The mauling of America

As sprawl enters the political mainstream, author James Howard Kunstler predicts perilous times

by Ian Donnis

In time for the 2000 presidential election, sprawl has emerged as a buzzword on the national political circuit. While small bands of social critics have been talking about the soul-depleting quality of homogeneous development for years, sprawl has suddenly gained wider purchase, not to mention copious attention from the New York Times and National Public Radio. It makes sense, after all. According to the Times, one-half of American voters are now the very suburbanites who are being frazzled by traffic-choked highways and other byproducts of what Henry Miller presciently dubbed our air-conditioned nightmare.

Along with other advocates of the movement known variously as new urbanism and civic design, author James Howard Kunstler has been calling for a return to a dignified and sustainable form of development -- the kind evidenced in the scale and vintage architecture of Providence, Wickford and numerous other older American communities. But Kunstler, who will speak this week in Wakefield about his forthcoming book, Can America Survive the Suburbs?, is less than cheery about the outlook for curbing sprawl.

In his most recent book, Home From Nowhere (Simon & Schuster, 1996), Kunstler describes the sad irony that during the period of America's greatest prosperity, in the decades following World War II, "we put up almost nothing but the cheapest possible buildings." The collective wisdom of a less wealthy nation, when things were built with the expectation they would last, was quickly discarded during the dawn of the disposable consumer culture that now envelops us.

The old way of building, writes Kunstler, was meaningfully connected to both the past (by offering elegant solutions to the age-old problems posed by cycles of weather and light) and the future (in the belief that structures would endure through the lifetimes of the people who built them). The result was buildings that were not just practical and aesthetically pleasing, but which lent meaning and dignity to human lives.

Since 1945, however, the opposite has been true. Kunstler blames zoning laws for prohibiting the building of authentic places that are worthy of our affection, such as traditional Main Streets or mixed-income residential neighborhoods. Instead, new housing is segregated by income, and buildings are constructed with the expectation they will fall apart in a few decades. The rejection of past and future can be seen, Kunstler says, in the prevailing national landscape of junk and ugliness -- interchangeable highway strips, cookie-cutter office units, graceless big-box stores and plastic residential housing. All this, he says, is the surface expression of far deeper problems and the kind of unhappiness expressed as "the loss of community."

Kunstler, 50, spoke by telephone from his home in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Q: More and more affluent suburban voters are being adversely affected by sprawl. What impact will this have now that sprawl has emerged on the national political agenda?

A: Americans in every corner of the country are very dissatisfied with what has happened to their everyday world. I think they're having a hard time understanding it. In general, our culture is not disposed to changing its development habits, so this is going to prove to been a very difficult set of circumstances to resolve.

Q: How did you get interested in the problems posed by sprawl?

A: I've been interested in it every since I was a young newspaper reporter [in Albany, New York] 25 years ago. I am convinced that the problems of our everyday environment are responsible for a lot of the unhappiness in our culture. We've created a living arrangement for ourselves that is economically catastrophic, ecologically insane, socially toxic, and spiritually degrading.What we're living in now, from sea to shining sea, is a national automobile slum. It is a setting that fails to reward us in so many ways that we may not be able to carry on the difficult enterprise of civilization within it. We've managed to create a whole land full of places that are no longer worth caring about, and they are beginning to add up to a country that's not worth defending.

I'm talking about the quality of the national automobile slum as the universal setting -- the panorama of highway strips, housing malls, freeways, and other accessories of the national car slum.

Q: People can easily feel overwhelmed by the omnipresence of sprawl. What can people do to make a difference?

A: This is a matter of deeply reforming our cultural consensus, which is the agreement between the citizens about what they want for their world. Sure, it's a good thing that voters are beginning to perceive this as a public issue. In fact, the only reason that it finally appeared on the national radar screen is because a grassroots revolution against this development has been underway for at least 10 years, taking place in every corner of this country. What we're seeing now is simply a recognition from the top of [something] that's been going on for a long time.

And I'm not optimistic that the politicians at the top are going to be able to deal with these issues. The smart growth rhetoric coming out of Washington these days has mostly been an extremely dumbed down version of the issue. For instance, not Al Gore, nor anybody else in Washington, has really mentioned the enormous web of federal subsidies that support and promote bad development.

Q: Your forthcoming book is called Can America Survive the Suburbs? What's the answer to that question?

A: I believe that economic and political forces will soon create conditions that will make suburban life untenable. The global financial crisis is real and is still with us, and will accelerate in gravity when the US stock market bubble blows up. The Y2K problem will aggravate it. I predict that one of the main effects of Y2K will be disruptions in the world oil markets, meaning unstable supplies and prices. The 1973 oil problem amounted to a net loss of 5 percent of our imported oil -- and it caused a decade of stagflation and other economic illnesses, like 15 percent interest rates. Y2K may easily cause us to lose between 15 and 30 percent of our imported oil, and we import more oil now as a percent of total oil than in '73. These disruptions will occur in countries that we have no control over.

Moreover, I believe that we are moving into a period of international political instability and military mischief that will accompany and be aggravated by events like Y2K disruptions of oil markets and global trade and finance. The bottom line is that suburbia can only function under extraordinarily favorable and stable conditions. Imagine Atlanta, or Phoenix, as it is today, if we had a gas crisis even on the scale of the '73 event.

