Suburbia Death Watch …



Kevin Bauman from ‘100 Abandoned Houses’

 

Front page article on the New York Times:

 

Outside Cleveland, Snapshots of Poverty’s Surge in the Suburbs

Sabrina Tavernise (NY Times)

PARMA HEIGHTS, Ohio — The poor population in America’s suburbs — long a symbol of a stable and prosperous American middle class — rose by more than half after 2000, forcing suburban communities across the country to re-evaluate their identities and how they serve their populations.

The increase in the suburbs was 53 percent, compared with 26 percent in cities. The recession accelerated the pace: two-thirds of the new suburban poor were added from 2007 to 2010.

“The growth has been stunning,” said Elizabeth Kneebone, a senior researcher at the Brookings Institution, who conducted the analysis of census data. “For the first time, more than half of the metropolitan poor live in suburban areas.”

As a result, suburban municipalities — once concerned with policing, putting out fires and repairing roads — are confronting a new set of issues, namely how to help poor residents without the array of social programs that cities have, and how to get those residents to services without public transportation. Many suburbs are facing these challenges with the tightest budgets in years.

“The whole political class is just getting the memo that Ozzie and Harriet don’t live here anymore,” said Edward Hill, dean of the Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University.

 

Our crisis has been misrepresented from the beginning. All of suburbia is an automobile habitat, designed and constructed for the benefit of the car- and energy industries. Governments at all levels; the real estate, insurance and finance industries hopped in for the ride. The idea promoted was that automobile waste would continue forever!

Michael Lynch or Dan Yergin and other cornucopians have PROMISED there would be new technologies and discoveries of crude oil to power our endless and heedless waste for all eternity.

The only thing necessary to bring about this blessed state of affairs would be higher energy prices. Higher prices would bring more commodities to the marketplace as they would make innovation affordable, empowering entrepreneurs leveraged by a free market.

Fuel prices since 1998 have increased by a factor of ten, but something has gone wrong with the ‘innovation plan’. None of the poor people in this country can afford fuel, afford a car or afford to pay for their house: they’re broke! This is the unspoken consequence of high prices, an outcome that has eluded the ‘intellectuals’ who manage the world’s economy. The suburban ‘non-towns’ cannot afford to provide services. The banks cannot afford loans and the borrowers cannot afford to repay them. Entire countries — which have no native energy supplies — have bankrupted themselves by copying ‘Leave it to Beaver’ — Greece, Portugal, Spain, France … China.

The people are becoming so poor they cannot afford to eat, these same people certainly cannot afford to support higher cost crude oil extraction in the arctic or in the deep Gulf of Mexico. Now what? The banks claim they can lend the necessary funds but people cannot repay the current mind-boggling amount of debt. Are we to double down? How do we do that? Who can be robbed, nobody has any money!

From the very beginning of this crisis, the establishment — including the New York Times — has been misrepresenting its nature. We are having an energy crisis not a finance crisis. Our entire economy is built around wasting capital for transient gains that flow upward to a handful of oligarchs. Yet no article dares mention anything about oil except to reassure us that we have plenty.

While the US rots from the inside, the Europeans are disintegrating. It’s tragic, really. The western world has driven the freeway right up its own anus. Once at the destination, there is surprisingly little maneuvering room! Contemplating consequences is unpleasant so the Euroleaders attempt to fool themselves convincingly one last time. Sixty-five years ago the Europeans swore to a new beginning, a break from centuries of militarism and warfare. The noble idea got lost in the a floating fantasy of pointless mobility and fleeting mercantile advantages.

Sez the same New York Times:

 

“Europe Faces New Hurdles in Crisis Over Debt

On the eve of a European Union summit meeting, crucial financial measures were still unresolved.

 

The most crucial of the crucial central issue is that Europe is flat broke! It has nothing of any value left! It spent everything on gas!

Zero is quite an unresolvable crucial financial measure!

This entire mess has been a charade of folks who should know better. The leaders are like spoiled little children, waiting desperately for Adam Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’ to come down the chimney like Santa Clause with bags full of euros to hand out. One would think that two years in, the ‘leadership’ would realize the giant hand isn’t going to come down anything.

