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.
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My 2008 novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available in paperback  at all booksellers. 

Comments

[Laura Louzader]

Former financial executive, I am with you on all points.

Our vicious drug laws have done nothing but enrich criminal cartels, corrupt our law enforcement and our justice system, burden our prisons unduly while crowding out truly violent criminals who really need to be locked up, and unfairly target underclass blacks for prosecution and incarceration. I know many white drug users, and NONE of these people have ever been arrested, let alone incarcerated for possession or distribution.

Regarding welfare, people need to know that it is not a race issue, and only partly a class issue. I've been shocked to discover so many young white women who grew up in lower-middle and middle class homes, and even have 4-year degrees, who have out-of-wedlock children and are ON WELFARE, to boot. Welfare is overwhelmingly a gender problem, for most of the people taking it are women with children they can't support- or don't feel they ought to have to support, for after all, isn't a mom with kids entitled to male support? And if you don't get it, shouldn't the government step in? These women need to learn about personal responsibility and taking care of themselves, and the Fundamentalist Christian crowd, as well as most of the white working class and lower middle class, are NOT teaching their daughters how to take care of themselves, clearly.

It is deeply frightening to me, that at a time when we are clearly at the peak of our ability to carry an entire class of dependents, that another is being created. What will these people do when our entitlement programs begin to collapse? That is already happening in CA, and this mother of 14 medically needy kids might well find their support jerked out from underneath them, at a time in our history when even people who usually score good jobs are hard put to it to keep a paycheck coming in. Will millions of people who are pushed out of the middle class by the collapse of our economy be willing to help women who insist upon exercising their "right" to breed whether they can pay for it or not?

All Americans need to learn that all things have to be paid for, and if you are getting something you're not paying for, someone else is paying. Just as financial people need to know that they aren't entitled to mansions and yachts on our dime, other people need to learn that they don't have a right to burden us with the care of children they never could support. Any fertile woman collecting welfare for her kids ought to be prevented from having any more.

[Dr.Doom]

"Oh, and what the F is that Ryan Crocker dude doing to get such an amazing following at his blog? His view stats are simply amazing. He must be doing something right."

And, it's apparently keeping him busy there. Every time he shows up here, pour moi, it's "whack-a-mole" time.

[Babystepper]

Hi Nudge,

Tried to post this over at ZK on your latest thread and it failed twice. I may be banned over there.

There may be a reason to reconsider the SUV:

Best Reason Yet for Driving a Bulky SUV: You Might Stand a Better Chance of Surviving if the Cops Open Fire on You for No Reason

http://cryptogon.com/?p=6769

[Babystepper]

This woman is my new hero.

Fuck bankers. Literally and figuratively.

Wall St. Madam Shares Little Black Book
http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=6825504

I hope ABC has the knads to share these names.

[Nudge]

Hi Babystepper :)

You are welcome to post at the other other blog. Nobody is banned there yet. You might love the last few threads which did not get posted to ZK. The most recent one is particularly dark.

Nice SUV link. Actually I have been thinking it would be nice to have one now if only because my driving has become almost entirely local since the last vacation.

It was that week in October 08 when the meltdown was becoming obvious even to the J6P's of rural Ohio and rural Pennsylvania .. and, naturally enough, they channeled their fear and rage into threatening each other on the public roads. After spending a week and a half dodging those kamikaze pilots and their 4-ton land missiles, I decided to take the train if I have to go any further away than an hour or so .. it's just not worth the aggravation.

Since then, the same horrible road behavior has appeared even on the roads within 5 miles of here. Got passed twice last week (in double-yellow zones with blind turns) even though I was already going +5 over the limit. Un-fricking-believable. Since karma is endlessly recyclable, I wished them the fates they deserved, such as a flaming wreck that ends in the ditch, or perhaps the loss of income which causes the loss of the vehicle they're no responsible enough to drive.

But yeah, I'd feel safer dealing with tailgaters (the ones who follow at less than 10 feet distance) in something that weighs about as much as a dump truck.

[Babystepper]

More SUV Clusterfuck from my neck of the woods.

Man kills other man fighting over parking of large vehicles.

http://www.myeyewitnessnews.com/news/local/story/52-Year-Old-Man-Shot-and-Killed-at-Cordova/hFvO2TzoOk-WZ6t21GaoHQ.cspx?rss=59

[Cymon Dendu]

"Really? Including the ones in the Afghan campaign that was launched as a direct result of the attack on the World Trade center, sponsored by Al-Queda?"

Yup, really. Terrorist attacks don't threaten our fundamental freedoms unless we let them. Is al-Qaeda gonna overthrow the US government? Of course not. Stop wetting your pants.

