Suburbia is unsustainable

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I recently wrote about James Kunstler's book "The Geography of Nowhere" and about the fact that the car society (“made in the U.S.”) is grossly unsustainable. There is hardly any structure less durable after global oil production peaks than the countless and endless American suburbs. The American way of life epitomizes the wasting of cheap energy. To build and to live in a sprawling suburb and to be so totally dependent on cars is not a good position to be in when heating (or air conditioning) becomes expensive and when driving a car and maintaining a “thinned-out” infrastructure (electricity, water, roads) becomes prohibitively expensive. The fact that detailed zoning laws by default prohibits commercial activities in residential areas (for example neighborhood stores), means that the nearest supermarket is usually located so far away that any options beyond the car are hard to imagine for many Americans. 



We know that many American suburbs have problems with "subprime loans" and foreclosures today, but I think many people here in Sweden do not understand how bad things really are in some places in the United States. When I wrote about "The Geography of Nowhere", I linked to the 12-minute long film "Foreclosure Alley". I recommend it again as it opens doors and gives shocking glimpses of a total crisis of monumental unpreparedness and desperation. People who are evicted from their large, beautiful (new) houses lose hope and can't pull themselves together together to try to sell their stuff and lack the strength to pack up their stuff (or they do not have anywhere to take them) before they have to leave them. 



The business models that are presented in the film are fascinating in their perversity. Spraying dead lawns green to make them look more attractive is a great example of a Potemkin village and of the fact that surface nowadays is more important than substance. I have not been able to drop the idea and found this article about Nick Terlouw and his Greener Grass Company as well as the accompanying 2 minute long news flash fascinating. Nick works in Stockton, California, "the ground zero of the foreclosure issue," and the paradox is of course that the more people that are evicted, the better the business for the Greener Grass Company. 



A customer says that "it turns the grass green and makes the neighborhood look decent again." The fact that the grass looks fine is important, that it actually still is dead (and the human tragedies that can be imagined behind each dead lawn) becomes a secondary matter. "After the spraying, the grass had a sparkling appearance and looked not only alive but also lush and thriving" - and all this for only 200 dollars! How can someone lose hope and think that there are problems that human inventiveness cannot solve when Greener Grass Company proves how easy it is to far surpass what nature has given us! Further research has led me to the company Tate Turf Painting - "the leader in grass painting" ("We have developed a process that can have a lawn a beautiful, natural looking green within a matter of hours"). Tate Turf can provide you with everything you need to start up your own greenwashing business (equipment, color and training). 



Any change has its winners and its losers. Among the more humorous (?) phenomena are skateboarders who use real estate brokers' sites or satellite imagery from Google Earth to find empty houses with large pools, which they then convert and skate in. At an internet forum, a skateboarder writes 'God bless Greenspan, patron saint of pool skatin' ". Well then, at least one person looks at the current economic situation and likes what’s going on. 



Moving back to "Foreclosure Alley", I think we can agree that it is shocking, but it does not say much about how this situation could occur or what will happen in the future. I therefore went back and read "The next slum?" again. It is written by Christopher Leinberger, a professsor of urban planning at the University of Michigan, and it was published in The Atlantic Monthly in March 2008. I read it last spring, before the subprime crisis had reached hurricane strength, and the article made a deep impression on me. While subprime loans at the time had emerged as a problem, this was before the financial and economic crisis crisis crashed the party (the explosion occured half a year later, in the autumn of 2008). 



What Leinberger’s article describes is how some recently-built suburbs - the furthest away from everything and everyone, therefore most dependent on cars and bought by the financially weakest players on the market – are collapsing. One example is Windy Ridge, 110 kilometers (!) Northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina. In late 2007, 81 of 132 homeowners had been evicted. Thieves had broken into empty homes to steal wires and sell them for the value of copper. In some cases, the walls had been smashed to get at copper pipes, and also brass and aluminum were desirable materials to steal from abandoned houses. The market value of a looted house naturally falls a lot. “a ‘notice of foreclosure’ letter affixed to its door [is] like a big billboard saying 'come and take me'." When do we get "house-sitters" (compare this future profession with babysitters or parking attendants) who may live for free if they guard and manage a bunch of abandoned houses in order to maintain as much as possible of their value? 



