02/04/09 Saratoga Springs, NY “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 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.
If I wanted leftist didactic gobbly-gook I would read the new york times. This guy hates western civilization and wants to destroy it. After all, evil whitey “shoved out the native Alabamu, Coosa, and Tallapoosa”. The poor victim Alabamu never “shoved out” anybody from that land ? The Tallapoosa were the sole inhabitants of that land since the beginning of time ? BULL. I am sick of the whitey/western civ. bashing that is the stock in trade of the left wind media complex. Your other writers froth at the mouth with smears of “protectionism” at the slightest hint of protecting ourselves from the most protectionist country ever: China. Who picks the articles for this site ?
A word to the wise: Luck favors the prepared.
Glad to see Jim here at the Daily Reckoning! Can’t get enough (F&F) fiasco & fiesta.
It is too late to protect ourselves from China. My the auto parts manufacturer my brother works for has been bought by a Chinese company. They are sucking out all the intelluctual property and patents.
My Nephew designs and builds industrial machines. The majority of his machines are shipped to China destroying jobs here in USA.
this guy hates the American Civilization. he won’t be happy until most Americans are dwelling in mud huts, cooking food in cast iron pots, over fires fueled by dried dung, with everyone wearing burlap dresses. Perhaps the dresses of the men could have a longer hem line than those of the ‘womyn’. I’ve read much of his work (via the Public Library) and believe him to be a proto-typical Socialist/Marxist/Bolshevik Collectivist.
I can imagine him, slavering and drooling , rubbing his hands in glee, should our civilization truyly DOES break down, with the concomitant death and destruction associated with severe events.
That a guy like this is on an alleged ‘contrary investment’ site, is simply mind boggling.
I prefer my business/economic sans ant political ideological flavoring. But that’s just me.
I reccommend that one goes to his web-site and see his pictures of MacDonald hamburger stands in the middle of a woods settings.
This ‘art’, (and I use that term advisedly) bespeaks to me of the author’s suffering from severe nuerosis if not psychosis.’
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this aritcle does NOT make me want to subscribe to any ‘financial information services’ as offered on this web-site; and ‘dat be fer sure’.
later
jz
Karl, suburbia is not Western Civilization.
I grew up in suburbia, and for a young boy it’s not a bad place to live.
But now as an adult, even with my fond memories I realize that as a type of settlement, North American style suburbia is very inefficient. People live too far from where they work, shop, and study. Suburbs force people to spend too time, energy, and money on transportation.
This style of suburban settlement was not a result of natural market processes. Instead, it needed massive public subsidization of infrastructure in order to come about. These perverse incentives distorted the marketplace.
Those perversities and inefficiencies must be removed. Then people can make more rational settlement decisions, and our society and civilization will eventually become much better off.
I disagree with much of what Kunstler says, and I think I understand why you found some of his remarks irritating, but the criticism of suburbanization long predates him. Lewis Mumford was accurately predicting many of the suburban problems back in the 1940’s, even before much suburbanization had occurred.
America had Ginsberg and then she had the 60’s. But who or what can stop a train wreck or who or what can stop an aging Hag from getting sick and dying a miserable death? The American Way of life? I wonder what the Super Bowl is going to be like next year.
Check out “The Age of Gladiators – Savagery & Spectacle in Ancient Rome” by Rupert Matthews. It is amazing how little has changed regarding the Spirit and Modus Operandi of Western Civilization.
Easy there, Karl
I think, minus your indeterminate anger, we mostly agree.
-The Left and its flagship the NYTimes would be better described as dialectic “goobly-gook”. The didactic is more the traditional (that which has proven its merit) right vs wrong; good vs bad; truth vs popular sentiment; etc.
-All primitives have been pushed out, tyrannized or indelibly altered including those from whence we came – it’s the way of the world. Kunstler’s point (regardless of impertinent sentiment) seems to be that modern, energy intensive ways have destructive, if unintended, consequences. Furthermore, Kunstler’s general focus is of a societal model that was built upon cheap energy and that paradigm has shifted, though it hasn’t as yet made its inevitable impact.
-Protectionism is always a two-way street. If a sovereign penalizes imports for the “good” of its people you can be sure that the harmed sovereign will penalize the penalizer’s exports. Hardly a win-win situation when the US depends so much on imports such as raw materials (oil!). Remember history’s axiom: When goods don’t cross borders armies do.
Regardless of Kunstler’s Leftist tendencies (Hell, where does one find a conservative?) we ought not throw out the baby with the bathwater. The foundations of the tangibles of our societal model (as opposed to the spiritual truths expressed in our founding documents) are crumbling. It’s going to be a wild ride and it’s going to be in our time. Better to prepare for the inevitability of the future than to waste time pretending that we can relive the past, eh?