Hating Suburbia

October 24, 2005,
      Readers of my stuff and audience members at my college blabs have been complaining lately that I wrote The Long Emergency as a wish-fulfillment fantasy because I hate suburbia. So perhaps it's a good time for me to clarify my thoughts on suburbia.

      First, we need to recognize its origins. Even the Romans had suburbs, and the wish to inhabit the borderlands (to borrow John Stilgoe's term) of the largest cities is not a new thing. But in America the pattern evolved to an extent never before imagined. America's cities emerged hand-in-hand with industrialism, and by the mid-1800s the industrial city was regarded as undesirable. As soon as the convulsion of the Civil War was over, railroad suburbs were created for the very well-off, and systems for designing them were innovated by the likes of Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted, creators of New York's Central Park. There were very few of these special places, and they formed the basis of what would be known as the American Dream.

     The idea behind these suburbs was simple and straightforward: country life as the antidote to the horror of the industrial city, with its moiling slums, its noise, congestion, bad air, disease, and obnoxious industrial operations. One could access the city by day for business and be back in a rural villa for dinner thanks to the railroad.

     The suburb of the streetcar era was an elaboration of this pattern for a growing upper-middle class (and the streetcar era was relatively brief). It allowed a finer grain of suburban development because the stops could be much closer together.

      The Model T Ford was introduced in 1907 and built on assembly lines in 1913, which made them cheap and affordable. When the disruption of the First World War was over in 1918, the automobile permitted an extenstion of the suburbs far beyond (and between) the streetcar lines. The great boom of the 1920s was largely a result of all this activity. This project was interrupted by the Great Depression and the Second World War, and then furiously resumed when the war was over. Up until the 1970s, suburbia was a kind of accessory to America's manufacturing economy. But as industrial production moved overseas, the creation of suburbia itself insidiously replaced it as the engine of the US economy.

       This brings us to where we are today, with an economy driven by a land development pattern and a system for delivering it that is hugely destructive of terrain and civic life. Since it depends utterly on reliable supplies of cheap oil, we can assert that it has dubious prospects as both an economic enterprise and as a living arrangement. The obdurate refusal to recognize its limitations begins to have tragic overtones for our society.

      Having directed so much of our post-war wealth to constructing the infrastructures of suburban everyday life, we are now trapped in a psychology of previous investment that makes it impossible for us to imagine letting go of it. This is expressed in Dick Cheney's tragic phrase that the American way of life is non-negotiable. Now, circumstances will negotiate it for us.

      It is true that I hate what the suburbs have done to my country. But the assualt on our landscape and the withering of our civic life was an obvious evil before the specter of peak oil signaled an absolute end of suburbia. What I certainly despise as much as suburbia itself is the stupid defense of it by people who ought to know better, such as columnists for the New York Times. I also believe that this stupid defense will continue and spread and become a tremendous, tragic exercise in futility for a people who could be putting their minds to a much better purpose in finding other means to carry on the larger project of civilization.
      

Comments

[Weaseldog]

One of the great tragedies of suburbia and run away real estate speculation is the elimination of farms and farming.

In the D/FW metroplex, several new concrete covered suburbs have sprung up in my lifetime, including Plano, Frisco and McKinney. The effect of these expanding burbs has been to put farmers our of business.

the effect of this nationwide trend has been to turn the US into a net food exporter into a net food importer. For several years we've been unable to produce enough food to feed ourselves.

Some will argue that driving up land prices so high that farmers can't cover their taxes and are forced to sell, is just the free market at work. But whta is so high and mighty about the free market that it should be allowed to affect our national security by limiting our supply of food? If the market is more sacred than eating, then why not give our raods and highways to private developers so they can build suburbs there? At what point do we say no to the market and the right of people to make a profit by any means possible? At what point does the greater good, trump the rights of rich developers to trade our security for profit.

Loss of so much prime farmland, coupled with rapidly increasing prices for farming necessities, will soon be driving up the price of food. You can't pave over all the farms forever. Eventually you get to where we stand today.

And I've heard arguments that farmland can be reclaimed. Sure it can, on a timescale of decades after Peak Oil. There's a lot of concrete to break up with pick axes and sledges. Poisoned earth to be carted off and then topsoil to rebuild.

