Formerly Normal

November 19, 2007
     Venturing into the rural outlands of the upstate New York counties these days, you see new houses everywhere in what was, until about the 1970s, mostly farm country. Almost all of them are stand-alone houses; there are very few multiple-unit subdivisions up here, a la the vast beige housing monocultures found in the sunbelt. But they seem no less tragic to me.

      These new houses all follow the "normal" programming of their time -- a time that is stealthily ending. The program is as follows: Each house occupies an out-parcel of an acre or so of what used to be a farm or a woodlot. The house is set in the middle of the plot, surrounded by an apron of decorative foundation shrubs and grass lawn. The scheme derives from the English idea of "a manor in a park." You can tell, because if trees remain (or get planted) on the lawn, they are always deployed arbitrarily, never in formal rows, as the French would do it. The idea is that every homeowner is the "lord of the manor."

     Of course, a major feature of this is the asphalt pad-and-driveway where the household stores (and not incidentally displays) its collection of cars, one for each adult family member plus "training" models for the adolescent offspring. This part of the package is indispensable, the umbilicus that connects the household to all the necessities of life, from paychecks to Slim Fast bars. Its continuation is assumed. In fact, the value of the house depends on that assumption.

     The appeal of this program is obvious in the consumer-democracy of recent times. The stupendous aggregate wealth ginned up at the climax of the cheap energy fiesta made everyone an aristocrat. As Tom Wolfe has pointed out, the average American roofer or insurance adjuster of these times has enjoyed a more comfortable life than Louis XIV. They certainly bathe more regularly, in sumptuous vinyl tubs, with motor-drive water jets, and possess refrigerated larders of delicacies from thousands of miles away (not to mention access to colonoscopies and periodontics).

     This luxurious life is a fragile thing, though. The fragility is actually expressed in the houses themselves, which are uniformly constructed from materials that would not seem to have a glorious destiny: wood-chips, glue, and vinyl. Anyone who visits the Palatine Hill in Rome must be impressed by the way stone blocks and masonry walls melt away over time. Imagine what would happen to a box made of chip-board over fir studs after a few decades of poor maintenance. You can even state categorically that the vinyl cladding was not designed to be maintained, only replaced. And in as much as vinyl siding is made from petroleum byproducts, one can easily foresee future replacement problems.

     There are also the things that you can't see: the furnaces and the mortgages. The expectation that it will be possible to get affordable heating oil or propane gas a decade or so into the future must be considered, shall we say, a crap shoot at best -- and in the climate of upstate New York, that can't be reassuring. As for the mortgages, we already know what is happening to them -- like the "transformer" entities of the movies, they are morphing into monsters that destroy everything in their path.

     I guess what really gets me about these houses popping up in the former cornfields and meadows is that the owners have absolutely no idea what a problem they are creating for themselves and their families (and their society), especially now as we move into a critical period of post-peak-oil instability. It's both poignant and pathetic, and a little disgusting. Their expectations are plain to see: that the life of luxury and incessant mobility is so assured that they can invest everything, even their anticipated future earnings, to enjoy all that the program had to offer. But they have tragically missed the fact that the program has changed.

     Of course, I am aware that my ability to venture easily into the outlands of Washington County, New York, is not something that I can take for granted much longer. A year or so from now, I may have to plan ahead, even make sacrifices, to travel so distantly from where I live. In the meantime, I wonder with the keenest curiosity what is going through the minds of the people who dwell out there. Surely they've noticed that gasoline is $3.25. One can easily imagine the granite countertop in the kitchen where the bills are piling up, the frightening invoices from Master Card and Discovery, along with dunning letters from the company that "services" the mortgage. One can imagine the feelings of despondency creeping up the veins of the household lord and his lady as they contemplate the distress sale of their motorboat, jet skis, snowmobiles, and RV -- and the futility even of trying.

