Currently, much of our valuable farm land has been eliminated in favor of massive suburbs which are increasingly serving more as “places to lie down your head” than in real, sustainable neighborhoods. We do most of our living, playing and working anywhere BUT home.
Large areas of our cities have become "dormitory suburbs". The average household size is declining while ever-larger homes are increasingly empty during the working day. Their blind windows look out onto streets empty of people (but all too often filled with cars). There is an alienating lack of community resulting, ultimately, in increased crime and fear. (Ibid)
In a new work, Jack Lessinger notes that environmental pressures, not the consumer lending/subprime crisis, will cut the feet out from under our suburbs.
The sub prime debacle and the ensuing cavernous fall in home prices may finally sound the last bell tolled for suburbia. But, when asked for a cause of death, the answer won’t be bad lending practices, builder’s greed, devaluation, or even inflation. Can someone say, “It’s the environment, stupid”? That’s right, while Dr. Greenspan’s last-ditch gimmicks to save suburbia are coming unraveled (fed rates harkening back to the “Great Depression Era”, Please.), America appears to be on the verge of realizing that suburbia just isn’t environmentally sustainable, anyway. (Jack Lessinger, Transformation, the Fall of the Consumer Economy and the Rise of the Responsible Capitalist)
While it is too “politically incorrect” to hawk gentrification, this is where the nation’s cities are eventually headed. Those who have enough money to purchase homes, but not enough money to sustain long suburban commutes will be driven back to the nation’s cities, in a move that will increase demand for city real estate, making hereto fore unattractive, urban and ghetto real estate a prime rib of opportunity for the new urban homesteaders.
Lessinger believes that we are on the verge of a transformative lifestyle, a radical upheaval of American society based on the decline of petroculture.
Because it disrupts an old and familiar pattern of supply and demand, socioeconomic transformation produces massive uncertainty. Like poison in the economic bloodstream, uncertainty paralyzes energetic entrepreneurs and slows economic growth. Economic imbalances bring recession. Uncertainty—breeding and building during decades of transformation—brings depression. A period of unsatisfactory economic growth will not be corrected until transformation to the new society and economy is completed. Society changes slowly. (Ibid)
The “corrective period” which we are now entering will be launched by recession and could possibly be prolonged by economic catastrophe so deep, that the only difference between the coming economic nightmare and depression are the words used to describe it. Techno-man is slowly being drive out of the suburbs by rising transportation costs. As the new urban homesteader returns to the cities, the nation’s urban centers will undergo a rapid, possibly revolutionary renewal process.
The old model of decrepit, dangerous inner cities will give way through force of urban renovation, investment and the necessity of sustainable living. The ensuing juxtaposition of investment, political capital and restructuring of urban populations will be the defining moment of the 21st century. In the Fifth Migration, the battle over urban real estate, the transformation of entire cities and neighborhoods, the restructuring the the nation's food chain and economy will prove to be just as world shaking as the "European Discovery" of the "New World."
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