For all intents an purposes, "What's lost, is lost and gone forever." (quote borrowed from Phil Coulter)

[Dave]

Great Post !

My own experience over the last forty years with suburbia and the city reflects to a certain extent your own and I think much of our generations. I was raised in the coal regions of NE Pa.. As a young person I loved to traipse all over kingdom come and was given the freedom to do so by an over brudened mother raising three other children and an abscent father busy with his career. A better combination could not be found. Because of this we moved quite bit around the region and my grandparents remained in their respective towns- the small city of Hazleton and the then coal patch town of Larksville outside of Wilkes-Barre, all which are small towns/Cities in the NE Pa. region. It was this fortuitous pattern of my early life that allowed me see close up the growth patterns of the region as contrasted to Northern N.J./NYC metroplex complex and the Phil. area over this period of time.
As a child I was exposed to the spoils of the mining era and was able to contrast this with the still wonderful rural environs of NE Pa. that are one of wonders our world. My postings this week will be to tell of those experiences and observations and the conclusions about the nature of modern city/suburban design and the future it holds for regions such as my own and its sister regions now totally enthralled by megalopolis. I am going to attempt this as someone who has an intimate knowlege of my region as an on the road sales person/social worker for 31 year, a hiker, a lover of cities and a student of Lewis Mumford whose works I have loved and revered for thirty years. I hope my fellow bloggers enjoy my efforts this week and that it serves illustrate the truths suggested by this weeks posting by the inimitable and sometimes infuriating JHK.

[netkat]

I also get the feeling that the notion of the suburban 'way of life' is equated with 'The American Dream' and not to want it and not to pursue it at the expense of all else is deemed equivalent of your being un-American or lunatic fringe.

N

[Weaseldog]

World's largest oil companies are seeing declining production.

http://www.odac-info.org/bulletin/documents/PetReviewOct2005.pdf

[Deb]

"we are now trapped in a psychology of previous investment that makes it impossible for us to imagine letting go of it."

Economists and psychologists refer to this as the "sunk cost effect." It is considered to be a big source of bias and irrationality in decision making.

http://changingminds.org/explanations/theories/sunk-cost_effect.htm

A bit of googling reveals that other scholars have applied the concept to explain the decline of great civilizations.

http://atlas-conferences.com/cgi-bin/abstract/camu-32

While we devote billions of dollars and trillions of neurons to fighting and worrying about external threats to our well-being (terrorists, viruses, etc.) the truth is that the biggest threats to our long-term survival are inside our heads. Add sunk-cost to cognitive dissonance, wishful thinking and good old Freudian denial of the list of mental gymnastics we engage in to avoid seeing that our lifestyle is about to be derailed.

[sipsey]

weaseldog,

Help me understand something: the chart that you linked to shows total production for the top 22 producers as in the neighborhood of 16M barrels/day. Is this correct? How can this be when daily consumption worldwide is, as I understand it, in the 70M barrel/day range?

The "non-neogtiable" American way of life is certainly undergoing some negotiation here in north Alabama. Our small company (40 people) has always had 3-5 people who drove 50+ miles each way to work. We're a microcosm of Huntsville, where probably hundreds drive significant distances to work in our aerospace industry.

Just last week, I heard, for the first time, people facing the ugly truth that this model will not work for them. $20.00/day in an SUV to work a $30,000.00/year job does not compute. The reactions were the typical "someone's got to do something", but as Katrina surely proved, there is no "somebody", and even if there was, there is little that they can do.

[Mike Church]

"I also believe that this stupid defense will continue and spread and become a tremendous, tragic exercise in futility for a people who could be putting their minds to a much better purpose in finding other means to carry on the larger project of civilization."

I tend to agree with you.

Circa 2004, most Americans were unaware of Peak Oil. That was bad. Now, they're becoming aware of the problem, but they don't seem to care, which is worse. I can't even count the number of times I've heard educated people argue that "the market will work something out". They seem to believe that everything will happen smoothly, when all indicators point at least to the possibility of a non-smooth, nonlinear, historically traumatic event. Why do people not care that this is about to happen?