     I think we are entering a time when what has seemed utterly normal to us will suddenly appear alien and threatening. If there was ever a recipe for an extreme social response, this will be it. As the poet said, the center cannot hold.

   

Comments

[bud4wiser]

"If there was ever a recipe for an extreme social response, this will be it" - yeah, there's never been anything so precious as the right of Amurikins to drive - after all it's "non-negotiable."

How polarized can America get? It's class warfare all over again, this time, all the "players" with the paper money and power will tell everyone else to suck-it-up and walk - and they'll even tax the poor to pay for new roads, because "by-the-gallon" road taxes won't be able to fund road ways when the poor can' buy gas anymore.

It's the National Guard and Blackwater et al, against the former auto workers, the former laborers etc - that finally figure out that the game is over.

Science fiction - hmmmm, maybe not.

[bruiserbob]

Recently the house next door to me was bought by a developer to "flip", as they so fondly call it. He slapped some cheap vinyl siding on it (a vintage 1936 house by the way), spray painted it, and sold it for a frightening amount of money. Two weeks after the owners moved in, the vinyl starting falling off the walls. I wandered over with my handyman toolbelt to help him figure out how to fix it. What i saw was shocking. This stuff makes chipboard look like two foot thick granite blocks. I've never seen such a crappy product and installation in my life. I guess this siding is designed to only last long enough to make it to the next flipping.

[StephenB]

Another tragic concern is the farmland ruined by these houses, in so much as what was under the driveway, house, and the immediate surroundings buried under builders' fill.

Of course, the occupants don't have a clue as to what to do with honest to Goodness farmland or woodlot to begin with.

Either way, it's good farmland ruined or tied up by know-nothings that will be needed quite soon.

[RJG]

The psychology of previous investment indeed.. it's apparently a monster of awesome magnitude..

Guest contributor Kathy McMahon on Carolyn Baker's site presents a compelling analysis of the situation defined as "Panglossian Disorder"..
http://carolynbaker.net/site/content/view/216/

There's a peak oil film on Youtube in which the filmmakers interview several folks at the pump filling up during a recent 3 bucks a gallon period.. two macho young lads are filling up their jet skis strapped in the bed of the truck etc.. the one dude says with disgust, "60 bucks! Just to fill up this thing! But what can we do?"..

You could ah, NOT fill it up?..

Never mind..

[JLee]

As for class warfare coming, well we have enough guns but do we have enough guts? Just watch and see how big the bonuses are on Wall Street. Do you imgaine just because there has been a minor meltdown that the bonuses will be zero? And who is it that should be in the sights of the .300?

[Andy in San Diego]

Here's an uplifting story about what happens when lots of houses go into foreclosure.

http://money.cnn.com/2007/11/16/real_estate/suprime_and_crime/index.htm?cnn=yes

or

http://tinyurl.com/24yv7o

[inquisitivemind22]

Hello,

I feel that JHK's post this week is very timely, as the financial markets seem to recognize that the housing debacle is not going to bottom anytime soon. To a certain extent, I think the problem is that people think a house is an asset that will only increase in value as they pay for it, when really, a house is a consumer product like anything else. (Like a car.) Personally, I fear buying a home. After I heard about what happened to the homeowners in New Orleans after Katrina, I found the potential risk due to global warming of owning a home to far outweigh any potential reward of "equity".
Given the trends in the insurance industry, who can afford the risk?

[umass82]

Thank goodness and my s.o.'s common sense I live in an old pre war subdivision close to what is left of the center city. I can walk to most of the places I need to get to, however that is only if I walk toward the city center, to go the other way, to the shops built more recently, just as close but on the other side of the xpress way is extremely dangerous, the drivers are so unused to seeing a pedestrian that they do not stop.
Also it is hard to walk under the highway either way rarely do you see people walking to the shops etc, some out exercising but when it comes to going to the supermarket or pharmacy the car rules.

My house is over 70 years old with some renovation built in 1990, I have some maintenance problems it is with the newer part never with the older part.

