The Martians Are Leaving!

Someone once said with pungent simplicity that if a trend is unsustainable, it will end. The suburbanite lifestyle is not just an immoral and ostentatios display of borrowed "wealth" and an attempt to exclude anyone else who doesn't think just like they do, it's so energy, resource and time intensive that it cannot ultimately be sustained.

Monocultures - whether a cornfield or a suburb - are a violation of nature, and cannot be maintained without huge energy inputs. Complexity Theory makes this clear. Urban environments are far less resource consumptive. Europeans have only settled North America in large enough numbers to matter for about 300 years. We have not yet had to learn to live in harmony with nature, as have Europe and Asia (that balance has been upset since developed countries have transferred so much industrial production to them in recent years, but that's another discussion).

Americans took over a continent with enormous gifts of natural resources (rich praries, vast lands, timber, metal, oil & gas deposits, abundant & teeming oceans, lakes & rivers), and built a recklessly wasteful lifestyle on their thoughtless rape of nature's bounty. Those gifts have now been used up. America was oil independent until the early 1970s and actually exported oil, but now we must import 70% of our oil needs. Nature always holds the trump card.

It's only the abundance of these natural gifts that made it possible for federal, state & local governments to support such massive subsidies for the expansion of low density suburbanite housing over the last half century, and to get away with trashing our public transportation system without any immediate consequences. Our excess natural resources footed much of the bill, and now they are gone. The inability of our society to continue supporting such huge subsidies may well become evident in the next recession for several reasons.

A major precipitating shock is likely to be when the $2.5 trillion shortfall in our state & local government pension plans forces local governments into massive increases in property taxes across the U.S., and also forces them to drastically cut public sector pensions on which much suburbanite housing value is based. How many middle and middle-lower class families will be able to afford a home when their property taxes have doubled or tripled, and it costs $100/week to fill up the car with gas? Virtually all employment growth since 2000 has been in public sector employment. Many of those employees have bought houses in the suburbs based on a presumption of continuing rich pension & health plan benefits relative to the private sector.

Total household debt has now passed $9 trillion, the interest on which is mostly home equity-based and therefore tax exempt. Assuming an average interest rate of 6%, this is nearly $540 billion per year of consumption that is state & federal income tax exempt. Local property taxes, with considerable variation, are about 1% of housing consumption per year, and directly offset state & federal taxes.

State and local sales taxes are more than five times that amount on other kinds of consumption, and not deductible. Funding for our secondary school system, public libraries and health clinics has been preempted by the lifestyle choices of resource gluttons who would rather blow their and others' taxes on maintaining low density neighborhood roads, sewer systems, garbage collection, and power and emergency support systems and services for our rapidly-expanding suburbs.

This is an unsustainable disparity betwen the tax rates on what's essentially excess and frequently luxury-based consumption, and fundamental human needs like clothing, basic shelter, health care and food. It is ultimately unsustainable. Bear in mind, this assumes a continuation of current very low interest rates.

An almost inevitable increase in interest rates as Baby Boomers begin retiring in 2 years will force the federal government to inflate its way out of nearly $60 trillion in retirement and medical benefits it simply can never pay. As a result, the cost of the $9-plus trillion in household debt will soar (not to mention the cost of local government and federal debt!) along with property taxes, as well as the $2.5 trillion of public sector pension plans (growing at $200 billion per year) that is not yet funded, and never will be.

Americans many years ago passed far beyond the limits to the living standard our society and our resources can support. Just recently the federal government forced Tennessee (and other states as well, I presume) to cut funding for Medicaid nearly 50%. This will dramatically increase the financial stress level for many families, putting more pressure on expensive suburbanite lifestyles. We've spent the last several years piling up massive debts in order to continue ignoring reality because we can no longer afford the continuing costs, but we are no more than a few years away from being confronted with the bill.

The suburbs must inevitably give way to a more efficient lifestyle as competition for the Earth's resources continues to heat up (no pun intended). The initial, and easiest adjustment for most people to make will simply be to downsize, or to downsize more than they had originally planned. Large homes will become increasinly difficult to sell.

Because of the recklessly inefficient lifestyle and infrastructure requirements of the suburbs, they are likely to see county taxes go up even more than in the cities before things collapse. This huge pendulum that has been swinging toward the suburbs for generation, driven by low energy costs, formerly abundant natural resources and massive public subsidies, is now slowing. The next recession is likely to reverse the pendulum for the first time in our history.

20 years from now, I expect to drive by suburbs where half the houses are standing vacant and decaying, with weed-choked yards and broken pavement. It will get worse as you move farther out from the city centers.

The death of the subranite lifestyle is as certain as the seasons. The only question is whether it will come to a grim, whimpering and richly-deserved end in this decade, or the next one.

Comments

[CAFKIA]

You leave out an option my brotha. Imagine a fundamental change in suburban society. Imagine all those large homes inhabited by multi and extended families. It would be theoretically possible to increase the population density of the 'burbs by a factor of three or four without additional infrastructure (ok, maybe sewage treatment will have to be upgraded) or damage to the environment.

Imagine the possibly traumatic change in the social structure. It could/should be interesting to watch from the safety of the city limits.

[CAFKIA]

Dil'dude sez:The suburbanite lifestyle is not just an immoral and ostentatios display of wealth

A point you fail to make clearly here is that for many, it is a display of wealth that is not theirs. It is a display of borrowing ability. It is a display of having few enough morals to screw current children and future generations (should they actually exist). It is indeed, a display of much of what is wrong with America. In short, it is a display of greed without responsibility.