What I also don't get is why people want to preserve the arrangement that has destroyed communities, dominated (and wrecked) American culture and social life, and degraded the environment. This excessive exurb/suburbanization is a mechanic that elites use to keep the striving middle- and upper-middle classes in place. It's a divide-and-conquer method of dominating the country.

[Weaseldog]

Sipsey, that chart only lists private corporations.

Saudi Arabian and Iranian, Kuwati, etc..., ie: OPEC oil concerns for instance, are owned by their respective governments.

I don't know how Iraqi oil would be categorized. On paper, the Iraqi Gov owns the oil, but Halliburton says in their press releases that they are paid to pump and sell it, while they keep all of the profits and are not taxed in any manner. Presumably these press statements are good for their stock value.

[donna]

Yo, Jim. Don't hold back--tell us how you =really= feel. ;-)

deb, re: sunk-cost effect--another example, from my own life, is how medical residents are so savaged by a brutally inhuman training system that many say they would have left medicine except they've put too much into it to back out. It's terribly sad and if people only realized how destroyed these workers are they'd be horrified. But I can see easily (from having lived this example) how hard it would be for many folks to bail from suburbia if they've put everything they've got into it. We'll have to see what happens.

[Barbara Domenico]

This is a great blog and I thank you for it. Of course you are rig ht on all counts. I have refused to move to the suburbs all my life & this has cost me two marriages. Unfortunately even though I live downtown I still must support a car because there is no bus service on my street and much of what I must have is beyond walking distance.

From a 72 year-old woman with painful hip-joints...

[Andy R]

weaseldog,
Are you sure we're a net importer of food?
I understand that we get a lot of produce from S. America, but I thought that in the aggregate, we still exported more grain and corn and that on average, we still produce more than we consume.

As for the "free market" causing a run-up in land prices and taxes, that market is far from free and unhindered. Tax policies have a lot to do with it. So do federal highway subsidies, and the idiotic social engineering that was school bussing.

In the 50s the Feds introduced accelerated depreciation for commercal real estate, which then resulted in the strip mall explosion we see uglying up our state highways today. This lasted until the 80s.

Now many of these ill-advised monstrostites are going belly-up or are redeveloped as "town centers" (we have a few of those here - White Marsh and Hunt Valley) Of course, no one actually lives in these "town centers" but they have quaint facades and sidewalks you can walk on after you park your car.

So I think it's subsidies, tax policies and social engineering that have driven the suburban growth machine far beyond what a free market would have done on its own.
A better alternative? Has anyone read up on a guy named Henry George? http://www.henrygeorgeschool.org/whowashg.htm
His ideas for taxing land based on its best possible use, regardless of it's current state would eliminate a lot of the speculation that contributes to urban blight and drives the suburban growth machine. The idea is that no one wants to sit on low value land if they are paying top tax dollar while they are doing it and no one should enjoy the benefits of owning low tax land with the expectation that they can convert to a higher tax use without any cost to themselves.
I still have a lot to read up on regarding George, but what I've seen so far is quite compelling and worth looking into further.

[Aladdin Sane]

The critique of suburbia has been in formulation for decades, so the accusation of opportunism on Kunstler's part will not wash. It does fit handily, though, with the current American attitude that the worst sin is hypocrisy, and that the worst public shame is the loss of one's "street cred," two utterly fatuous, specious notions that are indicative of a decadent, frivolous society. This is the easiest line of attack for PC conservatives and liberals alike: an attack on some minor discrepency in one's postion is intended to reduce the victim to a quivering state of submission to the wingnut's moral authority. When the smear fails to take, the attacker either flies into the infantile rage that is their default emotional state, or simply moves on to some other trivial line of attack. There is a bit of axe-grinding that goes on in the Peak Oil community, but this happens wherever you find people discussing problems and solutions, (that is, wherever you find PEOPLE) and to cast this aspect of the dialog in a negative light is nothing more than a stealth attempt to supress the dialog itself.

One of the most cogent critiques of post-WWII American suburbia views it as a successful social engineering project to bring a generation back into harness, the generation of young women and men traumatized and, yes, liberated by the global struggle that saw them scattered across the globe in command of new technologies holding the power over life and death. It was a in the current, debased parlance, a "life-altering experience," one that took the vast energies of the suburban project to displace and subdue, and it worked so well it continues today.

