Daily Score Blog

It seems to be a trend:  the press is noticing that rising transportation costs are starting to erode the value of housing prices in far-flung suburbs.  See, e.g., this Olympian article, and this article from the LA Times. 

On the one hand, this is perfectly consistent with what I'd expect.  As gas prices rise, living in far-flung neighborhoods gets more and more expensive, while housing that's close to transit, stores, and jobs seems more affordable. If Econ 101 is any guide, those forces will undermine suburban housing prices, and could even ease  the "drive 'til you qualify" phenomenon into reverse. 

On the other hand, the real estate market is just now recovering from a prolonged state of extreme wackiness -- and I'm sure that it's possible to find examples to support just about any point you'd want to make about real estate values.  Perhaps the press happen to be cherry-picking a few good examples that support their story lines, while ignoring other, contradictory evidence.

So if anyone out there in blog-land has the time or inclination, please point me in the direction of any actual studies on the issue -- say, credible academics who've compared real estate trends in both sprawling and less-sprawling neighborhoods, or mortgage industry analysts who are advising lenders about where to focus their lending.  I'd love to know whether falling land values in suburbia is a genuine trend, or just a media fad.

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Taking a page out of BC's playbook, the Canadian opposition leader is proposing an audacious and well-structured carbon tax shift.

And in a continuation of the scrambling of left and right about tax shifting, the proposal comes from Canada's center-left party as an election platform to distinguish it from the governing center-right party (which immediately critized the proposal).

This dynamic exactly reverses the situation in British Columbia, where the carbon tax shift has come from the center-right governing party and the left party is attacking it in its election campaign. (See, for example, this article.)

(In my view, BC's left party is behaving badly. They're deceiving voters about the effects of the provincial tax shift on working families and rural residents, and they're playing on citizens' fears about taxation. It's disappointing, especially considering that the same party proudly introduced North America's first tax shift ever almost a decade ago, with Sightline's help.)