The author's vague assertions that suburban development in America represents an enormous unfunded liability are supported in part by a considerable body of recent research suggesting that suburban lifestyles are far less efficient than their urban analogues.

To get you started, Geoffrey West, one of those physicists at the Santa Fe Institute who stick their noses into everything but physics, does a schtick introducing the idea of power-law scaling in urban agglomerations that you can find in various versions on YouTube [1].

An easy-reading overview of the same idea is Luis Bettencourt's paper with West, recently published in Nature, which points out that "doubling the population of any city requires only about an 85% increase in infrastructure, whether that be total road surface, length of electrical cables, water pipes or number of petrol stations. This systematic 15% savings happens because, in general, creating and operating the same infrastructure at higher densities is more efficient, more economically viable, and often leads to higher-quality services and solutions that are impossible in smaller places." The already classic reference is their 2007 paper in PNAS [3].

But the power-law approach ignores the true city-suburb distinction by focusing solely on size. (Suburbs are not small cities.) Edward Glaeser, a top urban economist, and Matthew Kahn recently did a panel study of geographic greenhouse gas emissions that includes a direct comparison of cities to their suburbs [4]. They found that suburban household emissions are higher than those of city households, usually substantially, in 48 of the 50 largest American metros. (See Table 5 for the money-stats.) The methodology reveals a wide urban-suburban disparity in energy-efficiency that I imagine is mirrored in the efficiency of use of many other resources.

(Next up, someone needs to integrate these approaches by comparing urban and suburban power-law residuals [5].)

None of this bears directly on the author's point in the linked article, but it does suggests that suburban development is a poor investment if an urban option exists.

1. A recent (and short) version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m-jM_Z9LtA

2. http://www.cabdyn.ox.ac.uk/complexity_PDFs/Publications%2020... [PDF]

3. http://www.pnas.org/content/104/17/7301.full.pdf+html [embedded PDF]

4. http://www.hks.harvard.edu/var/ezp_site/storage/fckeditor/fi... [PDF]

5. The residual approach is presented in another recent paper by Bettencourt, West, and crew: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...