But with energy costs soaring and a hike in interest rates likely in the months ahead, all of a sudden the Exurban American Dream is looking a whole lot tougher for many. Just ask Frank E. Heater, a carpenter who lives in Pike County, Pa., a fast-growing exurb of New York City. To afford his 3,500-square-foot ranch home, planted on five wooded acres, Heater pulls out of his driveway at 4:15 each morning to drive his Ford Expedition 86 miles to New York. In the best of times, his routine was grueling: "Come home, eat, shower, sleep, and you're back on the road again." But his gasoline bill now hovers around $180 a week, about double what he paid two years ago and an ever-growing big bite out of Heater's take-home pay. Now he wishes he could take the bus, tools and all. "The gasoline is killing me," he says.

The economic consequences of a slowdown in exurban exuberance is difficult to measure. Clearly the exurbs' rapid growth has been one of the main engines of U.S. economic expansion in recent years. Consider all the homebuilding plus the malls, box stores, restaurant chains, fire departments, and schools that have popped up on cheap farmland beyond the suburbs. The new arrivals provided huge growth for retailers and other service companies, hundreds of thousands of new jobs for teachers, firemen, and the like, and entrepreneurial opportunities galore. Indeed, it is unlikely that the U.S. economy could have outperformed every other major industrial country in recent years without the explosion of exurbs and their ripple effects on business.