I recently saw a house that is being flipped, they were adding an upper level addition, and of course on this old stone house they built with particle board
which was clad with brick face.
now the flippers could have spent a few extra bucks and put in ply wood but I suppose although this would result in a structure that would last much longer would result in their profit to be less extreme.

[dale]

Jim,
My initial introduction and interest in your books was associated with your critique of American zoning laws, designed as they were to accomodate the car, and I found those criticisms spot on.

Your essays on housing however, tend more to demonstrate your windshield view of the issue. Yes, the "English Manor" homes you mention make no sense economically or energetically, in terms of their encouragement of driving and excessive size. But you decline to mention that one bright spot in our laws, which has changed in the last 50 years, and continues to outpace the rest of our culture in making adjustments to a changing energy picture. That bright spot is building codes.

I have been involved in building hundreds of thousands of square feet of both retail and residential building space over the last 30 years. During that time the quality of the construction and it's energy efficiency have increased at least 100 percent.

As an example, the last home I built was "energy star", now being considered by state officials to be adopted as code required. The buyer of this related to me that he set the thermostat on 67 degrees and the heater had only come on twice by the end of October.

When I first moved to this area I rented a home built in 1960. I subsequently built a home of the same square footage a couple of years later. The current home uses roughly half the energy annually for heating and cooling that the 1960 house did.

Lastly, your criticism of building materials lacks a complete understanding. Many of the composite materials are far more stable than there "pure wood" predecessors, and as such will help keep the home straight and tight for many years longer. Structurally, these homes are almost always superior to homes built before the 1980's and will last far longer.

[PeakOilBoy]

I watched the Grapes of Wrath last night with my "Didn't pay attention in history class" wife.

She was shocked that not only was it historically representative of the hard times people went through.

Not only that, but head in the sand that "this time it will be different".

You bet it will be, baby.

I don't see people patiently waiting in line for jobs while their Nintendo playing kids are starving.

Where are people going when they are getting kicked out of their homes?

It certainly isn't California to pick fruit.

[FARfetched]

Bud4, the class warfare started decades ago. The problem is, the poor & middle class stopped fighting back around 1980.

Dale, I think you are likely correct — as long as you're using good quality materials and construction practices, a modern house can be built "better." The problem is, the vast majority of houses are built with the cheapest materials by the cheapest (often illegal immigrant) labor. Do you consider vinyl to be a good construction material? How well does it hold up to long-term solar exposure?

Maintaining FAR Manor is a b**ch, but I press on for two reasons: 1) if the housing market miraculously recovers, I might be able to sell the effing thing & move back into the paid-for double wide; 2) if I'm stuck there, the effing thing is less likely to fall down around my ears. On a brighter note, we've been given a fireplace insert… we just need some muscle to move it from point A to FAR Manor, then hire someone to install it properly. We've heated the downstairs, in mild Planet Georgia winters, a couple of times when we forgot to top up the propane tank; we have plenty of deadfall to keep a wood stove going… now if I can convince The Boy to go cut it up & stack it, we'll be set.

JHK, perhaps as fuel shortages drive (ahem) people off the highways, bicycling tours will become more common, and the walking tour (ala Thoreau) may even make a comeback. Not like we'll all have jobs to go to, right?

[FARfetched]

"We've heated the downstairs" *with the glass-door'ed fireplace* "in mild Planet Georgia winters." Might be good to be a little more specific there, huh?

[Laura Louzader]

A couple of posts back, one commenter dissented with me on the desireability of high-density living.

I've noticed, among commenters on this blog, an overwhelming bias towards low-density living and "country" life, which is what caused this country's large, unsolvable problems to begin with.

Face it, most people cannot make it as subsistance farmers, even if we did have enough land for most of our 300 million people to live the 19th century subsistance-farmer lifestyle.