[Weaseldog]

Andy, that's a good question. I've recently read a few articles that say we have been a net importer for several years.

But doing a quick search, I wasn't able to verify that with other articles. I did find this.

"Food imports have been steadily rising for four years. There were a few months in 2004 when the United States imported more food than it exported."

http://www.ca.uky.edu/agc/news/2005/Feb/imports.htm

And that certainly doesn't back up what I wrote. I wonder now if those other articles were referring to a specific food sector?

Jack Dingler

[Beth]

Where I come from moving to the suburbs was the only way a family could afford to buy a house of their own. The further out one went, the cheaper it was--for land and for a house. We really didn't have a choice.

[curious]

Even if the U.S. as a whole is exporting more food than importing, the fact remains that self-sufficiency at a local level, state or county, has been lost for the majority of areas.

[Andy R]

curious,

This is very true - one of the contradictions of being considered a net exporter of foodstuffs is that it doesn't necessarily equal sustainability on our part - for precisely the reasons you state.

[Andy R]

Beth,

That was certainly true years ago, but I'm wondering if the opposite isn't true today - you have to move back to the inner burbs to find affordable housing because the speculation on the fringe has driven prices through the roof.

Difference being, no one wants to live in that deteriorating inner ring of suburbs, which are rapidly becoming the politicians' favored areas for the next wave of dependency housing (read "malleable Democrat voters")
Sorry to sound like a soapbox Republican, but I do believe that this tendency is partly a political move on the part of Democrats to gain advantage against the Republicanization (sp?) of the fringe areas.
Surely this is another unintended consequence of government policies that encourage suburban sprawl as a means of maintaining the growth machine.

[Camerage]

"..., and it worked so well it continues today." Certainly an arguable point but isn't the question rather whether it will work tomorrow and forward indefinitely?

[skunqesh]

Are there any positive signs that stratagems such as an Urban Growth Boundary (UGB)can help alleviate suburban sprawl without back firing and creating pressures which 'encourage' sprawl? My thinking (however flawed) is that in places such as Portland Oregon they have a UGB, but it artificially inflates land values within, thereby over time driving out lower income earners (Similarly the Bay Area has something of an artificial UGB on the Peninsula - look at the commuter situation there!). Basically I'm agreeing with Beth, that the 'burbs have acted as something of a safety net against downward mobility. Though I also see the point that this may only be temporarily mitigating an inevitable problem. I tend to agree with JHK's thoughts that suburbia has become a means and end unto itself and once the cheap gas plug is pulled the economic bumps will feel like hard pack moguls on a double black diamond run. Something like the Dustbowl era, but with giant concrete boxes instead.

[skunqesh]

Are there any positive signs that stratagems such as an Urban Growth Boundary (UGB)can help alleviate suburban sprawl without back firing and creating pressures which 'encourage' sprawl? My thinking (however flawed) is that in places such as Portland Oregon they have a UGB, but it artificially inflates land values within, thereby over time driving out lower income earners (Similarly the Bay Area has something of an artificial UGB on the Peninsula - look at the commuter situation there!). Basically I'm agreeing with Beth, that the 'burbs have acted as something of a safety net against downward mobility. Though I also see the point that this may only be temporarily mitigating an inevitable problem. I tend to agree with JHK's thoughts that suburbia has become a means and end unto itself and once the cheap gas plug is pulled the economic bumps will feel like hard pack moguls on a double black diamond run. Something like the Dustbowl era, but with giant concrete boxes instead.

[Dan Icolari]

For me, as for many others, Bush's re-election was devastating--more because of what it said about the electorate than because of any of the vast litany of crimes attributable to this administration.

Such was my disgust and despair that I canceled my NY Times subscription (keeping the Sunday edition), stopped listening to NPR, and avoided reading anything that reminded me of how far we had come from even a modestly humane politics.

Over the past several months I have come out of hiding, persuaded that the only way out is to forget, for now, about influencing national or global policy--but not to abandon the stage to the neanderthals and fundamentalists.

Instead, I've determined to (1) commit to the slow, steady work of local political organizing and (2) to the greatest extent possible, live my beliefs.

