Road Trip

    "We will not apologize for our way of life...."

     This unfortunate phrase from President Obama's otherwise sturdy inaugural address, echoed through my mind last week as I cruised the suburban outlands of Montgomery, Alabama. All the usual commercial furnishings of consumerist America hugged the flattish ochre and dusty-green landscape of played-out cotton fields where thirty feet of topsoil has washed away in the two hundred years since the mainly English settlers shoved out the native Alabamu, Coosa, and Tallapoosa. Along the low horizon, mall followed strip mall followed "lifestyle center," book-ending the "one house" failed subdivisions of otherwise empty unsold lots in a cavalcade of floundering enterprise. It seemed at times as if the terrain was a kind of sea-like expanse, and all the retail boxes ghost ships drifting to oblivion.
     They say that the banks have stopped calling in their loans on the commercial real estate, even though the owners of the malls and strip malls have arrived firmly in default. Calling in the loans would only pin another horrifying liability on the banks' balance sheets. So all parties join in a game of "pretend," that nothing has really happened to the fundamental equations of business life. Something similar goes on at the next level down, where the tenants of the malls and strip malls sink deeper into rent arrears every month, and the eviction process is simply postponed, while the stores themselves put off paying their vendors and suppliers – as the whole system, the whole way of life, enters upon a circle-jerk of mutual denial in a last desperate effort to forestall the mandates of reality .
     How long will these games go on? This is the primary question that haunts the republic as we wait for new TARPS, and "bad banks," economic stimulus packages, infrastructure renewal roll-outs, and other policy life-lines thrown out in guarded hopefulness to haul America out of a ditch.
      The center of Montgomery was instructive, too. Not unlike any other city in the USA (pop. about 200,000), the former main artery of downtown commerce – Dexter Avenue, rolling out like a red carpet below the state capitol hill, where Martin Luther King's early career kicked off in a modest red brick church, and where Rosa Parks famously refused to move to the back of her bus – this "main street" presented a sad sequence of  empty shopfronts interrupted here and there by rather creepy amateur murals depicting the cruelties of slavery, as if a remonstrance to the politicos up the hill. Most of the buildings lining the avenue still stood burdened by the clownish facade re-doos and ghastly claddings of the 1950s, which had replaced the ordered classical-vernacular decorum of the original 19th century frontages. Once the malls had landed in the old cotton fields, and MLK moved on to Atlanta, Dexter Avenue was just left to rot in the memory trunk.
        Here and there around the rest of the downtown, other weird experiments in American post-war anti-urbanism presented themselves, most notably a "building" designed to look like a small-scaled Death Star, all black reflective glass, canted concrete and steel walls – which turned out to belong to Morris Dees' renowned Southern Poverty Law Center -- deployed directly across the street from the modest white clapboard-with-green-shutters house once occupied by Jefferson Davis after Richmond fell and the Confederate leadership skeedaddled further south. There were a few recently-built government towers that looked like Nascar trophies. But the rest of the downtown – the parts not dedicated to surface parking – was the ubiquitous array of muffler shops, or restaurants and churches that looked like muffler shops.
     With the city center thus nearly dead, and the asteroid belt of malls and strips on their knees financially, this emblematic sunbelt metro area finds itself in a pickle. Cotton being well-past decline, and having wrecked the soil, the "new" economy of recent decades dedicated itself to building car-dependent air-conditioned suburban sprawl – the perceived perfect antidote to a previous economic order based on serfdom, hook-worm, and inescapable heat. That now-not-so-new economy of sprawl, in turn, has come to a screeching halt, as a cruel destiny threw sand in the mechanisms of reliably cheap oil and revolving credit, and the gears seized up. A mood of ominous watching and waiting pervaded the city, but many of the movers-and-shakers had pinned their hopes on the chance that Mr. Obama's stimulus bill would allow them to commence building a new freeway to the ocean on the Florida panhandle.