The 50 homeowners who still lived in Windy Ridge now had new neighbors; homeless, drug addicts and criminal gangs that slowly entered the area and made it their home. It is easy to imagine that the woman who was interviewed had no further desire to live in Windy Ridge after a stray bullet went through her son's bedroom and into her own. But what are her options? Who in their right mind would like to buy her house at a price that has even a teneous connection to what she paid for it only a few years earlier? 



The sad story of Windy Ridge is repeated a year later in the story of Lehigh Acres, Florida. In early 2009, houses were sold for a fifth of the top prices three years earlier. Besides drugs, marihuana cultivation and scrap thieves, hunger and desperation is becoming a growing concern among those who remain. Houses have started to be sold again, but average price is ony 45 000 $ - one third of the costs of building the houses. 



In Windy Ridge and other areas where (many) homeowners have been evicted, you finally reach a breakpoint or a tipping point; when a sufficient number of houses stand empty the whole area changes, crime increases and those homeowners who remain become trapped in a vise as they can’t get a “decent” price for their houses and move on. Leinberger’s article is based on the premise that even before the subprime crisis exploded, Americans' preferences for housing was slowly changing. After 60 years of migrating to the suburbs (further and further away from the city), the pendulum started to swing back. The consequences are that many suburbs that currently still look nice are "living dead" and face a bitter fate. Their fate is similar to many American inner cities that in the1960s and 1970s declined into becoming slums with high crime rates, poverty and decay. This in turn accelerated the flight away from the inner cities for everyone who could afford to get away. 



The triump of the suburbs began in earnest after World War II. Escape from New York (1981) portrayed the city's low-water mark - the city was in such a state of decay and so unloved that nothing remained but to put up a fence around it and turn it into a prison. Today, the city has instead become hip through TV shows like Seinfeld, Friends and Sex and the City. 



But what will happen with all the scattered "McMansions" that exist today? If we take Desperate Housewives’ upper-middle-class "Wisteria Lane" and downgrade it one or two levels, where does that leave us? It is possible to imagine a suburbian cul-de-sac makover - from a handful of scattered houses to a "real" street with houses and shops that you can walk between without a car. Or perhaps you could tear down a few houses and build a nice park? Neither proposal will become common for a couple of different reasons. First, they are costly. Second, you would have to buy many plots and houses at one sweep, something that is difficult if only a few owners object to the plan. Third, there are currently major political and legal obstacles to implementing such projects. Fourth, the existing infrastructure is not well adapted to denser settlements. 



A more likely scenario is that prices in (certain) neighborhoods continue to fall until they hit rock bottom and the houses are purchased by families with very low incomes - or they might be bought and subdivided so that each house can accommodate multiple tenants. Some might become cheap hotels (flop houses) where you can rent rooms by the day, the week or the month. Still, it is difficult to see how those living in a distant suburb can earn a living when they are stranded far from the city, from jobs and even from the nearest supermarket. Another problem is that today's American suburban houses (even the bigger and nicer houses) are cheaply constructed and will not last that many years without extensive maintenance work. 



The neighborhoods best positioned to survive more or less unscathed from the scenario above are those that are economically prosperous, situated close to the city or along rail tracks or that are near a walking-friendly suburban center. 



In an article from this year, Leinberger points out that the problem is deeper even than the number of foreclosures and that it can take a generation or longer to work through the societal changes that so far have only started in the United States. About half of all Americans want to live in detached houses (in suburbs), but 80% of the U.S. housing stock is currently situated there, while only 20% is situated in cities or city-like environments ("walkable urban arrangements"). Since we replace houses only slowly, it can easily take up three decades for supply and demand to become balanced, and a study shows that there may be more than 20 million empty homes in America's suburbs 15 years from now. Just as Kunstler argued already 15 years ago, Leinberger says the U.S. has built too many houses, to much office and retail space and all of it situationed in the wrong places:




”For the owners of that retail or housing space, every dollar that they invest will be money they don’t get back. That is another definition of a slum. There’s no incentive to invest in a slum. So here you are. You buy a 4,000 square foot house [370 m2] 40 miles [65 km] outside town. You think, wow, I got great value. But when the roof begins to go, you just patch it, because if you put a new one on it’ll cost $20,000, you’ll still be at the same selling price. So, why do it?”