But we don't have enough land, not nearly, especially if we have to revert to low-tech methods of farming that produce lower yields. Even if we managed to reclaim every last acre of formerly good farmland since given to a suburban home, we will still be many hundreds of thousands of acres short of what we would need to put most of our families on farms.

So we will HAVE to go high density. I like the New Urbanist ideal of 4-7 stories with commercial on the ground floor. Many inner-ring "railroad" suburbs here are rezoning to encourage high density mixed use development around the central town core that includes, usually, all the commercial and the commuter rail stops.

The big high rises (20 stories or more) that fill Chicago and other cities are, I'll admit, liabilities because buildings this high take not only elevators, but water pumps and other equipment to get water to upper floors, and of course it is a disaster if you are without elevators for a few days. But these buildings still should be preserved and made as energy efficient as possible, preferably with alternative-energy backup systems to keep the elevators running if nothing else, in the event of spot shortages and power disruptions. This is a better solution than spreading our huge population allover the land at suburban or rural densities, which will make utilities and transportation completely impossible in an age of energy shortages. Someone on this blog said he preferred densities of 30 persons per mile, but trying to accomodate our huge population at that kind of density is what caused our problems to begin with.

The big job will be pursuading our population that this is necessary, and getting people to accept the inevitable hits they will take on homes in places that will be unliveable once we start to have real problems with energy. The biggest obstacle to the shift to a different mode of life en masse is that we have so much money and resources sunk into the suburban infrastructure we have that people won't have much money or resources to rebuild their lives on a different template.

This is too awful a reality to digest, really, and that's why most people out here continue to add to a bad trade rather than cut their losses, and so are digging themselves in deeper, instead of taking steps to downscale their lives. Two business associates of mine, both recent Chinese immigrants who have become very successful, just bought large homes in the distant burbs of Chicago- a large mistake that could undo them financially. These people don't want to hear that the lifestyle they've spent their lives working 14 hours a day to buy has been pulled off the table.

Therefore, I really hope that CFN posters at least will be able to make the necessary shift, and help build and maintain good, dense towns and cities where people can get the basics of life and have some access to amenity and jobs. These places are the only places where people will have a chance at jobs and amenity, because the farms won't come close to being able to absorb them all.

[XER]

"During that time the quality of the construction and it's energy efficiency have increased at least 100 percent."

Prove it.

[Movenonup]

XER,

Glad to see you're back! Missed you.

MOU

[thanneer]

Hi JHK,

Good post as usual this week. I believe by now many people will begin to sense things are going wrong around them. I would say your site has done its' part in creating the awareness. Don't you think it's time we talk more about solutions? Of all your posts, the ones I enjoyed most are those talked about practical solutions.

I'll start with one. So far, on record we do have one country that survived Peak Oil: Cuba. Below is a link to articles on how they managed to do it. http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLJ,GGLJ:2006-35,GGLJ:en&q=cuba+permaculture
For example, "Havana produces up to 50% of its food requirements from within the city limits, all of it organic and produced by people in their homes, gardens and in municipal spaces". From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture#Cuba and http://globalpublicmedia.com/articles/657.

Look forward to your next post.

[DerekK]

Filming a stretch of road in NJ yesterday, I saw one house for sale every 153 feet:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=CY0ulA_jQwg (56 seconds)

Mike Morgan refers to this in his Real Estate and Housing Industry Outlook: The disparity between the official story/myth and (b) actual observations.

It's going to take a lot of new rims, trips to the car wash, and flag stickers to save this already-lost neighbourhood and the millions like it. Maybe we can take up a collection.

"Formerly Normal" is the densest, most cogent, and most damning tract yet.