There's no guarantee that we are going to survive this calamity, because history is merciless and history doesn't shed any tears for cultures that destroy themselves. This is not a Bruce Willis movie with a happy ending; this is real life. We have made some disastrous choices about how we live. Personally, I believe that the next five or 10 years will bring us a stunning loss of equity value in all types of suburban real estate, and that economic forces are under way that are going to require us to live differently in this country. Specifically, they will require us to live and to re-condense our lives into coherent neighborhoods, towns, and even cities.

Q: That last part doesn't sound so bad.

A: Not if we respond to it well. The danger is the economic stress produced by this set of circumstances will also produce delusional politics. Americans feel that they're entitled to a very specific package of goodies, and if economic forces prevent them from enjoying these goodies, they may turn to political maniacs to bring back the good old days of the 1990s.

Q: Why do you have serious doubts about whether society will survive the threat of sprawl and development?

A: In essence, we have invested the accumulated national wealth of the 20th century in constructing a living arrangement that may not work in the future. Many of the components of the system -- the highway strip buildings, the housing pods made of chipboard and vinyl -- were not designed to last more than a human lifetime. A lot of it will simply have to be thrown away, or will fall into ruins. Also, when we reach peak world oil production, estimated to be between 2003 and 2010, depending on the source, we will leave the age of cheap oil behind and enter the age of increasingly expensive oil -- also an age of erratic supplies and unstable prices. We will look back at the last 50 years of the 20th century as a very abnormal period in human history.

Q: What about those people who think, "yeah, maybe there's more traffic than I'd like on the ride home, but the stock market's going great and my life is pretty good"?

A: This is such a short-sighted and complacent point of view. The idea that we're going to be able to continue living like this forever is really very childish. If one thing is certain about human history, it's that circumstances change, often drastically. Anyone who thinks we're going to be living like this 25 years from now is going to be very surprised. We really have to be prepared for some serious changes, even if we like suburbia. One of the serious delusions I hear today is that just because we like something, we're entitled to have it forever, and that [kind of thinking] has enormous costs.

The amount of confusion out there is enormous. Americans are not doing very well coping with this problem. It is evident in the phenomenon of nimbyism, which is essentially organized political paralysis. What it tells us is that many Americans don't like the kind of development they're getting, but the only solution they can get is to do nothing and allow nothing to be built.

In fact, there is a whole body of culture that is concerned with the design and assembly of the human habitat. It is called civic design and, about 50 years ago, we threw all this skill and knowledge in the garbage can and decided to embark on the experiment of suburbia. Well, suburbia is proving to be a failure, and we now have to go back to the Dumpster of history and dive in, and retrieve all this valuable knowledge and skill that we lost, in order to learn how to build towns and neighborhoods that are worth caring about and worth living in.

Q: What are the primary signs of the contemporary dissatisfaction that you describe? How are these forms of dissatisfaction linked to sprawl?

A: Try Littleton, Colorado.

Q: What kind of communities do you believe will fare will in the future?

A: I believe that Americans will before long have a lot of incentives to move back into traditional towns and cities. I hasten to add that the city of the next century will probably be different from the industrial city of the last two centuries, both in physical form and in character. My sense is that we are going to have to reduce our dependence on cars substantially, and the traditional town is the perfect solution for this. What's missing currently is any sense that American towns and cities are worth living in. Obviously, the majority of citizens would not elect to move to suburbia if American towns really offered a rewarding experience. Therefore, it is tremendously important that we improve the quality and character of our towns and cities, so that people will be delighted to live in them.

Q: Tell me about the communities that you're familiar with in Rhode Island.

A: Providence has enormous potential for civic restoration. The downcity neighborhood is virtually preserved-in-mothballs, ready-to-be-reused. College Hill is arguably one of the 10 best urban neighborhoods in America. And there are several other major neighborhoods that are ripe for revival. Personally, I think Providence is exactly the kind of town that Americans will be fortunate to rediscover. It is not overwhelming in size or scale, and it has managed to preserve a lot of its historic identity. Bristol is an interesting example of a smaller New England town that has allowed itself, to some degree, to be overwhelmed by suburbanization. Luckily, there is also enough of the traditional town fabric left intact [for use] as an armature for restoration in the 21st century.

Q: You describe a bleak outlook for the future. Do you see any reasons for optimism?

A: I see plenty of reasons for optimism -- if we make the right choices. However, if we desperately cling to the status quo of suburban sprawl and all the economic and social problems that it entails, we will probably destroy our country. I happen to believe that circumstances in the near future will probably not permit us to continue down that path, whether we love suburbia or not.

We are liable to see a certain amount of political mischief when suburbia fails and the tremendous economic and psychological investments we've made in it can no longer be defended on a rational basis. Society under these sorts of stresses often fail prey to delusional politics, and I'm afraid that we will see a politics of grievance arise when suburbia tanks out.

Kunstler will appear at the Larchwood Inn on Main Street in Wakefield on Wednesday, May 26 at 7:30 p.m. The talk is being sponsored by the South Kingstown Neighborhood Congress. Call 783-0887 for more information.

Ian Donnis can be reached at idonnis[a]phx.com.