“Lo, all our pomp of yesterday, Is one with Nineveh and Tyre” wrote Kipling in his 1897 “Recessional.” Clearly, thank goodness, this is not true of the United States following Tuesday’s terrorist outrage. But is it true of America’s cities?

The decision to live in cities, for each family, is a complex interaction of benefits and costs. Better cultural facilities, greater availability of jobs (or easier travel to jobs) and a broader variety of friends to make is matched against higher crime levels, generally more dangerous schools, higher pollution and higher costs.

Since people have different preferences, attitudes to city dwelling vary far and wide. There are people who live in Manhattan and commute to jobs in White Plains. Equally, there are people who feel that adequate rural calm is only finally reached at Beacon, N.Y., in Dutchess County, 59 miles from New York and who therefore put up with an 80-90 minute train ride to and from their job in Manhattan.

An external event, even one with devastating consequences such as last week’s terrorist attacks, does not change this completely. The 50 year old middle manager with three children to educate will always prefer the suburbs — he is appalled to think of what might happen to his children in an urban public school system, and is quite unable to afford the cost of educating all three at good private schools. For him, the endless daily ride on the suburban train is the price he pays for being a family man, and well worth it.

Conversely the artistic community, provided they can find an apartment, loft or studio in the city they can afford, will always remain there. The only factor that drives them out to the suburbs is real estate costs, and then it only sends them as far as Brooklyn. Two of my senior journalist colleagues, neither of them currently resident in Manhattan, expressed surprise that anyone working in New York would consider moving to the suburbs; for them, and those like them, the move is literally unthinkable.

Nevertheless, there are a number of cases in between, for whom last Tuesday’s action may provide a spur to removal. The yuppie two-career couple of 35, who have recently acquired a baby, will probably move to the suburbs eventually, but may do so earlier, as the dangers of urban life have increased in saliency. The top investment banker with a house on East 52nd Street, whose wife was recently mugged on a trip to Bloomingdale’s, may also reconsider his lifestyle, particularly of course if he used to work in the World Trade Center.

It is the real estate question that may provide a “tipping point.” Fifty-thousand staff used to work in the World Trade Center, of whom 45,000 must now find a new office. Top management of the institutions concerned, whether or not they personally used to work in the WTC (and most of them didn’t) will want to look at all the options, including relocation out of the city. Since the “patriotic” option of moving back into a restored WTC is unlikely to be available for at least 4-5 years, the decision will be made on cold-blooded dollars-and-cents grounds.

Those ground may well not produce the same answer as they did say 10 years ago, when the WTC lease was originally signed by the tenant, let alone 30 years ago, when the WTC was built. The reason is of course technology. Trading has become electronic; the trader no longer picks up the telephone to his drinking buddy in another firm, but puts the order on a screen, for all to see. Consequently, it is no longer necessary for traders to go the same bar, any more than it is now necessary for investment bankers to have attended the same school.

A further technological change that may be made more effective through reaction to Tuesday’s disaster is the possibility, arrived at last, of cheap, effective videoconferencing. Since the risk of air travel has increased, and the cost appears likely also to increase, videoconferencing is now poised to become the answer to many communication needs. Of course, companies will still use long haul flights, and conferences in exotic locations to rally the troops, but short haul flight, in particular, will largely disappear.

For the ordinary troops, there is always the train, which on the Northeast corridor is anyway quicker than flying. For the top brass, there are executive aircraft, taking off from and landing at suburban airports. Westchester County Airport is a good alternative for top executives of Westchester companies; Stewart airport, near Newburgh N.Y., is an even better one for companies located just a little further out, towards Dutchess County. Beacon N.Y. looks a much more attractive residential spot when its commute involves, not an 80-90 minute train ride into Manhattan, but a 10-15 minute drive to a company headquarters in Armonk, or better still Wappinger’s Falls. And Beacon has a further attraction for the top executive — it is only 10 minutes drive from Stewart airport. To live that close to a New York airport, you have to live in Newark or Queens, neither an attractive alternative.

With Wall Street cutbacks inevitable, lowering corporate overhead a very attractive option in this difficult market, and traders themselves far more replaceable than two years ago, the attraction of relocating even trading operations to the suburbs may well be irresistible to a top management thinking of greater personal security and an easier life, without the difficulties of a long commute into the city.

Meanwhile, suburban office real estate is readily available, far more so than a year ago because of speculative overbuilding and the collapse of a number of rich dot-coms. Hence for many top investment bankers, the solution will be clear: one phone call to a good suburban real estate broker, and Bob’s your uncle. (In other words, the problem is solved — this Edwardian phraseology was inserted in honor of its original inspiration, Field Marshal Frederick Sleigh, Earl Roberts, the last successful leader of a punitive expedition into Afghanistan.)

Moves of this type, particularly if they involve whole institutions, will have an inevitable knock-on effect on the New York housing market, which will bring the artsy types flooding back into the city. Thus human happiness will be maximized. The artsy types will be back in the city, which they never wanted to leave, while top and middle management in the financial business will find a new and happier home in the suburbs. Even the investment bankers with artistic pretensions will find it tolerable – you can always take a limo to the Met, after all.

The long term result of all this, in all cities large enough to have identifiable terrorist targets and a crime problem, will be a move of top management to the suburbs, and a degradation of the inner city. All the major cities will become more like Detroit and Atlanta. If U.S. population continues to grow, this will turn even Beacon N.Y. into an ugly “Edge City.”

If not, Beacon will remain pastoral, and the urban agglomeration of New York will take the shape of a doughnut, extending towards Beacon but not, itself, swallowing Beacon.

New York City? A mecca only for intellectuals, down and outs and tourists. Like Nineveh and Tyre, its glory will be past.

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(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)

This article originally appeared on United Press International.