James Howard Kunstler’s View on the Future of American Cities
My friend over at Cenla Education Watch sent me a link to this brilliant article concerning the future of American cities. Here’s an excerpt:
I hasten to add it is a mistake to suppose that the US industrial economy has already been replaced by a so-called “information” economy or a consumer economy. In reality, manufacturing activities have been insidiously replaced over the past twenty years by a suburban-sprawl-building economy – and the mass production of suburban houses, highways, strip malls and big box stores is just a different sort of manufacturing than making hair driers and TV sets. The sprawl industry also drove a reckless debt creation racket and multiple layers of traffic in mortgages and spinoffs of mortgages (such as the derivatives trade based on bundled, securitized debt) which represents, at bottom, hallucinated wealth that in turn has spread false liquidity through the equity markets and is certain to affect them badly sooner or later. All this is what we have been calling the “housing bubble” and it is now beginning to fly apart with deadly effect.
Much of the suburban real estate produced by this process is destined to lose its supposed value, both in practical and monetary terms as energy scarcities get traction. So, on top of the sheer distortions and perversities of the glut in bad mortgage paper, America will be faced with the accelerating worthlessness of the collateral – the houses, Jiffy Lubes, and office parks –
as gasoline prices go up, and long commutes become untenable, and jobs along with incomes are lost, and the cost of heating houses larger than 1500 square feet becomes an insuperable burden.
All this is to say that the suburban rings of our cities have poor prospects in the future. They therefore represent a massive tragic misinvestment, perhaps the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It is hard to say how this stuff might be reused or retrofitted, if at all, but some of it, perhaps a lot, may end up as a combined salvage yard and sheer ruin.
Another major impact of the coming energy scarcity will be the end of industrial agriculture. Without abundant and cheap oil and gas-based fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and fuels for running huge machines and irrigation systems, we will have to make other arrangements for feeding ourselves. Crop yields will go down – a big reason, by the way, to be skeptical of ethanol and bio-diesel alternative fuel schemes based on corn or soybean crops. We will have to grow food closer to home, on a smaller scale, probably requiring more human and even animal labor, and agriculture is likely to come closer to the center of economic life than it has within memory – at the same time that mass production homebuilding, tourism based on mass aviation, easy motoring, and a host of other obsolete activities fade into history.
I think this will lead to an epochal demographic shift, a reversal of the 200-year-long trend of people moving from the farms and rural places to the big cities. Instead, I believe we will see is a substantial contraction of our cities at the same time that they densify at their cores and along their waterfronts. A preview of this can be seen in Baltimore today. The remaining viable fabric of the pre-automobile city is relatively tiny and concentrated in the old center around a complex harbor system. With little need for industrial workers, vast neighborhoods of row housing built for them are either abandoned or inhabited now only by such economically distressed people that abandonment is inevitable. The pattern of contraction may not be identical in all American cities.
CenLamar 
The US has been moving away from a “producing” country to a “service” country for the past decade. Each year we see more manufacturing jobs exiting the States for more the one reason – cheap labor is usually the main reason. Taxation is another.
The US is also falling behind in innovation. It used to be the US invented things and the rest of the world copied, now we’re copying technology from other countries.
The farm discussion is one that will be interesting to watch. The family farm has long been fading away as large corporations have bought out farms from failing families. Additionally, the need for land to expand cities has eaten away at farmland. The one positive in all of this is research in crop planting and in seed development has paid off. Farmers can now expect a higher yield per acre in almost every crop produced.
What’s happened in Baltimore has happened in almost every metro area – slum like areas are being abandoned by the former workforce who were forced to live in these neighborhoods. These workers are moving to the jobs, away from the metro areas just like the companies who formerly employed them. Many cities are taking this opportunity to revitalize these areas for young professionals. A similar thing has happened in Alexandria in the area near City Park around Bush, Harvard, Yale, etc. Young professionals – mostly in the health care industry – have purchased homes and renovated them, helping to preserve a neighborhood and bring it back.
Wow, what can I say. The author needs to get out more.
Where has he been? People in areas such as 28 East and West, Woodworth, Buckeye area, etc. have put 30 yr investments in quality homes. The businessmen have realized this and followed these folks out to the burbs just as they have in Plano, Tx; Katy, Tx; Beverly Hills, Cal; Orange County, Cal; Shaker Heights, Oh; Grosse Pointe, Mich; Main Line, Penn; Long Island, NY; Redmond, Wash; and Norman, Okla.
From Wikipedia: Increasingly, due to the congestion and pollution experienced in many city centers, more people moved out to the suburbs. Moving along with the population, many companies also located their offices and other facilities in the outer areas of the cities. Between 1950 and 1956 the resident population of all US suburbs increased by 46%. In the U.S., 1970 was the first year that more people lived in suburbs than elsewhere. However, automobile-dependent suburbs remain the norm. Indeed, many of the fastest-growing communities in the U.S. are exurbs—communities even farther away and lower-density than suburbs.
The importance of public space reduced in favor of private property, a low crime rate, and schools considered “better” than inner-city schools are significant reasons for the suburbs to continue exploding.
Once these young professionals who want to live “near work” begin to have kids, and have no place for them to play, or no place for thier teens to park, or spend more money and time driving to, or sitting in a carline at a “quality” private school, or whose elected representatives really don’t represent them, you’ll see an increased expansion of the burbs, regardless of fuel prices.
And God help those that will punish their kids by insisting that they can make living in the inner city work! Ask Howard Stern about that.
Nothin’ worse than a politician lying right from the start saying you can win an apple computer and I don’t see it anywhere on here to enter
Not a good way to start a campaign buddy.