The life and death of the suburban project
September 22nd, 2009U.S. land use and transportation policies have, since the ’50s, mandated a suburban outcome everywhere – even here in Oregon.
As James Kunstler points out, the suburban project was made possible by a set of circumstances unique to post-WWII America: “an immense supply of cheap oil, cheap land, and the industrial capacity to churn out all the necessary components for a car-dependent development pattern.”
Beginning in the ’80s, the suburban project metastasized, essentially becoming the American economy, even while we could no longer afford it out of earnings. We borrowed to maintain the spending spree, taking on enormous debt. The result, as described by Kunstler:
Suburban life quickly became a cartoon of country living in a cartoon of a country house in a cartoon of the country. With additional layer-on-layer of, first, the shopping in the form of highway strips, then malls, along with the office “parks,” these places elaborated themselves into a kind of cancer-of-the-landscape, a chronic and expensive condition that Americans had no choice but to live with, because of the monumental investments they had already made in it.
“Consumer spending” accounts for about 70% of U.S. economic activity. “Consumers” are now tapped out. We’re experiencing what economist Richard Koo calls a balance sheet recession. Chances for a robust rebound in consumer spending are slim to none. We count on housing and consumer spending to be the drivers of economic recovery. But as Calculated Risk assesses the situation:
The overall recovery will probably be sluggish because both housing and consumer spending will be under pressure for some time.
Cash-for-clunkers, housing prop-up schemes, and other government stimulus programs aiming to reboot the suburban project are doomed to failure because the unique circumstances giving rise to that project have evaporated. Now that those conditions are no longer present, we’re stuck with a set of living arrangements that are energy intensive and economically expensive to maintain. Our personal investments in our houses and our communal investment in our subdivisions, strip malls, and road systems are evaporating before our eyes. We were all giddy with our illusions of wealth, thinking the bubble would expand forever and make us all rich. Now, the bubble has popped.
Here’s reality:
The suburban project was enabled by cheap and abundant oil. Blind to that fact, we poured all of our efforts and all of our wealth into “the outfitting of suburbia.” The end of the era of cheap and abundant oil is revealing how foolish and short-sighted we were.