Not all real-estate meltdowns are created equal. That's the upshot of this San Francisco Chronicle column which delivers data suggesting that sprawling suburban areas are seeing higher foreclosure rates than compact, urban areas.

In Puget Sound, while it's probably too early to conclude closer-in areas are doing better than those on the fringe, it's interesting to note that Pierce County, long a bedroom/commuter community to Seattle, has the highest foreclosure rate in the region. What's more, several economists and house builders have told me over the last several months that older urban areas will fare better than newer, suburban ones as the mortgage crisis continues to unspool.

Certainly, there are other factors in foreclosure rates: the rise and fall of local economies and jobs, individual mortgage deals gone bad and, of course, the inescapable fallout from spirals in national and global financial systems.

But there are other reasons why not all real-estate meltdowns are created equal. These reasons haven't received much press, but they have to do with land-use rules, or the lack thereof, the rising price of oil and the nature of newer suburbs.

Land-use zoning: If you don't have a regulatory framework to manage growth and curb sprawl you encourage developers to over-build and to build on the fringe. This is what has happened in places hurting the most from the sub-prime fallout, including, for example, Las Vegas. In Washington state, we're hurting less partly because we draw urban growth lines that discourage speculative development and that funnel growth into predictable areas. And this isn't just the conclusion of environmentalists and urban planners; it's the conclusion of some economists and developers and other people who aren't big fans of the state's 1990 Growth Management Act, including Todd Britsch of Mill Creek-based New Home Trends. 

The rising price of oil: When you live farther away from jobs and services - which a lack of smart zoning rules enables - you have to pay more to fill up the SUV to commute long distances. In other words, when you buy a house, you don't just buy a house. You also buy whatever transportation costs come with living in a certain location. Those transportation costs happen to be rising with the rising price of oil. In a time of relatively cheap oil and cheap gas, people are able to eat price spikes and move on. Not now, though, and maybe never again.

The nature of newer suburbs: Newer suburbs come with certain vulnerabilities. These days, those vulnerabilities include big homes with mortgages people can't afford and that no bank should have ever loaned. They also come with higher transportation costs because of the unprecedented global oil situation. Christopher Leinberger, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institute and a former developer, explains another vulnerability:

Newer suburbs also depend on developers' fees and property taxes to pay for the communities, he says. "When the growth stops and the property values fall, suddenly you're going to have this wicked situation where social costs are rising as funding dries up, but without any other tax sources from commercial or industrial activity."

Now, this isn't to say that urban and closer-in areas are all fah-la-la-la-la wonderful; they come with their own unique problems, including declining schools in some cases. Nevertheless, they are less vulnerable to speculative over-building because they have less raw land and, especially in the case of Puget Sound, they possess regulatory controls that curb sprawl. They also suffer less from rising transportation costs, because they are near transit and other transportation alternatives. King County Metro anyone? How about Pierce Transit? Or is Sound Transit more to your liking? Additionally, some of these older urban areas are seeing increases in property values - unlike the newer suburban areas Leinberger mentions - because they are the recipients of new, mixed-use developments that include some commercial activity - another tax source.

There are many reasons why Washington state and Puget Sound haven't been hit as hard by the real-estate meltdown. Some of them, though, have to do with things people don't always consider, including anti-sprawl land-use rules and reinvestment in city centers and older urban areas - both of which help in a time of frenzied, speculative building and skyrocketing oil prices.