The New York Times has a write-up on the "exurb" phenomenon. Much to my surprise, they manage to conceal their contempt! But seriously, it's a good look at it all. I have a couple comments, one aiming for insightful and the other settling for snarky. I found this particular paragraph interesting:

The answer, the company decided, is that a house in New River must be $12,000 cheaper than the same house in the north Tampa suburbs, 15 minutes closer to downtown. And in Silverado, a community that KB hopes to build 15 minutes farther north in Pasco County, the house must be $12,000 cheaper than in New River.

In the greater scheme of things, $12,000 is not all that much money when you're considering a house. Of course, once you add in interest and whatnot, it comes to be more than that, but even so I find it astonishing that people are willing to trade so much time for comparitively so little difference, if all other factors are as equal as the article suggests.

Fifteen minutes farther is 30 minutes a day.
Thirty minutes a day is 150 minutes (2.5 hours) a week.
Two-and-a-half hours a week is 10 hours a month.
Ten hours a month is 120 hours a year over the course of a 30-year loan is 3,600 hours, or 150 days or almost half a year, spent in a car, for the exact same house.

Once you factor in the extra interest that you're paying on the $12,000 price difference (bringing the cost of the house down from $222,000 to $210,000 (on a 7% fixed-rate loan), in this example, here are the savings:

Principal borrowed: $12,000.00
Regular Payment amount: $79.83
Total Repaid: $28739.20
Total Interest Paid: $16738.80

So the savings is almost $80 a month, or $30,000 a year.

That same year, a car that gets 20 miles to the gallon and drives ten extra miles each way (at $2.50/gal) will spend an extra $50 a month in gas.

The result? They've traded almost six months of their life in a car for roughly $30 a month or, over the term of the loan, $11,000.

That, in my mind, is insane.

(If you're interested and particularly anal, I've included my (admittedly general) methodology here:
I chose to start at $210,000 because it was the lower cusp of what is available in the community mentioned in the article. The below was calculated here. I wasn't sure the exact interest rate to charge, but someone I know recently got a house loan for 6% and I've heard that interest rates have risen somewhat, so I bumped it up a little. I overshot the price of gas, but it was actually a pretty conservative estimate when you consider what they will be paying twenty years from now. On the other hand I did not include property taxes, which makes the difference more marginal than it probably is. Twenty-miles-per-gallon may be somewhat conservative, but so may the 10 mile commute. Even if you dispute the numbers given, the point that the overall difference in cost is marginal, depending on your priorities, stands. The main point of this exercise is to demonstrate that people are very likely underestimating the importance of their time in favor either a little extra spending money or a little extra space in their home. I believe that to be a shame.

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Principal borrowed: $222000.00
Annual Payments: 12 Total Payments: 360
Annual interest rate: 7.00% Periodic interest rate: 0.5833%
Regular Payment amount: $1476.97 Final Balloon Payment: $0.00

The following results are estimates which do not account for values being rounded to the nearest cent.
Total Repaid: $531709.20
Total Interest Paid: $309709.20
Interest as percentage of Principal: 139.509%

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Principal borrowed: $210000.00
Annual Payments: 12 Total Payments: 360
Annual interest rate: 7.00% Periodic interest rate: 0.5833%
Regular Payment amount: $1397.14 Final Balloon Payment: $0.00

The following results are estimates which do not account for values being rounded to the nearest cent.
Total Repaid: $502970.40
Total Interest Paid: $292970.40
Interest as percentage of Principal: 139.510%