Real estate blogger Jim Duncan helpfully provides some context to the story I wrote on the rising home prices around in Charlottesville and Albemarle’s urban ring as sales continue to sag.
Here’s something that didn’t make its way into the story (along with the break out of numbers that Duncan provides): NPR’s report on neighborhoods that provide short commutes (read: cities) fair much better in terms of housing prices than those that require long daily commutes. Quoth the NPR:
"Stiff says buyers are now asking different questions: ‘What is the cost of gasoline? What is the cost of my time?’
"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."
And then there’s this piece in the Atlantic, which basically argues that American cities will soon follow the European model of housing its poorest—putting them out in the slums of the suburbs.