Europe’s problem is its lack of petroleum resources: it must trade bits of colored paper to Middle Eastern despots so that Europeans might ape Americans and drive aimlessly in circles between ugly buildings, one more monstrous than the next. This paper trade has been a multi-decade dead loss to Europe and now the continent is bankrupt. This couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of people.

The senseless ‘leadership’ has a choice:

– It can implement stringent energy conservation measures and cut fuel use by half to start with and by further large percentages during the next few years to come. OR:

– It can go bankrupt. Period. There are no other choices.

Eurostates will be left with the fuel they can pump from their own soils. Right now, Norway and Denmark have petroleum reserves … that’s it!

The bottom line is the cars go or the cars go, one way or the other they are gone. Over. Fin. Completo. Sayonara. Adios. Auf wiedersehen. Good riddance!

When the cars go, suburbia dies. There is no way for the public to create affordable mass transit without the mass. The world’s suburbs, from California to Beijing, from Spain to Brazil are obsolete, they cost more to run than they can return by their use.

The nations were brought to conflict by pointless institutional rigidities that no individual government felt able to escape. The outcome was a sense of inevitability that is mirrored today: that there is no escape from bankruptcy as the institutional tools have been placed purposely out of reach.

There is no reason why the Europeans should reject common bonds and a fiscal authority. What the leadership fears is loss of policy autonomy that is proven over the past two years to be poisonous! The German establishment is concerned about being stuck with the costs of European deadbeats that it sees no responsibility for creating. These deadbeats are nothing but proxies for German businesses and banks. German sovereignty is self-defeating, it encourages the very disastrous loss of financial autonomy it desperately seeks to avoid!

As has been the case throughout its history, Europe is at odds with itself and its own interests, the Leviathan’s war of all against all.

The governments in Europe in the summer of 1914 didn’t want to stop war. They all wanted war, they all thought they would win before Christmas, because they had better technology (they thought) than the other countries.

Each European country believed it had the answer or rather, its own particular answer. Britain had its dreadnoughts, France had its ‘elan’, Germany had its artillery and the Russians, their rapid mobilization. It turned out that all the countries had the exact same advantages but nobody was able to figure this out for themselves in advance.

WWI had very little strategy involved, it was the first machine v. human war, and the clear winner was the machine. All the pre-machine institutions were thrown over as failures: the monarchies, the bourgeois sensibilities and ‘high civilization’, the empires, the church. The consequences we are all living with now, mindless supremacy of the mindless machines.

Sir Edward Grey remarked before the hostilities began: “”The lights are going out all over Europe: we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” He was wrong, the lights have never been lit we are monsters groping along in the darkness …

25 thoughts on “Suburbia Death Watch …

    1. steve from virginia Post author

      Ha! Testosterone and gasoline don’t mix …

      One way or another the cars will be gone. The process is underway in Greece right now and I don’t think there is a widespread understanding of the process. It’s all taken for granted — that there will be transport and lots of fuel. Just like there will always be suburbs and lawns and good paying jobs, etc.

      Fuel prices need to rise: they are rising relative to what people can afford. As the tax fraction recedes, the market ‘tax’ increases. High prices force choices which people aren’t equipped to make. Being forced to make choices is what #OWS is all about. Peeps want to go back to TV making choices for them. Coke … Pepsi.

      What is happening in the US is a large expansion of the underground economy. The question is ‘How many pot farmers/meth labs do we need?’ Lots, obviously. Pot growing is a number one topic of conversation, this in the Washington, DC area.

      War is already here, wars to win are out of the question. War is another art that has gone into the toilet. The USA-style ‘throw resources at an enemy’ is a FAIL and alternatives don’t exist. At some point war becomes banditry. See ‘pot farmer’ above. With crooks at the top of the political/economic ladder I expect to see a big increase in banditry of all kinds: brokers, fixers, con-men, forgers, bootleggers and smugglers, extortionists, etc. Like China is now …

  1. Fourier2020

    Steve,

    I’m really trying to understand where you are coming from when you say “suburbia”. I’ve been to countries where cars aren’t that common, and suburbs of sorts still exist, although I’m not sure they’d call them suburbs. More like villages that are not-too-far-away from a big city. At least some of the places were quite nice, not at all like the trashed-out house you show at the top of your blog entry. People who want to go somewhere walk or take a bus. Those that do have private cars act as a taxi service sometimes also.

