From Bloomberg:

Wealth Evaporates as Gas Prices Clobber McMansions, SUV Makers

Homeowners in the exurbs aren’t the only ones whose assets have taken a hit because of the surge in energy costs. Companies such as General Motors Corp. and UAL Corp. are writing off billions of dollars in plants and equipment that are no longer viable in an age of dearer oil. The destruction of wealth and capital will weigh on U.S. growth for years to come.

“Our whole economy reflects the relative costs of energy: the cars we drive, the houses we occupy, the kinds of factories we have and the equipment in them,” says Dana Johnson, chief economist at Comerica Bank in Dallas. “I’m expecting relatively large changes in all of these things.”

The loss of wealth could be a double whammy for the U.S. economy. In the short run, it depresses demand as homeowners save more and spend less, and companies fire workers. Longer run, it curbs productivity growth, as firms shift their focus from increasing worker efficiency to reducing energy costs.
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“At $4 per gallon gas, $125 per barrel oil and $10 per million Btu natural gas, a lot of activity becomes uneconomical,” says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com in West Chester, Pennsylvania.

The lifestyle of the exurban commuter may be one casualty.

Emerging suburbs and exurbs — commuter towns that lie beyond cities and their traditional suburbs — grew about 15 percent from 2000 to 2006, nearly three times as fast as the U.S. population, as Americans moved further out in search of more affordable houses or the bigger ones that are sometimes derided as McMansions.

“It was drive until you qualify” for a mortgage, says Robert Lang, director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech in Alexandria, Virginia. “You can’t do that anymore. Your cost of transportation will spike too much.”
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Nationwide, home prices in neighborhoods with long commutes and no public transportation are falling faster than prices in communities closer to cities, according to a study by Joseph Cortright, an economist at Impresa Consulting. For example, his study found that prices in distant suburbs of Tampa fell 14 percent in the last 12 months, versus a 9 percent drop in areas nearer the city.
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“The decline in almost every case is worse in the suburbs and exurbs than it is in close-in neighborhoods because transportation costs are so much more of a factor,” says Cortright, whose Portland, Oregon, firm studies regional economies.