Original Sin (James Howard Kunstler)

[Tace]

James Howard Kunstler -- World News Trust

Sept. 21, 2009 -- In our history, the American nation committed obvious sins against select groups of people, and we've paid bitterly for some of that. But now it's our sins against the land itself that threaten to sink the USA as a viable enterprise.

It's odd, that in his otherwise excellent blow-by-blow account ("Eight Days," in the Sept. 21 New Yorker Magazine) of the September 2008 Wall Street meltdown that left Lehman dead, and AIG croaking in a ditch, and the banking system in general functionally crippled, reporter James B. Stewart never got around to really describing the cause of it all -- namely, the on-the-ground material catastrophe of American suburbia.

It was the worthlessness of the tradable securitized debt associated with all those overpriced (and overvalued) chipboard and vinyl houses, smeared recklessly over the American landscape, that started all the trouble in the first place. And it is our inability to come to grips with that underlying catastrophe that prolongs the resolution of the still-florid banking crisis -- since the federal government is doing everything possible to prop up the failed capital equation of terminal suburbia, and to deny the obsolescence of that version of the American Dream and all the mechanisms for delivering it.

The suburban project was not a conspiracy by the likes of Robert Moses, Walt Disney, Frank Lloyd Wright, and President Eisenhower to produce a living arrangement with no future. It was the emergent, self-organizing result of special circumstances in a particular time and place: post World War Two America, with an immense supply of cheap oil, cheap land, and the industrial capacity to churn out all the necessary components for a car-dependent development pattern. Suburbia was spawned out of a couple of persistent themes in American cultural history: 1.) that cities and city life were no good; 2.) and that the romance of settling the wilderness could be reenacted, at great profit, in all that space beyond the towns and cities. It would be silly to deny the appeal of this arrangement at its inception. By the end of WW II, city life in the popular imagination was reduced to one potently awful image: Ralph Kramden's apartment in "The Honeymooners" TV show.

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http://worldnewstrust.com/component/content/article/90/3727-original-sin-james-howard-kunstler

[Kolesar]

1. Housing in my town and the Cleveland metro area was never overpriced

Angst on pause, here

[happyslug]

2. I live in Johnstown PA, lost 1/3 of its metro population over the last 40 years

And I can NOT make the same statement. While low income and pre-WWII housing (inner city and pre-WWII suburbs) has gone down (in real terms) over the last 20 years, high end (Over $100,000) have gone up and kept up with the housing boom in the rest of the Nation (And gone down as the bubble unwrapped). It is these $100,000 plus homes that is causing the harm, the older homes are holding they own (most were only marginally affected by the Housing bubble) but those homes that went over $100,000 are the ones no one is buying today and as such dropping in price even in a depressed area like Johnstown Pennsylvania.