it seems that trend is halting rather abruptly, and some subdivisions are seeing so many foreclosures that they risk not just becoming slums, but ghost towns -- tributes to the high tide of wastefulness.
Recent studies suggest that buyers underestimated the costs of their long commutes. Those expenses can add up to more than the buyers saved on the home. Developers also miscalculated, lured by cheap land and rising home prices. They overreached, "partly because the bubble collapsed, but partly because these developments were just bad ideas to begin with," Stiff said.
Many of the projects were simply too far away from places that people need to go.