To this end (1), my wife and I, both retired, contribute a very modest amount monthly to a local progressive party that has scored enough successes in the state to have earned a ballot line. Those successes have included an increase in the state minimum wage and a campaign that forced our brain-dead Republican congressman to oppose Bush's so-called reform of Social Security.

As for (2), I live in a very large, very walkable city. I have not owned or driven a car for more than 20 years, relying on mass transit or walking to get where I want to go. Most recently, I have increased what I consider the maximum number of miles that constitutes a 'transportation walk' versus a 'fitness walk.'

Transportation absolute limit, 7 miles; ideal limit, 4-5 miles. Fitness walk limit, 10 miles.

As its name suggests, a transportation walk is one that gets you where you want to go. At first, I found it amazing that so few people discuss walking as transportation. And then I realized that the silence on this subject derives from the fact that most Americans CAN'T walk except recreationally because most Americans live in suburbs.

This coming winter will test whether I can put all my noble talk about living my values into action. Even in the heat of summer, it's easy to use a push mower and a manual hedge trimmer instead of the motorized kind. But--though I've put together a whole lightweight winter wardrobe from the local thrift store--will I really walk in the snow and rain and extreme cold? Will I really keep the thermostat at a uniform 68 degrees? Will I really put on a sweater instead of raising that thermostat just a notch or two?

I think I will. What makes me so confident? The economic incentive to conserve is huge, obviously. But using my own human fuel wherever possible instead of fossil fuel feels like an act of awareness--a refusal to indulge in free-market fantasies, as Bush's backers would like us to--and a choice that is very political indeed.

At the very least, I can act to try and minimize my conribution to the problem.

[llamajockey]

Thanks JHK for the great summary of your thoughts.

However, there is one huge cause for the growth of suburbia that has not been touched on. That is racism. I grew up in all White Midwestern suburbia. My parents God Love Them felt they were doing the best for their kids by raising them in all white suburbia. Both my parents grew up in mostly White ethnic urban neighborhoods. However post-WWII what caused so many WWII generation American's to turn their backs on their childhood homes that even my parents remember fondly and embrace sterile car dependent but supposedly "safe" suburbia?

Now I live exactly the kind of Neighborhood in Chicago my parents fled when they moved with 7 kids to Indianapolis from Cincinnati. Today, I live in Ravenswood on Chicago's northside a couple of blocks from the still troubled but improving Uptown neighborhood. My neighborhood is gentrified but there are still lots of cheap apartments for rent and there will be plenty more once the Housing Bubble pops. My neighbors are of every income level and race and sexual identity.

JHK, somehow you have to factor in the nearly hysterical fear so many whites felt over Black and Brown, gay and "other" Americans in your history of the rise of suburbia. Surely the kitschy scenes in "End of Suburbia" pitching the virtues of 1950's suburbia can now be seen only as racist in addition to self-indulgent and wasteful. How does one explain the nearly irrational fear so many of our parents have for others when they themselves were never the victims of urban crime?

[Dave]

One of the factors causing the suburban explosion of the last 50 years was the rise in incomes attendant to the growth culture of economics ans the desire to flee the truly atrocious factory/mining towns that oftentimes existed in the hinterlands of many ciies. Yes they were livable and even desirable at centain points but around you were the mine pits and culm banks, the ugly factories, the noise, the bar rooms with their constant tumult, the crooked politics, the cramped quarters, the lousy sanitation, the coal smoke and the ashes, the depserate poor who seem to grow always more numerous, the crime, the prostitutes, the lack of cultural amenities and the plain boredom of small town or small city living. Did'nt have to be this way but Coketown was a pretty ugly place reflecting the reality of capitalist social relations and the values of accumulation. Romanticizing the past gives lie to the real problems of the older cities and their failures.

[Peter]

Everytime I have to drive through some small c.1950s town whose main drag consists of nothing but strip malls, drive through gut-bomb vendors, seedy sports bars, and Wal-mart, I sink into a depression.

[Scorpio]

Migration to cities before suburbia becomes untenable probably will not happen. Moreover, oil-use intensive agriculture and shipping monoculture oods from all over is going to crash, as well.

Hard times are coming.