Buying a home in the Suburbs and the future oil?

I am looking at buying a home in one of the southern Houston suburbs (about 25 miles from Downtown Houston and 25 miles from Galveston) (Oil will obviously only get more costly in the future.)





Question is: when oil hits 4+ bucks a gallon will the value of homes in the suburbs like this one decline because the cost to commute has increased?Buying a home in the Suburbs and the future oil?
One of two things must happen: We avoid commuting by moving our residences closer to our place of employment, or we spread our places of employment among our residential areas.





Moving all our residences into a central core would leave a lot of essentially free housing outside of the core... so we do not expect to see things go that far. Just as a move to a central core is well started it will become obvious to some employers that they will be best to move closer to that low priced suburban housing.





I observe in most Canadian cities that a large part of employment is already becoming distributed around major traffic corridors far from downtown, even as it remains impractical to have business growth downtown, impractical because it is too difficult to get both employees and customers, suppliers into and out of that core.





Cities have grown from a central business core, but as the city has grown it has becom more and more inaccessible to business coming in from its hinterland. Cities may need to reverse engineer, moving their business core to the perimeter.





This of course is forced along if business is paying a large cost for energy to get its people and supplies in, its products out of that congested core, and its customers turn away to avoid incurring a lot of those costs.