     My journey continued on the Jesus-haunted blue highways, to that selfsame place, Walton County, Florida, where some of the most famous experiments in the New Urbanism were conducted beginning in the 1980s with the new town of Seaside. I had been there many times over the years, and I was called down to get a prize in the service of the movement, but it was a little disconcerting to see how the build-out had progressed.
     The Seaside experiment began very modestly as the idea for a bohemian village of architects and artists in what was then an almost empty quarter of piney woods owned by the St Joe timber company. Seaside was designed so beautifully that it attracted the attention of every thoracic surgeon and corporate lawyer between Nashville and New Orleans, and pretty soon Seaside became the Riviera of the sunbelt's economic elite – and came in for gales of criticism for becoming that. The newer houses and commercial structures grew ever grander, as a Boomer generation status competition ramped up into the new millennium. Several more, ever-grander New Urbanist towns sprouted along the adjacent beaches, some of the most recent composed of immense mansions embarrassing in their opulence. The outcome was a little scary, especially now that the fortunes behind many of these mansions may be threatened by the multiplying fiascos of finance and economy overspreading the nation like a vicious plague.
     The New Urbanists had not set out to build monuments to Yuppie-Boomer consumerism, but a peculiar destiny shoved them into that role for a while – even while they toiled elsewhere around the nation to reform town planning laws and generally provide an antidote to the fatal cultural cancer of sprawl, that is, of a settlement pattern guaranteed to comprehensively bankrupt our society. Anyway, the collapse of the housing bubble has affected the New Urbanists' business, too, and this may turn out to be a very good thing because they can put aside the distractions of building very grand places to sop up ill-gotten wealth and focus on the issues that Mr. Obama's people should have been paying attention to all along, namely, how are we going to reform the way we live in this country and what will be the physical manifestation of how we live in the decades to come.
     The New Urbanists have preached for years that conventional suburbia would fail America in the long run, and that we'd have to prepare for this failure by restoring traditional modes of occupying the landscape. So far, the Obama team has not been willing to identify the suburban system as the heart of our economic problem. They can't recognize it for what it truly is: a living arrangement with no future – and an economic, ecological, and spiritual disaster. It is, of course, the primary reason why we find ourselves in the deadly predicament of importing over two-thirds of the oil we use every day.
       But then, more than half the population lives the suburban way of life, with its deadly mortgage traps, its mandatory motoring, and its civic disengagements. Nobody in power dares tell the truth: that we can't live this way anymore.
     But there are scores of places like Montgomery, Alabama, and thousands of traditional main street small towns that are sitting out there waiting to be re-activated. We need to do this much more than we need to build new freeways to the beach. Suburbia is not going to be abandoned overnight (even if it fails logistically and economically !) but we have got to arrive at a consensus about rehabilitating our forsaken small cities and small towns. The New Urbanists have gathered, organized, and codified all the principle and methodology needed to carry out this campaign. This should be their moment. Mr. Obama and his team should get with the program.
____________________________________
My 2008 novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available in paperback  at all booksellers. 

