If a solution requires that we maintain every road that has been built, that we rehab every leaky pipe, that we hold on to all the neighborhoods that have been developed – and in most places today, these are prerequisites for any conversation – then there is no viable solution. Our cities are going to contract geographically; we will have fewer lane miles, fewer pipes, and less urbanized land in three decades than we do today. This is built into the math, shifting the situation we face from problem to predicament.
That answer rarely goes over well, and I’m going to acknowledge up front that, for many people, such a viewpoint feels defeatist. The United States didn’t become a great nation by retreating in the face of adversity. A great people have the ingenuity to overcome any challenge. All we need to do is unleash the American spirit of creativity, entrepreneurship, and determination and we’ll figure it out.
That’s one narrative, but it’s not my narrative. The United States of America became a nation by following a leader, George Washington, who was widely known for strategic retreats. Yes, there is great ingenuity among Americans, but history demonstrates that necessity is the mother of invention; overlooking the hardship that spurns innovation is simply a way to comfort ourselves with confirmation bias. Overshoot, followed by a consolidation of gains, is a common experience throughout human history.
We’re not going to keep and maintain every cul-de-sac, interchange, or frontage road that has been built. It’s not possible and, even if it were, propping up these places is a poor use of our resources. In a very real sense, many of our infrastructure systems are going to completely fail, whole neighborhoods will be abandoned, and cities will shrink geographically. Some of what has been built in the past two generations will be salvaged for reuse, but I suspect that much of it will simply rot in place.
This seems incomprehensible to us today, particularly to those living in the newest homes and shopping in the latest strip mall in the distant suburbs or exurbs. Yet, there is a continent-wide precedent in recent memory that we’ve culturally explained away as a one-time anomaly, that being the abandonment of cities by the affluent after World War II.
If we could have talked to a family living in an urban neighborhood in the 1930s and told them that, within a decade, they would pick up and move out to a field on the far outskirts of town, they would have been appalled. Except in a few places where the trend had already started, the outskirts was where the poor people lived.
Even more to the point, that family had deep connections to the neighborhood they were living in. It was likely that they had immediate family as neighbors. They had church, school, civic organizations, work, and all their social connections within walking distance. Leaving all that would have seemed unthinkable at the time, yet that is exactly what most of them did.
Affluent Americans walked away from cities when it became apparent that there was a better deal to be had somewhere else. When our policies began tipping the scales toward the growth that came with rapid suburbanization, urban neighborhoods went into decline. Those who could move, did. It should be no surprise to anyone that, as many of these post-war neighborhoods inevitably end up in decline, those who can move to more prosperous areas will also do so.
If there were no social costs, we could think of this process as a long overdue trimming of an overgrown shrub, something awkward in transition but ultimately healthier and stronger. There are huge social costs, however, and they can’t be ignored. More to the point, they won’t be ignored.
A Long Decline
I’ve encountered a predisposition to assume that the imbalances I’ve described must lead to a crash, some type of rapid phase shift from one state of existence to another. A fragile bridge will still carry traffic up until the moment it collapses, the random point where there is one innocuous vehicle too many. It felt like our economy was trying to collapse in 2008, a result that would have painfully exposed how fragile we are. I don’t rule out the possibility of such an event in the future. They do happen.
What I think is more likely, however, is a long decline. Unlike a collapsing bridge, a road fails slowly over time, the small problems accumulating until they aggregate into a broader failure. In some ways, long declines are more pernicious than collapses because we culturally excuse away each step, finding ways to adapt to continually worsening outcomes. There is no singular, mobilizing event shared by all but more of a malaise that creeps across society, a general dysfunction that can be blamed on a variety of convenient scapegoats. Indeed, blaming is part of the decline, a critical feature that fuels it along the path.
Social commentator and author James Kunstler best described this process as a “long emergency,” an ongoing breakdown of the complicated mechanisms that enable modern life. He points out how difficult it can be for a broad culture to identify the underlying predicament and instead become stuck focusing on the solutions that have plausibly explainable problems. In his words:
This is perhaps a self-evident point, but throughout history, even the most important and self-evident trends are often completely ignored because the changes they foreshadow are simply unthinkable. That problem is sometimes referred to as an “outside context problem,” something so far beyond the experience of those dwelling in a certain time and place that they cannot make sense of available information. The collective mental static preventing comprehension is also sometimes referred to as “cognitive dissonance,” a term borrowed from developmental psychology. It helps explain why the American public has been sleepwalking into the future. The Long Emergency is going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race.2
Modern Americans have a track record of explaining away the process of decline. The term white flight is an unnecessarily narrow description applied to the depopulation of core cities and the explosion of horizontal growth following World War II. While there is no question that race was an accelerator in the process, and practices like redlining went beyond class to systematically disenfranchise minorities, affluence was the underlying factor driving the mass migration. In a broad sense, people with means and agency decamped from cities, leaving behind those who lacked that option.
