End of Single Family Homes?

(Pffft. what's a foam peanut to do? Where IS everyone this summer?)

In an interview, author Christopher Steiner, predicted the single family detached home would be doomed by rising oil prices. The interview was about his book: "$20 per Gallon: How the inevitable rise in the price of gasoline will change our lives for the better."  

Steiner sounds correct enough in predicting that when the price of gasoline hits certain "tipping points", people will change how they do things. That's hardly Nostradamus stuff.  At $4/gallon, people stopped buying Hummers. They carpooled. They bought more hybrid cars.  At $6/gallon, we'd see more of that.

What perked my ears up was Steiner's prediction that high oil prices spelled doom for the single family detached home.  "Our pattern of the single family home, sitting on a quarter acre lot, was built around (automobiles)..."  Really?  Our suburban lifestyle, Steiner said, is built around being able to get in our cars and go do things.  What he sees as the "sustainable" housing pattern of the future amounts to urban apartment buildings. Everything needs to be within walking distance. I suspect Steiner is an urban apartment dweller, so has a hard time imagining living any other way.

He would be right about most suburban developments since WWII. They definitely catered to the automobile. But the single-family detached house is far FAR older than the automobile. As I drive through "downtown" Chester, I pass a half-dozen single-family detached homes that date back to the early 1800s.  THOSE families didn't have automobiles. How could they have possibly survived?

For one, their lifestyle was different. They didn't jump on their horse(s) and ride into town every evening to eat out. They cooked. They didn't jump on their horse and ride into town for a jar of pickles because they ran out. They waited. They didn't sit around their single family homes complaining that they were bored. "Let's jump on our horses and gallop around the countryside for awhile, just for something to do."

If/when gasoline does hit $20 gallon, our wasteful lifestyles will have to change. But, the single family home is not so clearly doomed.  It worked before oil. It can work after oil.