”There will be losers. And, yes, this is junk we’re putting up now. What’s the life expectancy of particle board and plywood under even the best of circumstances? So you have a suburb full of flimsy houses in the middle of nowhere, with no incentive for upkeep. That’s an ugly situation.”

Leinberger's text reflects the main current trends in the United States, but the joker in the deck is of course peak oil. If energy becomes radically more expensive, it is an even worse idea to live far away from everything and everyone, and the painful process of restructuring living arrangements in a whole society will be even faster and cause more harm and suffering. What do the trends above mean for us here in Sweden? Our houses are smaller and are built more densely in our residential suburbs. We also have better public transportation, even in suburbia. I would in any case, personally, for sure not buy a nice house far away and make myself totally dependent on having one or two cars to get to work or the grocery store.


This text was originally published in Swedish on June 11, 2009.
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"The geography of nowhere" by Kunstler (1993)

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Although James Howard Kunstler’s "Geography of Nowhere: The rise and decline of America's man-made landscape" (1993) is more than 15 years old, there are good reasons to take a look at his book at this particular point in time as it clearly is more relevant today than when it was published. In hindsight, it is possible to see that much of what James wrote was on the spot - almost prophetical - even if it is only now that this is becoming more and more obvious to more and more people.



James is a man with an almost sacred mission, and he preaches his doctrines as intensively as a teleevangelist preaches the glory of Jesus. He hammers in his message again and again and repeatedly comes back to two issues that overlap and interact and that penetrate all aspects of Americans’ daily lives; cars and houses. Anyone who wants to get to know James’ very critical views can check out his blog, Clusterfuck Nation, where he writes a new column every Monday. 



There is a whole complex of issues and industries that interact around cars, energy (oil), financing, road construction, (lack of) public transportation, politics, philosophy, etc. Houses (buildings) are really much broader than just the domiciles we live in and comprises both of private homes as well as commercial and public buildings. The way U.S. houses have been built, and cities designed, and the central role of cars all depend on each other, meet and are bound together by the arteries of American Society – its roads.



Since I have have lived in the U.S. myself, several questions that I have wondered about are answered by this book. Why are most neigborhoods in the U.S. built so that it is impossible to manage without a car? How is it possible to build roads without sidewalks in residential areas? Why are there are no neighborhood stores and why is the nearest supermarket always so far away? Why are the streets amazingly broad even in quiet residential neighborhoods? Why are so few people taking a stroll through their neighborhood and why are so few places within walking distance that are worth visiting in the first place?



The last question is not difficult to answer. The streets are broad, the blocks are huge and the distances are large; it is incredibly monotonous and boring to walk beside a completely straight road for 20 or 30 minutes. The whole environment is constructed so as to be traversed safely by a car traveling at 40-60 km/h and the restless brain of a curious human is just not getting enough stimulation when you are out walking in an American residential neighborhood. It is similarly very boring to walk any longer distances next to a Swedish highway or expressway.



Regardless of what the actual speed limits happen to be, the 12 meter wide roads of American suburbia are designed to be ultra-safe (for drivers) so that even a mediocre car driver can whoosh by in 70-80 km/h without risking the destruction of the car. The primary function of those roads is to channel suburban cars to the highways. The big losers of this arrangement are children who can not move freely outside of their homes without risking life and limb (beyond the fact that there are few destinations worth visiting within walking or biking distance).

Since children still need to get to school, many ride school buses to get there - a separate public transport system that "operates at huge expense, is restricted to children, and runs only twice a day". Based on their limited freedom of movement, it is understandable that many young Americans’ highest dream is to have their own car as soon as they reach the age of 16. James notes that it is basically impossible to live in any U.S. neigborhood built since 1950 without having access to a car.