[dale]

XER,
You can look up "energy star" yourself online and find out how superior they are energetically to coventional current construction. Energy Star utilizes R-19 wall insulation with Smart Framing techniques to minimize wood to insulated wall ratios, and dualglazed windows with high E values. That is generally estimated at about a 30% average energy savings over conventional code. Now, project that back to 1960 where single glazed glass and R-11 (if any) insulation was used. and you can probably imagine how significant those differences would be. Combine that with heating and cooling systems which are vastly more efficient then earlier versions. This will translate easily into being half the cost of cooling and heating over 1960. I was actually being conservation in that estimate. The house I'm currently in has about 10% more floor space than the 1960 model I used by comparison, with higher ceilings. So the volume is probably 25% greater than it's comparison model which had twice as high energy usage. I can't give you precise numbers because it does depend on your local codes and what climate zone you may be in.

FAR,
I have only used vinyl siding on low income housing. I don't like it although the later versions have far better UV protection and last longer. Siding these days usually has little to do with structural value, as the plywood substrate usually provides the structure and the siding is there to shed water and for appearance sake. Some of the new products, like "Hardiplank" are much better than wood. Hardiplank being a cement impregnated mesh which is impervious to water and sun damage. That or stucco is more typically used in the custom home market. I will agree that quality of workmanship has often suffered with the use of untrained immigrant labor in the last few years.

[RJG]

re: Don't you think it's time we talk more about solutions?

Democracy sold out to capitalism, capitalism sold out to corporatism..

Most Americans, mired down in a perpetual daddy fantasy (“They will think of something.”) go vote once every 2 or 4 years, put an “I voted” sticker on their sweater, feel good about themselves, and promptly go back to sleep mindlessly consuming, when that vote (the political capitalist machine now bought and paid for by global corporations etc.) is of increasingly little or no real use etc., because all capitalism understands is money (no sense looking to Cuba just yet, at least not for any proactive solutions in this psychotic capitalist cancerous culture).. because all capitalism understands.. is money..

So, go vote next November? Sure.. we gotta do something to try and begin to undo the butchering of the American landscape wrought by the current occupant and his daddy’s cronies..

But I’ve come to understand now (and this is no real great original insight or anything I admit) that every time I spend a single dollar, I’m casting a much greater and more important, substantial and more powerful vote. Every monetary transaction I make, is a vote. This realization (if we could all suddenly have it) could change the fucking world overnight..

[Mark]

The next step for folks who own such homes will be to go out into the Xmas shopping frenzy to greet Jesus Christ with oodles of crap from Wal Mart. Things that will later end up in the two car garage such that the garage is no longer a garage but a storage of plastic items bought for an unknown reason years ago. Jeebus! Save us from Christmas fer Chrisakes!

[kuros]

the most recent hilarious ad i saw on tv was an ad for soup that was "made with farm grown vegetables"
ahhh excuse me is there another type of grown vegetable? one in a lab, or in warehouses??

[kuros]

also check this out from sarasota florida
Glitter under the gavel
You know the market's bad when a Sotheby's auction can't sell a mansion for half price.
http://www.sptimes.com/2007/11/17/Business/Glitter_under_the_gav.shtml

[astutest]

If we could somehow omit Xmas, Canuckistan could meet its Kyoto obligations. Of course, our bootlicking neocon prime minister sees Kyoto as "..a plan to cripple the oil and gas industry.."

Strangely, he's correct.

Save the planet! Kill santa! Omit the big box stores from your life. We have the power as consumers to do so. Wouldn't it be nice?

[cybernaught]

"I wonder with the keenest curiosity what is going through the minds of the people who dwell out there."

The IPCC released their latest damning report and I picked up all major dailies I could lay my hands on the following day. Not one had the story on the front page. And that is climate change. Energy depletion doesn't make the news hardly at all.

What is going through the minds of North Americans? The trivial pursuits if movie stars and petty criminals and little else.

[cybernaught]

"I wonder with the keenest curiosity what is going through the minds of the people who dwell out there."

The IPCC released their latest damning report and I picked up all major dailies I could lay my hands on the following day. Not one had the story on the front page. And that is climate change. Energy depletion doesn't make the news hardly at all.

What is going through the minds of North Americans? The trivial pursuits of movie stars and petty criminals and little else.