I make this distinction because, as despotic as that outcome was for those left behind, it pales in comparison to the conditions being created on the current trajectory. When poor people were left behind in the center of Americans cities, they still lived in coherent neighborhoods. The places they inhabited still mostly resembled successful human habitats. Despite the decline and disinvestment, people living in these neighborhoods could walk to find food, live in a neighborhood with family and friends, and make a living in the economic ecosystem that immediately surrounded them.
As the affluent abandon declining suburbs today, the poor left behind face a whole new dimension of struggle. Now, amid decline and disinvestment, they must deal with a development pattern designed with an assumption of permanent affluence.
To get around, one must have a car. While it is possible to walk from the cul-de-sac, through the ditch, across the berm, around the drainage pond, over the four-lane road at an unmarked crossing, and then across the parking lot, all just to get life’s essentials, it’s not like that can be done without a huge commitment in time, not to mention unpleasantness.
Try hauling your purchases through that same trip in reverse. Now do it during difficult weather. Now do it while raising young children, caring for an elderly family member, or dealing with an illness. For the disadvantaged, this kind of environment magnifies all of life’s struggles.
A bike can make things a little easier in terms of time, but with a huge tradeoff in safety; infrastructure designed for high-speed automobile travel is treacherous for people on bikes.
In post-war America, the cost of an automobile is the ante for living a productive life. It is extremely difficult to hold a job, find food, educate children, seek medical assistance, be part of a church or civic organization, or do any of the routine things that humans do without a motor vehicle. Burden poor
families with the cost of an automobile and it starves them of essential resources, accelerating decline.
Individual homes require intensive, ongoing maintenance. For families already financially stretched, in neighborhoods prevented from changing or evolving to a higher state of intensity, where is that time and money going to come from? The resources aren’t there, and so homes begin to fail, dragging down entire neighborhoods.
There is also a sad irony to much of the maintenance of modern development. Traditional building materials require a base level of ongoing maintenance, tasks perfectly suited for the low-skilled worker willing to learn a trade. Modern maintenance-free materials don’t have these ongoing costs, which seems like a good thing, until they fail. That’s when they impose a huge replacement cost.
As Steve Mouzon points out in The Original Green, maintenance-free simply means not able to be maintained. There is no patching or hacking maintenance-free systems; they either work or they fail.
When so-called “no maintenance” materials fail, they fail catastrophically so you have to replace every bit of the materials, not just the damaged piece.3
As mentioned in Chapter 2, auto-oriented places have different failure mechanisms than traditional neighborhoods. In the latter, rising underlying land values create natural reinvestment opportunities. That mechanism doesn’t exist – there are no rising land values – in the slash-and-burn style of building, and thus there is no natural incentive for reinvestment. Once a home fails, it drags everything around it down, creating a negative feedback loop that won’t be arrested without massive outside intervention.
Someone living in a declining neighborhood is going to receive all the signals that the decline will continue. In such a place, only a fool would invest their time or limited resources in fixing up their home. If it costs $5,000 to fix the leaking roof in a declining neighborhood, that is money that will never show up in improved resale value, so why do it? Why paint the faded siding? Why replace the broken sidewalk? Even if the means to address these problems existed, every logical financial incentive is to merely struggle with the symptoms of decline.
And this is all before considering the local government, who is now tasked with maintaining all the roads, streets, walks, curbs, pipes, pumps, valves, and meters – infrastructure they couldn’t afford to maintain when things were shiny and new – with a tax base in decline and an impoverished population struggling to get by.
To make matters worse, aging cities routinely take on debt to compensate for their insolvency. Unlike federal and, to a lesser extent, state governments, debt levels are a genuine constraint for local governments. Too much debt crowds out other spending and only serves to magnify the despair of decline.
There was a lot written about why Ferguson, Missouri, blew up in riots and a police crackdown following the shooting death of Michael Brown during a police incident. Most of this analysis involved race. Again, I’m not dismissing race as an accelerating factor, but Ferguson – one of the early post-war suburbs – is a case study in building a place designed to decline.
