In other words, how can one see that suburb people are migrating, that cities are compacting and that far-out suburbs are depopulating? Because as long as public transport infrastructure is not in place in the USE, this seems to me the most realistic event going to happen soon.
However, I know of no real statistics or figures for properly measuring this.
The fact that the housing bust has hit at more or less the same time as this dramatic rise in the price of oil also makes it harder to look at this properly. The market has been cooling off since 2004, even if it's taken until this year for the whole system to start collapsing. One of the major effects of the whole thing has been rising available stocks of new housing, and most of that new housing is located rather far from urban centers.
How much has the rising cost of commutes figured into the decline in sales, and how much of it has been caused by the various other factors behind the financial collapse? Hard to say.
