Will higher gas prices be the savior of American cities?

"The popular narrative on the collapse of housing prices has only blamed exotic lending practices," says economist Joe Cortright. "But the much more important story is about how higher gas prices have redrawn the map of urban real estate values.

"Vibrant central cities just got a whole lot more valuable."

That's the premise behind Mr. Cortright's report, "Driven to the Brink: How the Gas Price Spike Popped the Housing Bubble and Devalued the Suburbs." Pittsburgh is one of five metro areas he uses to illustrate his point.

Let's put the obvious bias of the report out front: Mr. Cortright, of Portland, Ore., did this for CEOs for Cities, not CEOs for Suburbs. But he is not the only one saying real estate declines nationwide have generally been more severe in outer suburbs and in metro areas with weak central cities, and that's rooted in the spike in gasoline prices.

According to Mr. Cortright, most ZIP codes within the city of Pittsburgh showed an uptick in value from the fourth quarter of 2006 to the fourth quarter of 2007, and some of those increases were dramatic given the national real estate implosion. Housing prices were up 10 percent or more in 15213 (Oakland), 15232 (Shadyside), 15201 (Lawrenceville) and 15233 (a slice of the North Side).

Meantime, some ZIP codes in Butler County saw housing prices drop 9 to 11 percent over the same 12-month period. More than a half-dozen ZIP codes in Westmoreland County also dropped by more than 10 percent, according to Mr. Cortright.

Is that a reaction to rising gasoline prices? I'm not as confident as Mr. Cortright in making that call. Some of those Westmoreland ZIP codes have only a few hundred households. Other suburban ZIP codes, including Zelienople and Pleasant Hills, registered double-digit gains in housing value and most others in Allegheny County also came in on the positive side.

Also, when I double-checked some ZIP code data with RealSTATs for the same periods, results often seemed to go exactly the other way. Mr. Cortright e-mailed to say his report's data came from Zillow.com, but I was unable to reach that organization to discuss its methodology.

Yet even with all those doubts, this remains an interesting question. Where we live and how we get around is largely based on a simple but critical premise: cheap gasoline. We're already seeing how $4 gasoline is shaking up the auto industry, with General Motors' announcement that it will stop making pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles at four of its North American plants. Will the driveways where those trucks and SUVs have parked also drop in value?

Mr. Cortright says that in our region, neighborhoods within three miles of the Golden Triangle went up in value 2 percent while those at least 13 miles away dropped 5 percent. That echoes a national pattern.

"The gas price spike popped the housing bubble," he wrote. "Growth in housing prices was fueled by low and stable gas prices from 1990 through 2004.

"Suburban households spend more of their income on transportation, and gas in particular, and have, therefore, taken the biggest hit to household budgets from gas price increases.

"Now that the era of cheap gas is over, demand for development on the fringe is down, and consumer interest and market potential lie in developing and redeveloping neighborhoods closer to the urban core."

There's evidence of that here already, and the exemplar is Millcraft Industries. It developed the sprawling Southpointe office and residential complex off Interstate 79 near Canonsburg in the early 1990s. Now it's reinventing the former Lazarus and G.C. Murphy stores Downtown with new housing, restaurants and a relocated YMCA.

Of course, buyers of high-end condos are in an economic class that should be able to shrug off $4 gasoline. They're buying more to enjoy the walkable urban life, to be five minutes from the office, restaurants, sporting events and the stage, than for any fuelish concerns. We'll know there has been a permanent shift in thinking only if homes in the city and inner suburbs continue to rise in value. It's a lot harder to trade in your home than your ride.