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About face
About faceEconomists who look at housing trends are predicting the death of suburbs. Gas, they say, is heading to $7 or $8 a gallon, sooner rather than later, and that commuting expense, coupled with flat wages, tied to traffic that grows worse by the minute, is driving folks back to the cities.
Gasoline prices are the new and unpredictable variable in real estate, and, together with tight credit and plummeting prices, adds a shrinking buyers' pool to the unhappy trifecta facing those who are trying to sell.
Fauquier County is not immune, though the effect here is liable to be considerably less than elsewhere, according to the folks we've talked to. The cost of having gotten here in the first place indicates that the salaries of most of our commuters are sufficient to raise their tolerance of pain at the pump to Tiger Woods' U.S. Open levels.
And those we might lose to an eastern migration are likely to be replaced by folks from, say, Culpeper, who moved so far out when gas was cheaper and houses were dearer, and might jump at the opportunity to shorten their commutes.
But escalating gas prices should certainly have us doing some thinking.
What, for example, does a slowing inflow do to the need for a 12th elementary school, now in the planning stages?
How are county officials planning to deal with $7 or $8 a gallon fuel and its effect on school system and public safety budgets?
The fuel line item in the new school budget was already significantly underfunded when the school board approved the document in March. It is severely outdated now, and growing moldier by the day.
As for public safety, other communities have rescinded officers' ability to take cruisers home and have taken deputies out of cars and put them on foot and on bicycles. Neither alternative is realistic for Fauquier, but the escalating cost of energy is likely to force us to come up with an alternative that is doable here — or get prepared for higher taxes to keep these cars and buses on the road.
Challenges aside, re-urbanization and population re-entrenchment is liable to be the best thing that has happened to Fauquier County in years. It will be a boon to our agricultural base, and we can, perhaps, enjoy for a while longer the small-town sentiment that is such an important part of our community identity.
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