Another aspect of the human-built landscape that James dislikes is that it is cheap. Cheap to build, cheap to demolish, and, it looks cheap. Many neighborhoods consist of identical houses on identical lots along identical streets in identical neighborhoods. People travel along identical highways along which there are identical strip malls. Everything looks like everything else and nothing looks like something special. It is this "nowhere" that James refers to in the title of his book:



”long-distance car travel on an interstate highway is literally like going nowhere fast”. […] There is little sense of having arrived anywhere because everyplace looks like noplace in particular. […] we chose to live in Noplace, and our dwellings show it. In every corner of the nation we have built places unworthy of love and move on from them without regret.”


James writes a lot about the crappy architecture; outside of the cities cookie-cutter houses and shopping barns are erected – buildings of poor quality that do not deserve our love, or even to be taken care of. Little of what is built is meant to last for longer than in a decade or two, which means that as houses have “progressed” from being crafted to becoming a commodity - which are now consumed. In many places in the U.S., the plot is worth much more than the house and it is not uncommon to tear down an old house and build a new, rather than to maintain something that was never meant to withstand the test of time. Over time, the emotionally-charged “home” has moved towards becoming an interchangeable “house”, a place where a family “happens” to reside, eat and sleep at the moment, but which can quickly be “flipped” if something better turns up. 


James was very aware of the importance of oil to the American economy and of America's dependence on (imported) oil already back in 1993 when he wrote the book. He warned aginst continuing on the road taken, but was of course preaching to deaf ears. In addition to (significant) negative social effects of an atomized and dispersed society, and adverse effects on human physical and mental health, James characterizes the built environment of the U.S. as the greatest misallocation of resources ever: 



”America has now squandered its national wealth erecting a human habitat that […] will not be usable very much longer […] suburban sprawl is too expensive to operate, too costly to maintain […]. To lose it is tragic not because America will be deprived of such wonderful conveniences as K-Marts and drive-in churches […] but becuase it was a foolish waste of resources in the first place, and it remains to be seen whether its components can be recycled, converted to other uses, or moved.”


Today, 15 years later, we can in hindsight see that instead of changing direction during the 1990s and early 2000s, the course of action was to press the accelerator, borrow more money, build more houses and more suburbs, buy more cars and build more roads. James already at the time predicted that based on the enormous amounts of resources that had already been squandered by building a car society, the course of action would be to continue to "throw good money after bad" rather than attempting to imagine alternatives and ways to change society so as to make it less dependent on cars (and oil).



Many different factors now conspire and together indicate that we have reached the end of the road, and that James's 1993 predictions are coming true, "Today's posh suburbs could easily become tomorrow's slums." Very shocking to me was this one year old and 12-minutes long film, "Foreclosure Alley" from Southern California. In the wake of “epidemic” of foreclosured homes, new depressing business opportunities appear; spraying brown dead grass green so as to make the plot and the house look more vibrant and attractive, and, to empty and throw away all that is left behind in a foreclosured house, including furniture, photographs, toys, food and fully functional consumer electronics in the shortest possible period of time. Some of yesterday's brand new suburbs (the most recently built which are furthest away from the cities) are becoming ghost towns where squatters and criminal gangs move in as the previous homeowners move out and leave empty houses behind.



Although the U.S. is in the eye of the storm when our current solutions for transportation and and housing are "challenged" after peak oil, we Europeans can not sit back and believe that we will escape the coming changes unharmed. But it is a fact that our position is significantly better. Already in the nascence of “happy motoring”, in the early 1900s, Europe was forced to import the majority of its oil while the U.S. had huge, seemingly endless resources of oil. Even though there are many car-huggers also here in Sweden, our relationship with the car is still a pale copy of the Americans' long love affair. We have smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, higher gasoline prices, more dense settlements, we drive less, build fewer and narrower roads and have better developed public transportation systems. Our starting point is thus in many ways better, but unfortunately also we tend to - even in this late hour - to place headless bets on more airfields and runways and on expanding or building new highways, instead of more cycle paths and better public transport system.


