If families need to choose between homelessness, and area of no utility with unaffordable transportation and electricity costs, or a low-footprint, walkable area, I think they’ll choose the third one. Attitudes will change when new circumstances compel them to change.

Attitudes are hard to change. People will try to maintain their lifestyles if they can. To use an example of the electric car again. We all know that we’re going to run out of oil sooner or later. Maybe we’re running out of oil already, maybe we have 10 more years, no one knows, but at some point we’ll need to change. We can do it with existing technology (electric cars, plug-in hybrids) but it requires lifestyle changes – you have to plug your car into the outlet overnight, you can’t charge from zero to full capacity in two minutes, you can’t go 300 miles on one charge, you won’t do 0-60 in 5 seconds. So, instead of that, big money goes into looking for new solutions (ethanol, hydrogen fuel cells) that can hopefully preserve our way of life.

When worst comes to worst, people will change, but they will try to change as little as possible. Transportation may become unaffordable, but electricity costs are in no danger of running out of control, there’s plenty of coil, uranium, … we can even build some new hydroelectric power plants if we want.