    Since I’m planning to move my family, I’ve been doing quite a bit of thinking about ideal locations. As much as an urban environment is desirable in some ways, I fear that civil unrest will be concentrated in those places. Angry mobs don’t make good neighbors. Also, food/fuel shortages tend to be more accurate where the volume needed is greatest. Frankly, I really don’t know what to do. Any suggestions would be welcome.

  2. Jb

    The photographer of the fixer-upper above describes that neighborhood as “a (former) wealthy enclave in the city” of Detroit. This isn’t the ‘suburban’ image that immediately comes to my mind, but the point remains: we squandered the resources and stranded ourselves.

    Bauman’s houses will fall apart and slowly disappear – their lead paint, aesbestos siding, and leaky underground heating oil tanks will be forgotten. If you aren’t already familiar with the book, you might enjoy reading “The World Without Us” by Alan Weisman.

    When thinking about relocating, be sure to consider climate. Maintaining body temperature is alot easier in a moderate climate such as the mid-Atlantic. We also have a rather dependable growing season.

    1. Fourier2020

      I have actually been thinking about Texas. Its pretty hot, but it never gets very cold in winter. Probably the BIGGEST criteria is the creativity/adaptability of the population. Let’s face it, nobody knows exactly what is coming. California is a very open minded place, but the government there is loony and there are huge layers of entitlement. Texas has more of a frontier feel to it, the people seem adaptable, and the government has more common sense. The downside is that the state does seem more dependent on the automobile than average, although there has been some attempt to change that.

      1. Jb

        I don’t know much about Texas other than my brother spent one summer there after college and couldn’t stand the heat. How about a nice little college town in Appalachias?

        We live in Charlottesville, VA. The cost of living is a bit high but we have a little of everything: mass transit, Amtrak / Greyhound station, major highway crossroads, excellent public schools, small river, plenty of farms, orchards http://www.cartermountainorchard.com/ , strong community focused on ‘green’ urban living (you can have chickens AND goats within city limits), an earthquake every 100 years or so…

        The University of Va is here along with NGIC: http://www.inscom.army.mil/msc/defaultngic.aspx?text=off&size=12pt (I’m hoping this keeps us on the supply routes. MREs are mighty tasty.) Jefferson’s home, Monticello, is about 15 minutes (by car) from my house and Fall is lovely here.

  3. Reverse Engineer

    Top on the list in relocation is Low Population and good natural resources. Good water supply, local energy supplies, food harvesting. Where is that spot?

    ALASKA! Sure it gets a little chilly, but you know Inuit have lived up here for 1000s of years hardly burning anything at all. Snow makes great insulation.

    RE

    1. 25Oct1917

      Yes, and it’ll take 1000 years for caucasoids to adapt/micro-evolve to the harsh environment. Darwinism made sure the Inuit are the only folks to survive in such places.

  4. James

    A fossil bonfire, everything gets thrown in, but we don’t simply dissipate the heat to space, we capture it and make matter dance……for a while. Those houses are now slowly settling back to earth as we all do. The ghosts that once inhabited them are now motionless in the earth or moved on. The sun allows our resurrection but the structures that fossil fuels built will rise no more.

    I can almost see the nomadic American Indians walking amongst the ruins. Great post, Steve. I agree that the cars cannot be fed for much longer, neither can the houses.

  5. Mr. Roboto

    Starting next year, Milwaukee County will get its bus service cut roughly in half. Won’t that be just *swell*! 😛

  6. Jeotsu

    Catching up after being away from da itnernets for a few weeks.

    The comment was made previously about India not having a property bubble. I was just there, and have a contradictory anecdote. While in Jaipur we were talking with a local who went on at length about the massive property boom of the last ten years. Suddenly “everyone is wealthy”. He talked of home values going up 10x or more, and people selling houses to buy other houses hoping those would go up in value even more.

    I would also worry a great deal about the corruption problems there. It’s syphoning away the resources, even as the massive population puts further strain on the system. We don’t have a TV at home, but watching on the hotel one we saw the same western waste lifestyle being pushed, heavily, on the people there.

    Rural Nepal looked okay, from a sustainability standpoint. Being way behind the development curve does havea small advantage of leaving you less dependent on fossil fuels.

    Cheers,
    Jeotsu

  7. Reverse Engineer

    OWS and the Failing Suburban Paradigm

    Repost from my Civilization Collapse Group on Yahoo. http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/reverseengineering
    I think it is on topic to this blog entry by Steve here on EU.