This text was originally published in Swedish on May 25, 2009.
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Energy free of charge

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A little more than 50 years ago, Lewis Strauss, chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, proclaimed that the promise that nuclear power brings is that "It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter". The phrase "too cheap to meter" occasionally pops up when an accusing finger points at that phrase as proof that nuclear power has not fulfilled what it promised, or more generally, that new technology is always hyped and that the hopes of techo-optimists are not to be trusted. The idea I explore here is instead that energy for all practical purposes has been and still is free of charge (but that this of course will change radically when peak oil becomes apparent to everyone).

By some calculations based on local Swedish conditions (Flygare and Isacson, 1999), 19 days of manual harvesting - hard physical work 200 years ago - has been replaced by an hour of driving a tractor today. We have in similar ways replaced the vast majority of physical labor by humans or animals - days of toil and sweat moving rocks, logs or merchandise - with the energy contained in one gallon of petrol or diesel. The most common use of petrol today is of course to quickly move hundreds of millions of big heavy metal containers - with (usually) one person inside each - back and forth, back and forth. The average Swedish car weighed more than 1 400 kilos in 2007 according to statistics from the Swedish Institute for Transport and Communications, SIKA.

The term "energy slave" represents the amount of energy needed to replace the work of a manual laborer. The energy content of a gallon of gasoline is roughly equivalent to the force a person can develop during one month of hard physical work. The implication is that in the western world we all can be said to have many energy slaves working for us 24 hours a day in order to maintain our current high-energy lifestyles.

The average American has according to some estimates a three-digit number of energy slaves and even though we Swedes may not have as many slaves, we still play in the same league. Exact estimates of the number of energy slaves varies widely, but the point of using the concept is to convey an understanding in more human terms of the fact that each one of us - unconsciously and perhaps feeling that we are entitled to - make use of large amounts of energy in order to maintain our modern western lifestyles. In ancient Egypt, 95% of the population was directly employed in agriculture and they managed to (only) generate a surplus of energy (food) that was sufficient for feeding the remaining 5% of the population who were slaves and built the pyramids. In "the bad old times" energy was thus Expensive.

The next step here is to show not only that we today use energy in abundance, but also that this energy is very very cheap. I here borrow from Richard Heinberg who argues that it has been sufficient to work for 20 minutes with a statutory minimum wage in the U.S. in order to afford a gallon of gasoline. Twenty minutes of (probably not very physically demanding) work thus gives us access to energy equivalent to up to 200 hours of hard physical work. Exchanging 20 minutes for 200 hours gives us an exchange ratio of a factor of 600 (and far higher if you have a higher salary)!

It is thus impossible to deny that energy is very cheap today. With a longer historical perspective, energy is so incredibly cheap that it can for all practical purposes be regarded as free in our modern society. It might not feel that way when you pay at the pump or when you get the electricity bill, but it is very much so in a longer historical sense. The only reason the electricity bill hurts is because we use so insanely much of that product. A traditional light bulb of 100 Watts uses as much energy in an hour as (or is on par with what) a man performing hard physical labor (an energy slave) can develop during the same amount of time! If electricity was generated by bodily work, we would need an extra man working for us for each lightbulb we wanted to have lit. Low-energy lightbulbs are of course preferable, but we have at this point not even begun to talk about the costs of keeping the fridge, stove, washing machine or our consumer electronics running, or the costs for heating water for a shower.

Perhaps it is possible to push this argument a little bit further and claim that as long as we as a society can afford to maintain our current lifestyle, energy for all practical purposes remains free. When then would energy start to cost? Well, maybe when:

- we as a society must make difficult choices that may seem radical today.
- we discover that the amount of energy (electricity, gasoline, heating) we can purchase with 25% of our disposable income has shrunk considerably, forcing us to make some hard choices.
- most individuals can no longer afford to own/drive cars
- we no longer can afford a summer cottage or to go on vacation (forget abroad)
- we can not afford to heat or cool our McMansions (and forget the pool)

Living conditions is a hidden “energy thief” that many might not think about even though it costs significant amounts of energy to build, heat and maintain our housing. The average Swede has access to 44 m2 (475 ft2) of dwelling per person - an increase of over 60% since the late 70's. Other more authoritave sources such as Statistics Sweden report figures as high as 55 m2 (600 ft2) per person which would mean that we Swedes have doubled our living space per person in as little as 30 years.