Comments

[Frank Gifford]

Thanks for the post, Jim. As I was reading the observation about boomer competition for grandiosity, I was reminded of an epiphany I received now some twenty years ago. "If you run in the rat race, the rats will win." That was the beginning of a long and often difficult journey to http://entropypawsed.org I invite everyone who fancies themself to be something other than a rat to find a way to drop out to the rat race, and engage in nature linked low energy living. Do it for the sake of the children of future generations. Thanks, Frank. Our blog is http://entropypawsed.blogspot.com

[Jynx]

Yes, this is a critical moment. Do we revitalize our urban landscapes bymaking them livable without an automobile and huge energy inputs? Or do we piss away our last chance at some sort of decent future by attempting to prop up Cartopia with its ghastly suburban landscape? Myself, I'm not hopeful.

[ragtag5]

Kunstler's weekly slamming of the south is getting tiresome. The cities of Charleston and Savannah practically invented the concepts of historical preservation. As for the "New Urbanists" of Seaside and their ilk, moronic architects have sited poorly designed communities for very wealthy part-time residents on flat barrier islands that are sure to be decimated by hurricanes. There is no "community" in these places - just transient rich folk from really shitty places like Kunstler's upstate New York. Give it a rest Jim.

[asoka]

Obama said: "We will not apologize for our way of life...."

Do we need apology and remonstrance at this point in our history? What good would an apology be?

We need billions to create an infrastructure that might allow us to be more independent of oil... and that is where Obama is focused.

[squander n. blunderbush]

I live in a village on Long Island, one of the "Main Streets" that the New Urbanists have sought to re-create. We are lucky to have a good connection to NYC via rail...though many of us still commute by car. I have great hopes that our location (a former deep-water port now needing dredging) will keep us from harm. The other possibility is our house in Maine, near where another deep-water port (Eastport) is quite viable.

I read "The Long Emergency"..also the newer book, and have been following your ideas for the last year. Thanks so much for making the esoteric communicable...for allowing the small-holders to understand what's in store.

I look forward to Mondays, and also have a deep-seated anxiety about what currently awaits us economically.

[Kris]

Seaside's original plan sounded nifty. Bohemian atmosphere...love it. Too bad it got sucked into the status game.

We have a few new urbanism towns around here. I always felt they were rather creepy...like a movie set or Disney's Main Street. They always boast working and shopping close to home. The problem is that the shops are too expensive and only a handful of people work very close in. So, mostly everyone commutes to work and on the way home stops at Wal-Mart.

One community has had a couple of corner markets go out of business because the rent was too high for the amount of business they were doing.

I'm wondering if after the big boxes get "shuttered" (media overplay on this word, btw)...if small businesses will rise again. Maybe not our current small businesses...they will probably die soon.

If we can survive the short-term upheaval, maybe the future holds opportunities. This could be the time to think about what you are good at and what you could have valuable to offer for sale or barter.

Doom is at hand. Wait it out and be thinking about small-scale opportunities after this all shakes out.

Kris7
Working hard at www.sccworlds.com

[Laura Louzader]

Jim, this is your very finest post of the past few weeks, and there's nothing to add to it...

Except to say that the reforms we need in the way we plan our cities and towns and arrange our transportation, will have to take place at the local level as much as the federal, and that, further, it isn't going to happen at the federal level because of the sheer weight of previous investment in our highway system, and the fact that most people in this country not only live suburban lifestyles, but have a lot invested in them emotionally.

The only way we can make changes at the federal level is to completely defund transportation, because as long as we allocate tax money to it, it will go for more $130 million/mile highways, and as long as the government helps housing in any way, the help will go to sprawl building in the exurbs.

If we completely defund transport, and let the user pay, people will damn well have to move close to rail lines and public transit, and our battered, hollowed-out heartland cities like Montgomery, Cleveland, St. Louis, Detroit, and Memphis will HAVE to rebuild their cores. Watch how fast cities that seem "too far gone" recover their downtowns and profitable transit companies and railroads, as people are no longer able to afford cars or air transit, in the absence of federal support for highway maintenance and air travel infrastructure. Or, for that matter, FHA and GNMA guaranteed loans for houses in the Inland Empire or the far exurbs of Chicago, St. Louis, or Atlanta.

If we want to help this process along, we need to kill the $800 billion stimulus bill. God knows there are plenty of other, still more compelling reasons to kill it, such as that if we continue to add to the public debt a trillion dollars more a pop, we will end up like Weimer Germany or Argentina.... or like someplace like the Ivory Coast.

[Kris]

Asoka:

That's what I was thinking about Obama's comment about not apologizing. I think he was trying to communicate to everyone and start getting people on the same page. If he would have started right in with..."We need to change our lives, immediately!" he would have alienated those who haven't been enlightened yet.

Right after his "no apology" comment, I'm pretty sure he made a plea for energy independence.

I want to believe he is busy working on the peak oil problem.

Kris7
Working hard at http://www.sccworlds.com

[Chris]

Hi Jim,

A good post. What a shame about Seaside.

One small factual correction: that "modest white clapboard-with-green-shutters house once occupied by Jefferson Davis" was actually the first Confederate "White House." After the first wave of secession in the winter of 1861, Montgomery became the first capital of the Confederacy. The capital was moved to Richmond later that year after Virginia seceded in order for the government to be closer to the main theatre of war in Northern Virginia.

