@Eyebrows McGee: I wouldn't bet any mortgage payments on THAT one. The sprawl business model is very firmly entrenched in most markets, and there's a perverse American attitude that living near anything but other houses (preferably behind a gate) is low-end. People strive to afford the shiny-new house that looks just like their neighbors' houses, so they don't have to put too much thought into whether or not their house is nice enough (it's just like the Jones' house next door, after all, so it must be good enough. Right?)

Unraveling the suburban sprawl blight will be a multi-generational project (if it happens at all.) Too many developments have been built on the concept of 2-car long-commute families, where you NEED both cars so that one can go to the mall while the other goes to the gym, or so each one can drive the SUV an hour in snarled rush-hour traffic to their white-collar job. The built environment in most of the country doesn't lend itself to any sort of mass transit, and if you accept the car as the only transportation option it makes higher-density stuff harder to sell to people who aren't thinking any farther ahead than the day they can afford to "trade up" to their next depreciation-mobile or bigger, more-impersonal, less-welcoming house behind a fancier gate.