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If
the Devil created an anti-city, a place where people would feel least human,
Atlanta would surely be that place -- despite the prayerful babble of tongues
emanating from the evangelical roller rinks at every freeway off-ramp. One
might think: Los Angeles, but that city at least came up with the amenity of
valet parking, mostly lacking in Atlanta, where the suffocating heat slows
the journey of blood from heart to brain.
My
homeys, the New Urbanists, held their annual
meeting at the "downtown" Hilton there this past week -- a most
mysterious selection, perhaps due to an x-treme
discount on room rates in a time of austerity. The New Urbanists
first came together about twenty years ago as a campaign to reform the tragic
fiasco of suburbia. By taking this on they were often labeled as enemies of
the American Way Of Life and Christian Decency, but they are a valiant band.
I'd guess that architects composed about two-thirds of the org and the rest
included developers, planning officials, a few college professors and
journalists. They were all out of the mainstream, especially of architecture,
whose stock-in-trade had become the emperors
new clothes.
The basic idea behind the New Urbanism was that the quality and character of
the places where we spend our lives matters, and that the surrender of the
entire American landscape to Happy Motoring was an historic aberration that
had to be corrected if the USA was going to continue as a viable project.
Among other things, they noticed that if people live in places that aren't
worth caring about, sooner or later they end up being a nation not worth
defending -- and this is on top of the daily personal punishments suffered by
hundreds of millions of people dwelling in a geography of nowhere.
At
the time they first got going, the idea of peak oil barely existed outside a
small circle of geologists, so the battles were fought mostly on other
grounds. They were up against a lot. The collective American identity was
invested in the idea of the suburban utopia, and the sheer dollar investments
in the infrastructure of it all -- everything from the interstate highways to
the housing subdivisions to the strip malls -- was so massive that nobody
wanted to think about changing it. What's more, a massive system had evolved
for delivering what came to be labeled as suburban sprawl, especially the
laws that regulated land-use, so that in most places in the USA it was
illegal to build anything else but sprawl.
The New Urbanists were fiercely opposed, usually
for stupid reasons by stupid people, but also by the mandarin architecture
establishment, especially in the grad schools, where mysticism supported a
set of theological rackets in the service of celebrity cults divorced from
the public nature of things that get built. In the local planning boards, the
New Urbanists were accused of being communists; in
the ivory towers they were accused of being slaves to worn-out traditions --
like walking from home to work. They certainly proved one principal of the
human condition: that even the best ideas will generate
opposition.
The New Urbanists had to work within this system.
They had to find allies among developers who aspired to create better places,
and they had to get under the hood of regulatory system to rewrite the laws
in thousands of municipalities. They got a lot of projects built, new
neighborhoods and even whole new towns. Many of these places came out
beautifully. Some of them were badly compromised in the fight to get them built.
Some of them were rip-offs that amounted to little more than the usual
suburban schlock with a little window-dressing.
It's a bitter irony that the most ambitious New Urbanist
projects were made possible within the context of the housing bubble economy.
For about a decade money seemed to grow on trees. Most of that money went
into conventional suburban crapola and a small
percentage of it went into New Urbanist projects,
but when the bubble burst, it crushed all the players, regardless of the ultimate
social value of what they produced.
I
heard a lot of stories during the meeting in Atlanta last week but one really
stood out. It was about the money and revealed a lot about what is going on
in our banking system these days. A New Urbanist
developer had gotten a small project going for a traditional neighborhood.
Despite the global financial clusterfuck, the
developer was able to meet the payments of his commercial loan. But the
FDIC sent bank examiners around America and they told the small regional
banks that if they had more than twenty percent of their loans in commercial
real estate (CRE) they would be put out of business. The banks were ordered
to reduce their loads of CRE by calling in the loans and liquidating the
assets. Ironically, the banks only called in their "performing"
loans, the ones that were being regularly paid off, because they were
ignoring and even concealing the ones that weren't being paid.
The developer in question had his loan called in when the FDIC descended on
his bank. He couldn't pay off the $3 million in one lump, of course. The
FDIC's agents are going to seize and sell off his project if he can't get it
refinanced in short order. He can't get it refinanced because there is
now such a shortage of capital in the banking system that no one can get a
loan for anything. Also, since it is now well-known that the bank failed, the
vultures are circling above his project hoping to buy it for a discount, so
even the few private investors who have money won't throw him a lifeline. By
the way, the FDIC agents told him they are doing this because they now expect
that virtually all commercial real estate loans in the USA will fail in the
months ahead. Pretty scary story, huh? And he was one of the good guys.
I suppose it was a tragic thing that they New Urbanists
made themselves hostage to the same banking system that was behind suburban
sprawl. Apart from the personal stories of misfortune among them, the
movement is still alive. In fact, they have emerged the victors in the long
contest over how America will build itself, because
it is now self-evident that suburban sprawl is an epic failure. Whether
Americans like it or not, whether their identity is tied up in the suburban
fantasy or not, we are faced with circumstances that now compel us to live
differently.
Among other things, the most forward-looking leaders in the New Urbanist movement now recognize that we have to
reorganize the landscape for local food production, because industrial
agriculture will be one of the prime victims of our oil predicament. The
successful places in the future will be places that have a meaningful
relationship with growing food close to home. The crisis in agriculture is
looming right now -- with world grain reserves at their lowest level ever
recorded in modern times -- and when it really does hit, the harvestmen of
famine and death will be in the front ranks of it.
This eighteenth Congress of the New Urbanism was held in the shadow of a
banking system in extreme crisis and an epic ecological catastrophe brewing
in the Gulf of Mexico. The three crisis of capital,
energy, and global ecology will now determine what we do, not the polls or
the marketing analyses or the whims of "consumers." The great
achievement of the New Urbanists was not the
projects they built during the final orgasm of the cheap energy orgy. It was
the knowledge they retrieved from the dumpster of history. We really do know
where to go from here. Whether the people of the USA have the will to
take themselves there now is another issue.
Also in the background of this Congress was the bizarre organism of Atlanta,
which represents in so many ways the behavior that can't continue in this
country if we are going to remain civilized. A prankish destiny put us in the
worst place at the worst time and the next time we meet America is going to
be a different country.
James Howard Kunstler
www.kunstler.com/
James Howard Kunstler’s
new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is
available at all booksellers.
James Kunstler has worked
as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a
staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine. In 1975, he dropped out to write
books on a full-time basis.
His latest nonfiction book, "The Long
Emergency," describes the changes that American society faces in the
21st century. Discerning an imminent future of protracted socioeconomic
crisis, Kunstler foresees the progressive
dilapidation of subdivisions and strip malls, the depopulation of the
American Southwest, and, amid a world at war over oil, military invasions of
the West Coast; when the convulsion subsides, Americans will live in smaller
places and eat locally grown food.
You can purchase your own copy here
: The Long
Emergency .
You can get more from James Howard Kunstler -
including his artwork, information about his other novels, and his blog - at
his Web site : http://www.kunstler.com/
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