[judetennessee]

We are so screwed. Obama's cabinet is filled with tax evaders, former rivals and also rans. Not an original idea will come from that bunch. It is big business as usual. Already the Big O has deep- sixed contraception funding and legal aid for the poor in a misguided effort to get the sorry loser, totally pout of touch Republicans to agree to his ill conceived and half baked economic stimulus package. Meanwhile Rome burns. It would be an amazingly wonderful thing if Obama would declare that he is not going to go for that second term and use his remaining first term to implement some of the ideas and ideals that he spread around so liberally during the campaign. Don't get me started as I voted 4 him OK!! If you remember back to JHK's Long Emergency he warns of demagogues rising up as things get worse. I am afraid we already have it in the form of Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin. They may well be the 2012 Republican pres and vp nominees. Sorry I have lived long enough to see what a terrifying inhumane place our society is fast becoming and to ponder what we have done to this beautiful planet. Looks like End Times to me.

[envirosponsible]

Resuscitating main street probably isn't on Obama's radar.

FEMA camps and a main corridor from Mexico to Canada though...

[maxafrogamoose]

"Thanks so much for making the esoteric communicable.." squander n. blunderbush

Yes, yes, i second that. Been enjoying the Clusterfuck nation from my high horse for quite a while. I was deeply fortunate to extract myself from a pleasent little community near Asspen Colorado where I'd been for four years; carbondale, and ride my bicycle across country from seattle to brooklyn where i now live. Sept 7 - Dec 12 '08. Thanks to a generous boss out there I have an Iphone and every monday while on tour I read this blog, like I said, from my high horse. I'm young and single and childless and I live a predominantley bike-centric car free life. I didn't pay for lodging once on tour and I slept in my bivy sack all but about once per state, cooking and looking at the stairs; records on stomparillaz.blogspot. Living simply in this day and age, is more pleasurable than people can fathom, and I hope to ride around the world before it's too late. Upon arrival in Brooklyn my good karma carried me into a brand new bike shop where i was hired and we work only with used bikes. To me now, professional positive service of simple sustainable technologies is the best show in town. I think we do need to apologize and be thankful for our way of life and be humble going forward. We shall see if the apocalypse arrives before we do that. If anyone in Brooklyn wants to check us out, we're also at brooklynbikeandboard.com 560 vanderbilt.

Thanks Jim..

Max

[st.jim]

yeah, seaside, that's what we used to call jim's place back in the days. god do i ever miss them, the days, that is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53_-OvLQodM&feature=related

[Quin]

>>The New Urbanists have gathered, organized, and
>>codified all the principle and methodology needed
>>to carry out this campaign. This should be their
>>moment. Mr. Obama and his team should get with
>>the program.

Is there one iota of evidence that Obama and his team are even *aware* of the program?

[LaughingAsRomeWasBurningDown]

JHK, Excellent column this week. Down by the Seaside? People turned away? So far way...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-EIQiFUrlk

[Pat]

Heh - last year Kuntsler visited my little burgh of Austin Texas and proceeded to decry in-toto the revitalization of our "main-street" downtown sector. Apparently nowehere is Kinstler's favorite place. Just what is this clown's thesis anyway - to yell at the kids on his little tract of virgin Earth out in front of his exquisitely-crafted Gustav Stickler home?

[bud4wiser]

JK, thanks for the post card from the South. Empty "Big Box" buildings are indeed making an appearance on many community and regional news radars.

Holy Cow! You think? Could it be that some one might notice that the "TIF" money never seems to fix those schools or clean up the "old" strip malls and shopping centers?

My new "pet peeve" for this month is the "amazing attack" of the killer electric-grid trees. Oh sure, its 2009, but how the heck were electric utilities supposed to know that these "killer trees" would attack their lines in stormy weather? Please, god-damn-it, bail these useless bastards out - we've got to trim those "killer trees" now - we can't put this "tree problem" on to the backs of fat little diabetic comatose childrenof our future.