    RE
    ———-
    The Political “establishment” (not necessarily the same thing as TPTB or the Illuminati) seem to be having a very difficult time figuring out what to do about the OWS Mushrooms.

    The Gestapo Tactics employed in Oakland are overall getting very negative Press even in the MSM, and apparently the Oakland OWSers were rapidly able to tear down the Fencing around the park and reestablish some sort of Occupation there. I’ve read numerous articles in the MSM today where they seem “confused” on what to do Next here.

    The ACLU and the Lawyers Guild have already filed to get Disclosures on the Violence perpetrated by the Gestapo in oakland, and you can SMELL a lawsuit in the making, which will give the Pols in Oakland many headaches. Other Mayors in other cities look at this, and they don’t want to be the next one making the Newz with Protesters Chanting “The Whole World is Watching! THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING!”

    At the same time, they are getting all the Expected Complaints about Filth and Human Feces and Tents obstructing Pedestrian walkways, yadda yadda. Or they just make up said complaints as Justification for why they NEED to get rid of these encampments.

    So far, Demonizing the OWSers hasn’t gained much traction, most of the Polls seem to show general Support for the Movement, despite the fact the Protesters may or may not be shitting in the park. Perpetrating Police Violence against them at the moment seems to be INCREASING support for the Movement rather than decreasing it. Yet the Pols still return to the Conventional Wisdom, which is that at a certain point “Enough is Enough” and these Occupations cannot be tolerated in perpetuity. At the same time however, they haven’t come up with a Solution OTHER than Police Violence to remove said Occupiers from their Campgrounds. They are trapped in a Morton’s Fork, where neither removing them forcibly nor tolerating their extended Occupations are acceptable outcomes.

    There are two basic Administrative Laws being used in all the Occupy Cleansings, one is the Curfew Laws which restrict these Public Spaces to Daytime Usage and close the parks at around 11PM in general; the other one is restrictions against “erecting structures” in said parks, AKA Tents.

    These two Administrative laws have one fundamental purpose, which is to perpetuate private property rights along with a subsidiary purpose of preventing the formation of “Favelas” or Shanty Towns.

    If there actually WERE “Free” public spaces where anybody could erect a house (or shack or tent etc), why would the poor folks Pay Rent on somebody else’s Private Property? Take the great example of Central Park. One suspects if you could actually camp out there, lots of people faced with the ridiculously high rents in NYC would have done that long ago. Central Park would have become just like the Favelas in Rio de Janeiro. Yours truly might have chosen to camp out there at a few chosen moments of his life. I did use my Van to sleep in in NY Shitty for about 3 months right after my divorce before I bit the bullet and moved back home with Mom.

    What the OWSers are REALLY doing here is fighting for the RIGHT to set up Shanty Towns on Public Propety where none of the residents pay any property tax or rent. I don’t think even the OWSers are really aware that this is the battle they are fighting, because if they were aware of it what they would be demanding is that Administrative Laws against Camping Out and sleeping in Public Places at night should be repealed.

    As it appears to me right now, this is the tide which the Political Establishment is trying to hold back, and they may be able to do it for a while, but the Tide is likely to become a Tsunami here soon enough. Reason being, the Suburban Model is failing rapidly, whether the current Mcmansion Dwellers are forcibly evicted or not. Steve on EU just wrote a nice deconstruction of the Suburban Dwelling paradigm you can review here. Vast numbers of people are going to HAVE to move out of their Mcmansions because they are too remote from any Jobs there might be and there isn’t sufficient housing of any sort they could afford in places there might BE some jobs.

    Rio de Janeiro and the Favelas are a good example of this again in the Brazilian Economy. The Maids, Drivers and Cooks we employed in my youth all came from the Favelas. On the wages they made doing those jobs, they could not AFFORD a real rental apt in Rio, but they had to be close enough to be able to access Public transportation to get to those jobs. So they set up Favelas on the hillsides surrounding Rio where they paid no rent or property tax!

