Gas prices make North Shore living hard

By Deon Roberts, Online Editor

Yesterday, CityBusiness’ Web site featured a story about falling sales of SUVs at North Shore auto dealers.

“SUV sales have become practically nonexistent for us,” said Ed Greenwald, sales manager with Baldwin Motors in Covington.

He’s not alone. Other SUV dealers throughout the country are watching demand for gas-guzzling vehicles drop as the country goes through an economic slowdown and deals with high gasoline prices.

But high gas prices could cost the North Shore more than SUV sales. It could cost St. Tammany Parish and surrounding parishes some of their population as residents grow sick of paying more than $3 a gallon to drive the 24-mile-long Causeway or other routes across Lake Pontchartrain.

In a July 23 CityBusiness story, reporter Emilie Bahr wrote that gas prices increasingly are prompting some North Shore residents to re-evaluate the expensive need to drive across the lake to get to their South Shore jobs.

“Real estate market figures suggest there has yet to be a large-scale migration away from the North Shore back to the city. While housing sales are on the decline across much of the metro region, they remain relatively stable in western St. Tammany Parish, which experienced the smallest decrease in the New Orleans area in the number of homes sold from April 2007 to the same month this year, according to the New Orleans Metropolitan Association of Realtors,” the story says.

Four days later, The Times-Picayune wrote basically the same story.

“Local real estate experts say people will not make such a fundamental lifestyle change until stratospheric gas prices prove to be the new reality, not just a temporary spike. There is nonetheless a vanguard that has grown weary of commuting across the Causeway, the twin spans or congested stretches of Interstate 10 and has resolved to trade in their house for a place closer to the city,” the T-P wrote.

According to the St. Tammany Economic Development Foundation, St. Tammany Parish is the fifth largest parish in the state and has been the fastest growing parish since the 1970s. Will high gas prices reverse that trend?