According to Jonas Frycklund, an economist at the pro-industry lobby group Confederation of Swedish Enterprise, the average living space per person in the U.S. is 70 m2 (750 ft2) per person. That figure might be correct but as it so happens, Jonas also thinks that we will live in larger houses and consume more in the future and he confidently looks forward to when "the children of our grandchildren will relax in their pools and with good conscience reflect on the fact that that they do not exert any pressure on the environment."

Sweden has the largest number of single households in the world and Stockholm is the top single-household capital of the world. It is obviously more expensive (and more energy consuming) per person to live by yourself rather than to share a household with others. No less than 47% of all households in Sweden are single households and a further 28% consists of two persons. In one part of central Stockholm, Kungsholmen, 80% (!) of all households are single households (I do not know if a single parent qualifies a "single household"). Is it sustainable to have so many refrigerators and stoves and TVs in so many relatively large and sparsely inhabited apartments? Not in a world where energy is no longer free, because in that world we will have to crowd together and share the cost...

Some of the figures presented above can be contested and discussed. There are several factors that you could examine further, for example:

- Exactly how does one define an "energy slave"? Input (energy in terms of food) or output (work you get)? What force can a human being sustainably exert during 8 or 10 or 12 hours of hard physical work?
- How many hours does one month's work consist of? 160 hours (40 hours/week x 4 weeks/month + some holidays) or 320 hours (12 hours/day x 6 days/week)?
- What is the minimum wage (and the average wage) in the US and elsewhere in relation to the price of gasoline (or electricity).

None of this however changes the basic argument proposed above. Energy is from a historical perspective incredibly cheap – for all practical purposes free - and in the long term (beyond the oil peak) practices that we very much take for granted will by necessity be reshaped and altered or altogether disappear. Our challenge is to ensure that “different” does not necessarily and unilaterally mean "worse", but that we can rather find good solutions that can work in a sustainable low-energy society.

After I started to play around with the idea that energy today is free of charge (this text) and that transportation therefore is free or charge too (the following text), I have acquired new conceptual glasses that allow me to see the world in new ways. Media theorist Marshall McLuhan noted that we do not know who discovered water, but we do know that it was not a fish. The point is that it is difficult to see what we swim in, is surrounded by, and take for granted. It is easier to become aware of your own culture and the things taken for granted when you are abroad, when you discover that things work differently there and gain the opportunity to reflect on the differences between here and there.

The same is true for energy and transportation. Our society takes the stable supply of cheap energy for granted to the extent that we are not aware of this fact and have a hard time imagining any alternatives. Only with a provocative claim that "energy is free of charge" - which of course is not true in the literal sense - can we start to think about and recognize the full scope and the implications of what will happen - in all areas - when energy no longer is free, but instead will Cost Big Time.

When I went to IKEA at two p.m. in mid-November last year, I all of a sudden opened my eyes to the fact that there were thousands of lamps along the highway that were already starting to light up. And when I one hour later sat in IKEA's autumn-decorated restaurant, I noticed that I was surrounded by yet more lights in all the windows. It is at times like these that you lean back and ponder. … for example on the fact that the gasoline for driving 25 kilometers back and forth to IKEA only costs a few dollars and that the late lunch at IKEA therefore still was much cheaper than if we would have stayed at home and gone around the corner for a lunch at the neighborhood pub...

Who is today thinking about electricity consumption and the cost of power when we buy a food processor or a DVD player? You and me both, for all practical purposes, treat energy as if it was free of charge. Try to argue against it!


This text was originally published in Swedish on December 2, 2008.


Reference
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Flygare, Iréne and Isacson, Maths (1999). "Jordbruket i välfärdssamhället: 1945-2000" [Agriculture in Welfare Society: 1945-2000]. Stockholm: Natur & Kultur. (Book 5 in the series "History of Swedish Agriculture").
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