Potentially bad news for the greenfield guys, according to Jim Kunstler’s Forecast for 2008, at his Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle: Commentary on the Flux of Events.
One thing the public doesn't get about the housing debacle is that it is not just the low point in a regular cycle -- it is the end of the suburban phase of US history. We won't be building anymore of it, and those employed in its development will have to find something else to do. Now, unfortunately the whole point of the housing bubble was not really to put X-million people in so many vinyl and chipboard boxes, but rather to ramp up a suburban sprawl-building industry as a replacement for America's dwindling manufacturing economy. This stratagem ran into the implacable force of Peak Oil, which not only puts the schnitz on America's whole Happy Motoring / suburban nexus, but implies a pervasive trend for contraction in everything from the daily distances we can travel to the very core idea of regular economic growth per se -- at least in the way we have understood it through the age of industrial capital ...
... something like 40 percent of all new jobs after the year 2000 were created in the final burst of suburban expansion -- everything from the excavators to the framers to the sheet-rockers, and then the providers of granite countertops, the sellers of appliances and furnishings, and cars to service the far-out new subdivisions, and so on. This is the end, therefore, not only of the production "home-builders," but perhaps everything from Crate and Barrel to WalMart, too, eventually.
Coming tomorrow: Michael Dalby of One Southern Indiana addresses the readership of NA Confidential.
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5 comments:
Sounds like a vast conspiracy on the highest levels. Maybe we need a special investigation into population growth and why nobody wants to live in downtown New Alabany!? Those folks from 1SI have so far to travel to get anything done around here. Gotta go, think my vinyl box needs repair.
For relatively new readers, it is instructive to note that in the urban area of downtown New Albany, as opposed to the suburbs and exurbs, there are somewhere around 25 separate churches, maybe more.
Two years ago, Gary McCartin dismissed the notion that people might choose to live downtown. As described in the Tribune: "He (McCartin) thinks people would rather have a yard and live near their church and other conveniences."
I believe he meant to say that they'd rather live near "his" church, which I'm assuming to be one of the exurban varieties that are interchangable with 16-screen movie theaters and minor league baseball stadiums.
True or not, I've always wondered what he was implying with reference to the many who choose to live downtown. Perhaps their churches aren't as important as his.
There are numerous and sundry reasons why we might debate the efficacy of suburban vs. urban lifestyles, as in the case of the aded expense in erecting ever expanding exurban infrastructures when urban ones already exist, but looking on it from the perspective of the Gary, perhaps it is necessary to pave the greenfields so as to distance oneself from the undesirables warehoused downtown.
Just a bit of secular sarcasm to balance the ledger.
In other words:
I hate the government. I hate the government. Please build and maintain new roads and sewers and provide me with expanded police and fire protection as they are the main factors in giving my property value. A new school or two with transportation expenditures that exceed the amount spent on educational activities would be nice, too. I know you can already provide those things more efficiently elsewhere in a more limited, manageable service area, but I want to make sure that government services and spending grow as much as possible so that I can continue to complain about tax bill increases while ignoring my own role in spurring those increases and drawing attention to myself by preaching personal responsibility to others. I hate the government.
No one likes to hear bad news. George Bush denies the human impact of global warming. It's not the bad news of global warming and climate change that upsets him and his contributors. It's the dislocation and realignment of capital that bugs him. His kind have allocated their capital to plan for an apocalyptic end game. Without that end game, their investments wither.
Mr. Short squawks, fearing that NAC speaks a truth about America's return to neighborhoods instead of parking lots, concrete, asphalt, and monoculture. I'm always amazed at the dissonance of "conservatives" who support such radical diversions of public investment to support their chosen personal investments.
But then, we are a fallen species, destined to always fall short of righteousness. I guess fundies have the right to be as prideful and stubborn, greedy and selfish, as anyone else.
thanks bluegill - I needed that.
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