[Nudge]

C'mon, Cymon, let's leave OEO a little wiggle room. Why, the next thing we could say is that since some 50,000 people are killed here every year in the United Parking Lot of America in auto accident's, Al-Quada's most effective means of killing us is to sell us cheap gasoline, not to do a few highly-publicized one-shot stunts like flying jetliners into buildings.

Did anyone or any agent firmly declare war on us in the same manner that Germany or Russia or France might do? No.

Did we decide to invade a country that formally had nothing to do with the attack of a few Saudi nutjobs on our own flying air/fuel bombs? Yes.

[Dr.Doom]

I just want to say this is the last post to this thread, because if I say that, someone(s) will post something just to nah-nah-it-ain't-so me.

[Dr.Doom]

Jim, regarding your daily grunt of 6 Feb., the first Bloomberg article you link says the reason for the DOW uptick was investors were predicting even more drastic job loses, so the actual data apparently had the effect of a boost to the DJIA points.

[Bob Snowjob]

"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?"

Pretty much, yeah. Pass the popcorn.

The urban landscape in CFN is far more ghastly than the suburban.

Just ask a resident of Chicago if they'd rather live on the south side or in Evanston.

Laura Laz, your posts rock...maybe just because I'm familiar with the Chicago area. They hit home.

[Bob Snowjob]

asoka,

Fear is not necessarily bad. Presumably, sheep being led to slaughter have no fear, nor lemmings running over a cliff. Fear can motivate you to do things for your own survival when nothing else works, so in that way it can be healthy.

[Bob Snowjob]

We are NEARING the Rubicon?

[bud4wiser]

Time is running out. Soon, extranational interests, mainly US corporate leaders and the many congressmen they have bought and paid for, will devise schemes to "blame" working Americans for current financial sector "problems" and the government's lackluster response to it.

The crimes have been committed, and now the criminals will begin telling the victims its "their" fault.

We are entering post Clusterfuck America. Not good.

[taylorbaxter]

>"Kunstler's weekly slamming of the south is getting tiresome. The cities of Charleston and Savannah practically invented the concepts of historical preservation."

Kunstler has on several occasions listed Savannah and Charleston amongst his favorite American places. And unfortunately the quality of these two cities has no bearing whatsoever on the wastelands that are nearly all Southern cities. (PS - I am from the South.)

[hildebdr]

There is only one realistic option for the betterment of American society as a whole:
1. Middle-class takeover of the Fed, voting in their own candidates for governorships and senatorships. We need a president like we need a hole in the head. The presidency is replaced with a board of directors.
2. Eliminate municipal pension funds and replacing them with 401k's. Why am I paying Barack 400k for life when he's already successful?
3. Flat tax
4. Nationalize banking - everyone gets a home without paying more than 3% interest over 30 years, unless home and land is owned by the fed and leased for 75 years, whereby there is no interest
5. Nationalize health care - funding outlined in #7
6. Get a grip on the entire school system - funding outlined in #7
7. Fund Health care and Education with a nationalized sports program. No more privately owned sports teams. 50% of merchandising goes to federally funded health care and education, the rest to sports system maintenance and athlete salaries.
8. Force all US based companies to manufacture within US boundaries no matter what it takes, as this will beef up the tax base and crush unemployment
9. Wipe out the welfare state by mandating employment even where it requires daycare.
10. Nationalized daycare for single parents who can work.
11. The jump start: a one time 1% tax on every single US citizen and non-citizen residing in or out of the US based on their gross worth.

This is not the time to make room for the upper echelon. Nobody deserves to earn more than 1m $ per year and everyone deserves a job and a home, that is once they start working and stop loafing.

[andwelaughed]

As a Montgomery native, born and raised there, I must say that I am appalled by your uninformed generalizations about Montgomery's economy and way of life.

Now, I'm all for building communities and sustaining the environment, but I don't think picking on the South is the way to accomplish that.

If you based this article off more than what you observed on your drive-thru tour, you would know that Montgomery is in the process of renewing downtown. Civil rights and "white flight" left downtown barren, but in the past five years or so, the town has begun revitalizing it. An old train shed has been converted into a baseball stadium, and old warehouses have been converted into trendy loft apartments. First Baptist and St. John's Episcopal are beautiful churches in downtown Montgomery, and Dexter King Memorial Church has an ongoing building project. Yes, there are empty box stores, but we are making progress! The old Waccama building was recently converted into a state-of-the-art bowling alley, and the old PharMor building is now a new health center.

Change takes time and effort, and it's coming! The only way to achieve it is by working together. So, enough pretentiousness, enough high horse, enough looking down your nose. Montgomery isn't perfect, but it's home and I'm proud of how the city has started rebuilding.