The "housing bubble" implosion is broadly misunderstood. It's not just
the collapse of a market for a particular kind of commodity, it's the end of
the suburban pattern itself, the way of life it represents, and the entire
economy connected with it. It's the crack up of the system that America has
invested most of its wealth in since 1950. It's perhaps most tragic that the
mis-investments only accelerated as the system reached its end, but it seems
to be nature's way that waves crest just before they break.
This wave is breaking into a sea-wall of disbelief. Nobody gets it. The
psychological investment in what we think of as American reality is
too great. The mainstream media doesn't get it, and they can't report it
coherently. None of the candidates for president has begun to articulate an
understanding of what we face: the suburban living arrangement is an
experiment that has entered failure mode.
I maintain that all the "players" -- from the bankers to the politicians to
the editors to the ordinary citizens -- will continue to not get it as the
disarray accelerates and families and communities are blown apart by economic
loss. Instead of beginning the tough process of making new arrangements for
everyday life, we'll take up a campaign to sustain the unsustainable old way
of life at all costs.
A reader sent me a passel of recent clippings last week from the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It contained one story after another
about the perceived need to build more highways in order to maintain "economic
growth" (and incidentally about the "foolishness" of public transit). I
understood that to mean the need to keep the suburban development system
going, since that has been the real main source of the Sunbelt's prosperity
the past 60-odd years. They cannot imagine an economy that is based on
anything besides new subdivisions, freeway extensions, new car sales, and
Nascar spectacles. The Sunbelt, therefore, will be ground-zero for all the
disappointment emanating from this cultural disaster, and probably also
ground-zero for the political mischief that will ensue from lost fortunes and
crushed hopes.
From time-to-time, I feel it's necessary to remind readers what we can
actually do in the face of this long emergency. Voters and candidates in the
primary season have been hollering about "change" but I'm afraid the dirty
secret of this campaign is that the American public doesn't want to change its
behavior at all. What it really wants is someone to promise them they can keep
on doing what they're used to doing: buying more stuff they
can't afford, eating more shitty food that will kill them, and driving more
miles than circumstances will allow.
Here's what we better start doing:
* Stop all highway-building altogether. Instead, direct public money into
repairing railroad rights-of-way. Put together public-private partnerships for
running passenger rail between American cities and towns in between. If Amtrak
is unacceptable, get rid of it and set up a new management system. At the same
time, begin planning comprehensive regional light-rail and streetcar
operations.
* End subsidies to agribusiness and instead direct dollar support to
small-scale farmers, using the existing regional networks of organic farming
associations to target the aid. (This includes ending subsidies for the
ethanol program.)
* Begin planning and construction of waterfront and harbor facilities for
commerce: piers, warehouses, ship-and-boatyards, and
accommodations for sailors. This is especially important along the
Ohio-Mississippi system and the Great Lakes.
* In cities and towns, change regulations that mandate the accommodation of
cars. Direct all new development to the finest grain, scaled to walkability.
This essentially means making the individual building lot the basic increment
of redevelopment, not multi-acre "projects." Get rid of any parking
requirements for property development. Institute "locational taxation" based
on proximity to the center of town and not on the size, character, or putative
value of the building itself. Put in effect a ban on buildings in excess of
seven stories. Begin planning for district or neighborhood heating
installations and solar, wind, and hydro-electric generation wherever possible
on a small-scale network basis.
* We'd better begin a public debate about whether it is feasible or
desirable to construct any new nuclear power plants. If there are good reasons
to go forward with nuclear, and a consensus about the risks and benefits, we
need to establish it quickly. There may be no other way to keep the lights on
in America after 2020.
* We need to prepare for the end of the global economic relations
that have characterized the final blow-off of the cheap energy era. The world
is about to become wider again as nations get desperate over energy resources.
This desperation is certain to generate conflict. We'll have to make things in
this country again, or we won't have the most rudimentary household
products.
* We'd better prepare psychologically to downscale all institutions,
including government, schools and colleges, corporations, and hospitals. All
the centralizing tendencies and gigantification of the past half-century will
have to be reversed. Government will be starved for revenue and impotent at
the higher scale. The centralized high schools all over the nation will prove
to be our most frustrating mis-investment. We will probably have to replace
them with some form of home-schooling that is allowed to aggregate into
neighborhood units. A lot of colleges, public and private, will fail as higher
ed ceases to be a "consumer" activity. Corporations scaled to operate globally
are not going to make it. This includes probably all national chain "big box"
operations. It will have to be replaced by small local and regional business.
We'll have to reopen many of the small town hospitals that were shuttered in
recent years, and open many new local clinic-style health-care operations as
part of the greater reform of American medicine.
* Take a time-out from legal immigration and get serious about
enforcing the laws about illegal immigration. Stop lying to ourselves and stop
using semantic ruses like calling illegal immigrants "undocumented."
* Prepare psychologically for the destruction of a lot of fictitious
"wealth" -- and allow instruments and institutions based on fictitious wealth
to fail, instead of attempting to keep them propped up on credit life-support.
Like any other thing in our national life, finance has to return to a scale
that is consistent with our circumstances -- i.e., what reality will allow.
That process is underway, anyway, whether the public is prepared for it or
not. We will soon hear the sound of banks crashing all over the place.
Get out of their way, if you can.
* Prepare psychologically for a sociopolitical climate of anger, grievance,
and resentment. A lot of individual citizens will find themselves short of
resources in the years ahead. They will be very ticked off and seek to
scapegoat and punish others. The United States is one of the few nations on
earth that did not undergo a sociopolitical convulsion in the past hundred
years. But despite what we tell ourselves about our specialness, we're not
immune to the forces that have driven other societies to extremes. The rise of
the Nazis, the Soviet terror, the "cultural revolution," the holocausts and
genocides -- these are all things that can happen to any people driven to
desperation.
