Why the housing slump hasn't hit New York or San Francisco

Interesting article in today's New York Times Magazine at

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/realestate/keymagazine/406Lede-t.html?...

Bottom line: housing prices are going down in sprawl, but big cities are retaining their value.

A quote:

It may be easier to transport an individual job from New York to Vermont, but the value of being in New York is actually greater than it used to be. “The essence of cities is physical proximity,” explains Edward Glaeser, a Harvard professor who specializes in the economics of geography. “They’ve always had the advantage of making the movement of people easier, the movement of goods easier and the movement of ideas easier.” What has changed over the last few decades, Glaeser says, is that good ideas — be they in finance, entertainment, technology — have become much more valuable. The best ones can be turned into products that are soon being sold all over the world, thanks to globalization, FedEx, the Internet and a host of other forces. But it’s still much easier to come up with a good idea when you are surrounded by a lot of other people working on the same problems as you are.