    You can hold back a purely Political movement of people to Occupy Public spaces, but you CANNOT hold back such a migration which is driven ECONOMICALLY. The OWSers who have Occupied some Public spaces for Political purposes are soon to be joined (they have been already in fact) by people who are simply Homeless and for the most part basically Politically Unaware of most of the underlying issues. These folks just inherently grasp the Power of Numbers and once they see a Tent City take hold, they go and Join Up with it as a good spot to pitch their Tent also.

    Even people currently holding onto their McMansions, 2 years after missing their last Mortgage Payment and still not visited by the Sherriff to kick them out will eventually abandon these completely unsustainable and economically stupid dwellings. There is neither the Money nor even the Political WILL at the moment to try to build them some other types of dwellings that are more sustainable, so they will have to do it for themselves, and that means Shanty Towns, Tent Cities and Final Resting Places for Bugout Machines when the Gas runs out or gets too expensive to keep moving the Bugout Machine around.

    So, IMHO, OWS will continue to grow here despite greater and more violent attempts to surpress this migration by TPTB. At some point of course, they will try to direct all these folks into FEMA Concentration Camps rather than Public Squares and Parks, but my guess is they will be overwhelmed quickly even trying to do that.

    The of course is when we really “Hit the Wall” and see whether we get a Repeat of the “Final Solution”.

    Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You.

    RE

      1. steve from virginia Post author

        The favelas that RE speaks of are really incarnations of the Traditional City that Nathan Lewis speaks about (when he isn’t ranting about gold and gold standard 🙂

        http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2011/092511.html

        Lewis is more auto-tolerant than I am, but acknowledges that auto-free is the ideal human environment.

        Property rights tend to become confused with the rights attached to money, which is where the problems emerge.

        Favelas start with land (at very low cost or free by way of family), morph into shanty-towns then are adapted as owners procure more durable building materials:

        http://images.placesonline.com/photos/7021_antananarivo_favelas.jpg

        That’s middle, the end is this:

        http://www.brodyaga.ru/images/France/Eguisheim%201%20brodyaga.ru.jpg

        Favelas are car free b/c nobody can afford cars.

      2. Reverse Engineer

        They’re also car free because of the terrain features upon which they are built, the steep sides of mountains. A ig part of the reason Carz haven’t encroached on much of Alaska is because the terrain is extremely difficult to road build on.

        This also explains why areas like West Virginia were essentially left to be populated by poor people and never saw a whole heck of a lot of economic development, other than for mineral extraction.

        RE

    1. Sandor

      The low on the DXY today thus far is 75.125. The high on the VWO is 42.99. Both gaps will be filled soon. All my targets have been hit on the SP, Euro, and WTI crude. Almost time to short…

      1. robert in london

        Didn’t we just close above the 200dma? By the way, how is that old college girlfriend treating you these days?

  8. shacain

    Excerpt re-posted from Reverse Engineer:

    I’m having more and more trouble with humanity. As time goes on, are more people getting worse?. I find myself wondering about some kind of contagion of the soul as if from a drug or a virus.

    All this violence against the citizens in the OWS attempts, the deaf, dumb and blindness of TPTB, the extent of the propaganda we have endured for decades.. this is leading somewhere and it may be deliberate.
    Black hole type of phenomenon as in things are worsening and elongating into some inescapable worm-hole like death but I never thought of black holes or death as unholy.
    I’m beginning to think that the ‘potential’ unholiness about all this is the point, rather than the end of the world or the NWO or the earth resetting.
    That our call is to begin with “save as many as you can”, but not to stop with it.

  9. James

    Upon further reflection, the decaying homes have led me to a new motto for living in the 21st century, “Don’t get caught in the rot.” In other words, where economic opportunity has declined to a point where city services are no longer reliable, jobs are scarce, infrastructure is rotting and the average citizen is hopelessly below-average, it’s time to move on. “Don’t get caught in the rot.” At some point the gangrenous rot will poison the entire civilization and the systems that enable high-density living will succumb. Can cells and their molecular populations ever escape the failing organisms of which they were a part? No. But remember, you do not have to be a “citizen” or be very tightly integrated into society and stupidly follow the herd. With preparation, you can survive until your highly integrated and delusional compatriots stop moving by death or rearrange themselves into something much more suitable to the energy and resources environment, which will also result in catastrophic loss of imagined wealth and a high mortality rate.

    It’s probably best to help family and friends now by informing them of the impending situation. Later, as the last rites fill the air, escape will not be an option, you will have been caught in the rot.

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