David Brauer – former Twin Cities Reader (or was it the City Pages?  Who can tell anymore?) writer, KSTP-AM morning guy and MPR’s current Sole Voice on the Media, writes in the Daily Mold’s wrapup of the year’s top stories about something I was actually pondering myself over the weekend.

No, not this bit…:

Atrios lovingly labels the mortgage meltdown as a pile of poo, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that while inner-city neighborhoods have been shat upon, those are troubled places used to such muck; the real gonad-shrinking panic is emanating from the petro-enabled Outer Burbosphere, whose overvalued aura of Manifest Destiny may exhibit a steeper downward arc than our own fading American empire.

Many’s the lefty who fantasizes about the burbs’ crumbling and the US joining Sweden among the ranks of “former powers”.  Apparently equally many are the leftybloggers who think Duncan “Atrios” Black’s fourth-grade dribblings are quotable. 

But I digress: here’s the part I started pondering late last week, myself, when i was writing about the Northstar Commuter Rail line a few weeks ago.  A few comments popped up in my comment section that mirrored some things I’d heard from some left-leaning friends of mine:

With the approval of the North Star I actually hopped on MLS last night and looked for homes in Elk River and Big Lake. Down Side, of course, it is crazy Bachmann land. But nice homes and a better price than burbia with a commute that would be very doable on the Rail…if enough people like me consider the move, her days are numbered anyway *smile*

In other words (not to stuff words into commenter, neighbor and pal Flash’s mouth, but it reflects something I’ve heard from other people, so I’m going to use the comment emblematically), once rail transit makes it politically correct for (white, middle-class) lefties to move to the ‘burbs, they’ll flee the mess that three generations of their own party’s policies have created.

Along these lines, Brauer adds:

Wouldn’t it be something if the flipped parts of Minneapolis and St. Paul were some day repopulated by the Hummer-scarred expats of Commuterland?

Indeed, I pondered over the weekend – should Linden Hills, Highland Park and Saint Anthony Park’s upper-middle-class Prius-driving yuppie demo decamp for the ‘burbs to escape the collapsed education system, crime and social ills that their own liberal/DFL machine, system and philosophy have made into untouchable institutions, it’ll leave behind a huge stock of housing at bargain rates – housing that is well-built (compare a 1910’s Edwardian, solid as Churchill’s bunker, with the shoddily-built, cheesily-appointed McMansions that glut the left’s future stronghold), well-situated (sited and built before the left’s tinkering with the market via Urban Renewal, when the free market still ruled demographics) and very, very liveable (as the Twin Cities were before three generations of DFL hegemony messed the place up). 

And conservatives – being people who appreciate value over “statements” and “messages” – will go where the value is. 

By about this time, the shoddily-mass-manufactured McMansions will of course be decaying into rotting husks, and the suburban high schools will be crime-sodden atrocities, and the DFL will be plaintively begging the prosperous inner cities to bail them out. 

As David Brauer notes, things change.  As history tells us, the more they do, the more they stay the same.