It is truly a display of suffering yet to come.

CAFKIA

you're quite correct, cafkia. i actually had "borrowed" before the word wealth in the original, but somehow left it out of the actual post. i've corrected the error. it's actually the wealth of their grandchildren and the chinese and japanese they are showing off. kind of like a rented tuxedo and limo.

[hot potatoe]

Gee, perhaps you should also couch your terms in the "urbanite" lifestyle as well.

Obviously you are as clueless about your swaggish and pungent lifestyle downtown and feel as though everyone should embrace the minimalism you think it represents as well. Should everybody live in a decaying urban environment with a new veneer just because you believe you're so hip?

And how is urban environment living in "harmony with nature"? besides the fact that urban environments are a product of the very industrial environments that you eschew. What about the net energy inputs required to periodically makeover your pungently simple environment and keep it clean?

The Americans that built this recklessly wasteful lifestyle weren't my ancestors, or perhaps the majority of your readers. We came later in the search for a life of peace. We didn't kill for our property and we fight daily to keep it from the clutches of the New Robber Barons presently plaguing our nation.

Yea, we are opportunists, but we come by it honestly and we want to find a way because life must always find a way. However that doesn't mean that we all sneer mindlessly at everyone else's attempt to live successfully.

And how many middle and lower income people will find a home in your downtown amongst the multitudes of gleaming brand spankin' new six-figure (and more) condos? How many of those long-suffering people will find tax relief that leaves enough money in their pockets to try and start their own business surrounded by the nouveau riche that benefit from HUBzone financing meant for the poor and instead going to the better off because of geographic location?

I guess there are opportunists downtown as well as the suburbs!

Personally I have no problem with such opportunism because most of us could use a leg up at some point in our lives. But my god! You come off sounding like you think an urban lifestyle is the only solution!

I hope you're not an urban planner because I shudder at the thought of a community that is one big urban area.

It wasn't too long ago that "our own" downtown area was a big weed-choked zone of abandonment. Perhaps it would remain that way today without the federal and local government aid that helped revitalize it.

Besides, if the suburbs die what will be left to replace it? More towering high-rises perhaps in the image of the decaying projects of Soviet Russia and some European cities?

Is that really your vision?

[dilettantedude]

"And how many middle and lower income people will find a home in your downtown amongst the multitudes of gleaming brand spankin' new six-figure (and more) condos? How many of those long-suffering people will find tax relief that leaves enough money in their pockets to try and start their own business surrounded by the nouveau riche that benefit from HUBzone financing meant for the poor and instead going to the better off because of geographic location?"

My, my, such defensiveness! Could it be guilt? Suburbanite skin really is even thinner than I suspected.

Have you ever considered that if suburbanites didn't demand that others (including more resource-efficient urban dwellers and the poor) pay out THEIR tax money to SUBURBANITES to subsidize (why do you think they call it SUBurbs?) and maintain huge numbers of new suburbanite roads, pay for the sewage, water and power lines to be run for the new suburbs at the expense of OTHER taxpayers, pay for the heavy burden of unnecessary pollution they create by their consumptive lifestyle of driving & mowing, heavy chemical fertilizing, pesticiding and insecticiding, maybe there would be more money for decent schools and housing for the poor?

No, of course not. Probably too busy driving in their SUVs to their huge suburbanite churches on which they've squandered so much of the money they could have used for the poor if they weren't world class hypocrites, and praying for them.

Not one word in recognition of your extraordinarily energy wasteful lifestyle, just the typical greed and demand that others continue to subsidize your lifestyle choices and pay for your greedy consumption of the Earth's resources and energy at a rate that is multiples of everyone else on the planet, and at the cost of help for the poor you so insincerely purport to care about.

And excuse me, but did you say something about "six figure" condos? Silly me, and here I thought suburbanite houses were six figures also, plus a huge yard. My apologies for not realizing that surbanites live in five figure hovels in humble obscurity and take public transportation.

You spend money at a shopping center built on the only wetland in this part of the state, and YOU criticize those who live downtown for renovating old buildings and walking more lightly upon the Earth?

And how many "poor" live in a typical suburbanite neighborhood among your six figure stater palaces with huge lawns and attached garages and gates to keep out the poor, hmmm?

Is there a homeless shelter across the street from YOUR house that you support, hmmm?

If you proposed one for those poor you so hypocritically pretend to care about while you consume as subsidies for your lifestyle taxes that could otherwise go to support them, what do you think your caring suburbanite neighbors would have to say about that, hmmm?

They won't find tax relief because they don't pay any taxes, you moron. Neither will lower middle class folks, because you demand they give you all their tax money to build your roads and pay for your pollution and fancy new schools, while inner city facilities like FREE health clinics and older schools decay.

You have redefined hypocrisy downward, if that's possible.

[CAFKIA]

A word of advice to Hot Potatoe: Yer gonna want to bring yer "A" game if you are going to argue this issue. All of us who post on this blog have lived both sides of the street and have argued the points back and forth with each other and with anyone else willing to open their mouths in suppor of either side. We know the arguments cuz we used them until they were exhausted.

At the very least, you will need some impressively IQ'ed reinforcement. When you get it, come on back and we'll play.

[dilettantedude]

oh, and btw, hot potatoe, you might want to worry about impersonating white house employees with your email address. i believe that's identity fraud, and possibly even a federal crime.