There are many ways of describing the fiasco of suburbia, but these days I refer to it as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.
I say this because American suburbia requires an infinite supply of cheap energy in order to function and we have now entered a permanent global energy crisis that will change the whole equation of daily life. Having poured a half-century of our national wealth into a living arrangement with no future — and linked our very identity with it — we have provoked a powerful psychology of previous investment that will make it difficult for us to let go, change our behavior, and make other arrangements.
Compounding the problem is the fact that we ditched our manufacturing economy for a suburban sprawl building economy (a.k.a. “the housing bubbleâ€), meaning we came to base our economy on building even more stuff with no future.
This is a hell of a problem, since it is at once economic, socio-political, and circumstantial.
Here’s what I think will happen: First, we are in great danger of mounting a futile campaign to sustain the unsustainable, that is, of defending suburbia at all costs.
In fact, it is already underway. One symptom of this is that the only subject under discussion about our energy predicament is how can we keep running all our cars by other means. Even the leading environmentalists talk of little else. We don’t get it. The Happy Motoring era is over. No combination of “alt†fuels — solar, wind, nuclear, tar sands, oil-shale, offshore drilling, used French-fry oil — will allow us to keep running the interstate highway system, Wal-Marts, and Walt Disney World.
The automobile will be a diminishing presence in our lives, whether we like it or not. Further proof of our obdurate cluelessness in these matters is the absence of any public discussion about restoring the passenger railroad system — even as the airline industry is also visibly dying. The campaign to sustain suburbia and all its entitlements will result in a tragic squandering of our dwindling resources and capital.
The suburbs have three destinies, none of them exclusive: as materials salvage, as slums, and as ruins. In any case, the suburbs will lose value dramatically, both in terms of usefulness and financial investment. Most of the fabric of suburbia will not be “fixed†or retrofitted, in particular the residential subdivisions. They were built badly in the wrong places. We will have to return to traditional modes of inhabiting the landscape — villages, towns, and cities, composed of walkable neighborhoods and business districts — and the successful ones will have to exist in relation to a productive agricultural hinterland, because petro-agriculture (as represented by the infamous 3000-mile Caesar salad) is also now coming to an end. Fortunately, we have many under-activated small towns and small cities in favorable locations near waterways. This will be increasingly important as transport of goods by water regains importance.
We face an epochal demographic shift, but not the one that is commonly expected: from suburbs to big cities. Rather, we are in for a reversal of the 200-year-long trend of people moving from the farms and small towns to the big cities. People will be moving to the smaller towns and smaller cities because they are more appropriately scaled to the limited energy diet of the future. I believe our big cities will contract substantially — even if they densify back around their old cores and waterfronts. They are products, largely, of the 20th-century cheap energy fiesta and they will be starved in the decades ahead.
One popular current fantasy I hear often is that apartment towers are the “greenest†mode of human habitation. On the contrary, we will discover that the skyscraper is an obsolete building type, and that cities overburdened with them will suffer a huge liability — Manhattan and Chicago being the primary examples. Cities composed mostly of suburban-type fabric — Houston, Atlanta, Orlando, et al — will also depreciate sharply. The process of urban contraction is likely to be complicated by ethnic tensions and social disorder.
As petro-agriculture implodes, we’ll have to raise our food differently, closer to home, and at a finer and smaller scale. This new agricultural landscape will be inhabited differently, since farming will require more human attention. The places that are not able to grow enough food locally are not likely to make it. Phoenix and Las Vegas will be shadows of what they are now, if they exist at all.
These days, an awful lot of people — the production builders, the realtors — are waiting for the “bottom†in the real-estate industry with hopes that the suburban house-building orgy will resume. They are waiting in vain. The project of suburbia is over. We will build no more of it. Now we’re stuck with what’s there. Sometimes whole societies make unfortunate decisions or go down tragic pathways. Suburbia was ours.
From The New York Times
I dont think that really is at the core of the problem though perhaps one of the symptoms. The problem of waste is pervasive in this society, it is everywhere you look.
Check out Tom Friedman’s lastest column…depressing but onpoint.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/26/opinion/26friedman.html?hp
This comes across as a lot of heated rhetoric with little or no substantive reasoning (aka “proof”), and I am tempted to call BS on all of it. While car culture and highway infrastructure helped create the exurb (what Knustler is really talking about here, not “suburbs”, which are the towns and villages within easy range of resources that he mentions in the middle paragraph), his doomsday scenario fails to acknowledge the massive gains that can be made not just in terms of fuel and building efficiency, but also the fact that human ingenuity is what brought us here, and what will eventually bring us through to a more sustainable future.
Really, anyone throwing around phrases like “epochal demographic shift” is immediately suspect. Talk about a guy with an axe to grind on his meaningless childhood in suburbia…
Miss fighting the man in Central Europe, Dan? Agreed that Knustler is somewhat hyperbolic. However, his premise is correct. As you know, the housing/highway projects were some of if not the largest programmatic non-wartime outlays this country has ever made. No conspiracy theories here, just greed. GM wishes to hasten car ownership with the masses? Buy up streetcar and other light rail systems and put them to sleep. It’s funny that the ones who most want our help now are the very orchestrators of this appropriation of public good for private greed. Check out Mike Davis, you’d like him. SF turned me on to that 😉
Doye, we read City of Quartz together smart guy. So the entire highway system is just a big conspiracy to make cars the dominant method of transportation? Come on – that’s a bit hard to swallow. Detroit may have undue influence in our national politics, but a large part of the reason for the highway projects was to keep people working after the total engagement of industry during the war.
I see this less as “fighting the man” as arguing against one of the greatest facets of Americanism, which is to exploit massive amounts of cheap labor in the service of equally massive egos of powerful men to create some of the largest things on earth. You’ll also recall that Los Angeles wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for some guy re-directing the Colorado river and building hundreds of miles of pipelines and aqueducts into the desert. Indeed, to criticize these efforts is to criticize manifest destiny – a completely different argument.
In any case, we’re looking at the same kind of infrastructure outlays to buoy the economy once Obama gets elected. Do you question the wisdom of spending to keep people employed during a major recession?
Your point about big egos for big projects is correct; reference Robert Moses and the re-shaping of modern New York. I guess what is really bothering me here is the fact that we jumped so blindly into a new sort of lifestyle without stopping to think about the consequences. Our desire for constantly expanding the suburbs (into exurbs as you mention,) and our highway and transit policies has been an overall disenfranchising endeavor, one partly motivated by racism. Think of some of the effects of suburbanization: many city neighborhoods were bisected by large highways, urban housing stock and mass transportation were severely neglected, the poor (disproportionately minority) were left to fester there. Did you know that Moses designed the bridges on his parkways to be too low for busses (to prevent the “negro” masses from reaching the roads’ destinations?)
Contrary to being opposed to public works, I am a strong supporter of them. I have pointed out here that there are some lovely bridges and other structures in New Orleans’ city park that were built by the WPA; they are about the only things not falling apart here. We need to move away from junk culture embodied by poorly built housing in nowhere but somewhere away from “the city” and close to the highway. But one of the components to revitalizing our cities includes the gainful employment of most Americans, as cities often function as national bellwethers to a country’s health (see Detroit.) So, let’s focus on smarter public-works projects, including: building a national high speed rail system, re-implementing urban mass transit (not busses but rather rail that operates within its own ROW,) re-developing entire areas of cities currently underutilized with green, new urbanist communities, and starting to retract from the atomization movement that has so splintered our society and helped turn us into some of the most ‘out of touch’ citizens cum consumers.