An Examiner story this morning is designed to fill you with dread for the coming D.C. Pricepocalypse. According to a study released Wednesday by George Mason University professor Stephen Fuller, the average price of a home in the national capital region likely will swell almost 3,000 percent in 50 years. The study predicts the average home in the metro area will be $14 million in 2057, compared to today’s average of $477,000. As if your nightmares about never being able to afford to buy a home in D.C. weren’t bad enough already.

The D.C. metro area in 50 years will likely look much like it does today, only much larger. 10 million people will live here, but that will be because we’ll still have more good jobs than we can fill, which is why so many folks will still want to live here. The reason home prices will go up so high is that we’ll never be able to build fast enough to keep up, so prices will rise more than incomes.

But Fuller’s suggestion in the article that we’ll all need to move into tiny apartments closer to our jobs seems like a pretty tough proposition to achieve. As Harriet Tregoning, director of D.C.’s Office of Planning, wisely explains, the ability to afford a home in the future will be inextricably linked with how long your commute is: “If you live far away from where you work, you are captive to gas prices. You have nowhere to go except back to the pump to fill up three or four times a week.” We’ve discussed some of these issues before, and wonder whether focusing on improving our transportation infrastructure, so that people will be able to commute on mass transit from more and more places, wouldn’t be a more workable plan.

Photo by grundlepuck