Wow. That’s all I could think when I read the following from Inman News:

Ask most home builders these days what they sell, and they’ll say a lifestyle. In most cases, this means a house on the outer fringes of suburbia with a yard for the kids and a garden for the folks. The house has plenty of room to pursue hobbies, entertain friends, bond with the family and get away from it all in a spacious master suite.

But is this lifestyle a sustainable one for the long haul? That is, in meeting our own needs in this fashion, are we compromising the needs of future generations? The needs of our children and our children’s children? In a word, yes.

If we continue to build more than a million such houses every year, the long-term effects will not be good, so say architects, builders, environmentalists, ecologists, engineers and developers in recent interviews. Dan Chiras, an Evergreen, Colo., environmentalist, teacher and home builder was quite specific.

“We cannot keeping spreading out across the country, gobbling up farmland at the rate of 3,500 acres a day to create roads and highways, single-family houses and suburban shopping centers. We need the productive farmland to feed our growing population–as many as 120 more million people may be living here by the year 2050. In the near term we need the forests to absorb the astronomical amounts of carbon dioxide that we are producing daily, and we need the pastureland to absorb rain and reduce flooding. All the paving, roofs, sidewalks and driveways that come with every subdivision create impervious surfaces that compromise nature’s ability to control flooding.”

Not only are we gobbling up land to create new communities, but we are also using vast resources to build the houses.

“For almost every new 2,300-square-foot house, we have clear cut an acre of forest somewhere,” Chiras explained. “To produce all the metals and minerals used in construction, we have dug a hole in the ground somewhere that is equal to the entire volume of the house.”

Read the rest of the story here.

Unless you’ve been hiding in a cave, you know that suburban expansion has been widespread in Utah for many years now. I think most people understand some of the basic complications that arise from this sort of development plan, but I, for one, never took into consideration half of the “costs” that author Katherine Salant identifies in her article at Inman.

It will be interesting to see what happens if gasoline really does hit $5 a gallon this summer, as predicted. Those who are commuting will take a serious hit to the pocketbook if it happens, but will it translate into more people looking to move closer to their place of employment? Will urban real estate prices in Salt Lake rise while suburban development stalls? Could happen. Time will tell.