Another pet project might have something to do with just figuring out how to tear-down, clean up, and sod over the thousands and thousands of square blocks of ugly shit and building debris that seem to pervade the poorer areas of roughly 700 or 800 major urban cities.

After all, JK - the whole reason suburbs exist was to escape the rotten garbage produced from the previous tenants.

If we can't create "marketable" space, green or otherwise in our existing urban areas, and retrofit the infrastructure that supports it - you can give up on getting anyone to "make other arrangments."

And you of all people - knows exactly how the "markets" work in America - right Jim?

[LaughingAsRomeWasBurningDown]

> Just what is this clown's thesis

Sustainability?

[ragtag5]

The Gulf Coast between Pensacola and Panama City used to be a nice place to visit until the "New Urbanist" architects built their plastic imitations of the "Olde South" on the barrier islands to sell to monied northerners. For generations upon generations people had the good sense not to build there, except maybe a shack, because of the hurricanes and flooding. The New Urbanists have screwed up the area for everyone.

[David Mathews]

I'm pretty certain that the global economy will collapse, and with it all the dreams of building an entirely different civilization to replace this one which is presently dying right in front of our eyes.

Wasn't the Super Bowl spectacular? That's entertainment.

I'm observing the death of the consumer culture right now and it is a beautiful thing. May all of these retail stores go the way of the dinosaur. May all of their parking lots erode into dust and become forests again. May the roads empty and may the wallets empty and may the war machine and its parasites fade away.

The oil industry is suffering, too. Hopefully the collapse of the global economy deprive these people of their financing so that the industry dies like a fire deprived of oxygen.

This world is passing away and hopefully nothing will replace it. The Earth needs new management. Nature must take over from humankind because of humankind's incompetence, negligence, recklessness, self-destructiveness, and suicidal stupidity.

The end of civilization is a blessing. Don't mourn for the death of something which was so intent upon killing itself and its host planet.

http://www.flickr.com/dmathew1

[Schizoid]

Has the current economic destruction of the entire world come about by sheer chance and the naive blundering of government officials and bankers?

Or...

Is the entire world now under the control of a powerful elitist group of trillionaire money masters who are in the process of creating a fascist global government that will enslave us all?

While Jim prefers the former theory, I prefer the latter.

[envirosponsible]

Right on Schizoid. I asked Jim why he never mentioned NWO or other theories a month or more ago, and he told me that he doesn't mention them because he thinks they're nonsense.

[Nudge]

What's sad is that our heads are still so apparently mired in project-Apollo-scale, top-down, imposed-from-above thinking that at present we must have a whole "new urbanist movement" to tell us how to beautify our own living spaces.

Huh. The record is pretty clear about how, in ye olde days, the Benjamin Franklin Memorial New Urbanist Overseers Gang did not ride around the whole country imposing on every community small and large a sort of universal blueprint for how to arrange things. Things got arranged in order to meet local needs, which under that way of living were fairly similar in most places across the country.

The idea that yet another imposed-from-above or not-imagined-locally set of arrangements is going to save us from a previous imposed-from-above system is quite amusing in itself. Why do we keep seeking solutions by repeating the same mistakes that got us to this point?

Yawn.

[Tom]

Another good one, Jim.

As someone who has read your stuff for several years, I am encouraged by the way your writing has matured. Gone is the doomerism of old. It's good to see someone in the Peak Oil commmunity who can see the difference between the collapse of the consumer economy and the Apocalypse.

It's vitally important that there be articulate voices getting the word out that the end of cheap oil is not the end of the world. That the future can actually be better than what we have now. It won't necessarily be better but the more people speaking out against the doomers the more likely it will be.

[beerzie boy]

I'm afraid Jim's right: with Mr. O, it looks like it's going to be business as usual with the same gang of fixers and tired hacks. "Change" = a party with a different name. Same soap, different box. Perhaps the realities ahead will not make for cheery press conferences or palatable poll results, but Mr. O has four years ad a golden opportunity to wake people up. He'd better hurry and get with the program: there is a limited supply of political and actual capital to be spent before things get really ugly.