Long Emergency
In comments to Ghost Towns, Alex writes:
To most Americans, large cities are for cultural and sporting events.
Some of them may live in one for a few years after graduation, then
they’re planning to spawn in the burbs.They’ll go bankrupt before they move into the cities.
He’s probably right: the comment reminded of something Kunstler wrote a few years ago in the Long Emergency excerpted at Rolling Stone:
Most of all, the Long Emergency will require us to make other arrangements for the way we live in the United States. America is in a special predicament due to a set of unfortunate choices we made as a society in the twentieth century. Perhaps the worst was to let our towns and cities rot away and to replace them with suburbia, which had the additional side effect of trashing a lot of the best farmland in America. Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It has a tragic destiny. The psychology of previous investment suggests that we will defend our drive-in utopia long after it has become a terrible liability.
Before long, the suburbs will fail us in practical terms. We made the ongoing development of housing subdivisions, highway strips, fried-food shacks and shopping malls the basis of our economy, and when we have to stop making more of those things, the bottom will fall out.
The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away. The turbulence of the Long Emergency will produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former middle class.
And more:
The successful regions in the twenty-first century will be the ones surrounded by viable farming hinterlands that can reconstitute locally sustainable economies on an armature of civic cohesion. Small towns and smaller cities have better prospects than the big cities, which will probably have to contract substantially. The process will be painful and tumultuous. In many American cities, such as Cleveland, Detroit and St. Louis, that process is already well advanced. Others have further to fall. New York and Chicago face extraordinary difficulties, being oversupplied with gigantic buildings out of scale with the reality of declining energy supplies. Their former agricultural hinterlands have long been paved over. They will be encysted in a surrounding fabric of necrotic suburbia that will only amplify and reinforce the cities’ problems.
Philadelphia’s one of those places that, if Kunstler’s predications are correct, will do OK because we are “surrounded by viable farming hinterlands that can reconstitute locally sustainable economies on an armature of civic cohesion.” We have one of the oldest commercial corridors in the nation, the Lancaster Pike which is a direct route to and from the Amish farmlands in central PA. Boston Massachusetts will probably be OK as well.
However, Alex is almost certainly correct that suburban and exurban dwellers will “go bankrupt before they move into the cities.” As the article I cited last week pointed out, they already are well on their way.
As the residents of inner-city neighborhoods did before them, suburban homeowners will surely try to prevent the division of neighborhood houses into rental units, which would herald the arrival of the poor. And many will likely succeed, for a time. But eventually, the owners of these fringe houses will have to sell to someone, and they’re not likely to find many buyers; offers from would-be landlords will start to look better, and neighborhood restrictions will relax. Stopping a fundamental market shift by legislation or regulation is generally impossible…
[snip]
On the other hand, many inner suburbs that are on the wrong side of town, and poorly served by public transport, are already suffering what looks like inexorable decline. Low-income people, displaced from gentrifying inner cities, have moved in, and longtime residents, seeking more space and nicer neighborhoods, have moved out.But much of the future decline is likely to occur on the fringes, in towns far away from the central city, not served by rail transit, and lacking any real core.
We live in interesting times…
3 Responses to “Long Emergency”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
April 28th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
It’s all ringing true in my head. I’ve often thought a lot about the nature of consumption and sprawl in this country. Nobody, it seems, ever really looked out at the scope of what was happening here in the states. It’s just been a endlessly ambitious onward and upward mentality for decades. I’ve felt for a few years now that all these different economic and environmental factors were going to converge on us all at once. Causing this coming chaos. It’s sort of like the universe reaching it’s point of full expansion. Now it is going to start retracting. So people better be ready to shrink their respective lifestyles in the coming years. If they don’t do it willfully, it will be done for them. Perhaps in the end it will turn out to be a blessing of sorts. Forcing people back into a simpler way of life. Time will tell.
April 28th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
When my daughter was much younger, her mother was her girl scout leader. Her mother arranged for a transportation merit badge, which, among other things, involved taking Amtrak from Wilmington to 30th Street Philadelphia, than taking SEPTA Rail to Center City, and return.
Now, visualize: I live 4 1/2 miles from the Wilmington train station (which I commuted from for 10 years and worked at for four more). To get to the train station from here, you have to drive right through downtown (such as it is) Wilmington (a whole 12 and 1/2 minute drive it you make most of the lights).
Most of these girls and their parents HAD NEVER EVER BEEN IN DOWNTOWN WILMINGTON, four flippin’ miles away, for heaven’s sake. Jeez, the way they talked about it, you would have thought we lived in Escape from New York.
That’s the part of the suburban mentality I don’t get–that the city is somehow the enemy, rather than the raison d’etre of the burbs. (Hey! I worked raison d’etre into a comment!
April 28th, 2008 at 11:42 pm
Maybe I’m a pessimist here (Ironic that I’m more of a pessimist than Brendan)
I don’t think our society or economy is robust enough to survive a prolonged economic downturn. We’ve relied on cheap energy, food and credit for so long that we can’t easily adapt.
Take a look at the ‘typical’ suburbanite way of life. You live in a single family house that can’t easily be converted to apartments or light retail. You drive from your subdivision to your work in an office park or strip mall. Neither is dense enough to support public transport and are too far to walk or bicycle between. You need all that space for parking lots, anyway.
This is so rigid it’s brittle. You can’t leverage any of the infrastructure for a downsized future. What use is a McDs if you don’t have cheap beef? What use is a tract house in an area that you can’t commute to work from?
We’re going to have to re-invent our entire country- to move from nascent empire to some post-global thing we’re not sure what it is.