Ferguson was one of the suburbs of St. Louis built in the first generation of automobile expansion. It was once shiny and new, attracting the affluent and middle-class who were partaking in the American dream. It enjoyed a generation as one of the premier places to be in the St. Louis region, until the end of the growth phase and the predictable decline began to manifest.
The affluent in Ferguson long ago departed for newer places with better prospects. The middle-class exodus happened during Ferguson’s second life cycle – the stagnation phase – as public debt rose and decline spread. Those with public pensions stuck around a little longer, which partially explains how a city populated by mostly minorities ends up with a police department that is nearly all white.
Forget strategic investments in growth; Ferguson today is so indebted that it can’t maintain its basic infrastructure systems. In the year Brown was killed, the city spent over $800,000 making interest payments on their debts while allocating only $25,000 to the maintenance of sidewalks.4 There are good reasons for Ferguson residents to walk in the streets; their sidewalks are falling apart.
Beyond the built-in nature of decline in a specific place, there is a regional aspect to decline that is equally pernicious. Many regional infrastructure systems require maintenance of the oldest components for the newest to function. For example, with a sewer system, the new pipe in front of the exurban home requires the old pipe downstream in the core neighborhood to function. Water systems, drainage, and much of our transportation networks function in this same way.
The opposite does not hold, however: The older parts of the system do not need the newer. The infrastructure within the core, urban neighborhoods of a city can function regardless of what happens to the infrastructure out on the edge. In many cases, if the edge neighborhoods went away, the core infrastructure would function better.
In other words, there is a floor on how low the level of disinvestment in infrastructure can be in traditional neighborhoods without the entire system collapsing, but there is no systematic threat to disinvestment out on the edge. The roads and pipes throughout America’s suburbs can completely fall apart and, with few exceptions, it will have no impact on the infrastructure within the urban center.
Whether we want it to happen or not, the accumulated liabilities of cities are forcing them into a long decline. In the triage of what is maintained and what can rot away, there is a cold, logical rationale for contracting cities around the traditional urban core and its immediately surrounding neighborhoods. This is reinforced when the affluent leave declining areas on the edge and start to reinhabit core neighborhoods.
Restoration of Normal
The North American development pattern mass-adopted after World War II is a massive experiment. Americans transformed an entire continent in mere decades, discarding centuries of wisdom on how human habitat is constructed in favor of new ways of doing things. Trillions of dollars were mined out of, or reallocated from, traditional cities to feed a growth machine that built a middle class, and then trapped them in financial purgatory.
The traditional orientation of cities, the pattern that persisted in the United States and Canada since European settlement up until the twentieth century, can still be seen in most cities outside of North America. In these places, wealthier people generally live near the center of the city while the poorer people live toward the outer edge. This is reflected in underlying land values, which place a premium on the more centralized and accessible places.
After World War II, trillions of dollars were spent in North America inverting this historic pattern, moving the affluent to the edge while leaving the poor trapped behind. As the financial systems that induced the change become frayed, as the weight of accumulated liabilities overwhelm our attempts to keep things propped up, it seems likely – even natural – that cities, and the regions around them, would start to revert to something like their original form.
In that sense, trends toward re-urbanization of the affluent become even more understandable. In his 2012 book The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City, Alan Ehrenhalt describes shifting living patterns that were already being experienced around major North American cities.
The most powerful demographic events of the past decade were the movement of African Americans out of central cities and the settlement of immigrant groups in suburbs, often ones many miles distant from downtown.5
Ehrenhalt identifies a trend that has only accelerated in the intervening years:
We are moving toward a society in which millions of people with substantial earning power or ample savings will have the option of living wherever they want, and many – we can only guess how many – will decide in favor of cities and against distant suburbs. As they do this, others will find themselves forced to live in places less desirable – places farther from the center of the metropolis. Statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau in October 2011 revealed that in the f
irst decade of the new century, poverty increased by 53% in the nation’s suburbs, compared to only 26% in the cities.
Not only are there increasingly more impoverished people living in the suburbs, but the number of neighborhoods with extreme levels of poverty – census tracts with poverty rates of 40% or more – doubled between 2000 and 2010, with America’s suburbs experiencing the greatest amount of that growth.6
Simultaneous with the rise of suburban poverty is the gentrification of urban neighborhoods. As well-located urban land values rise once more, the value of the improvements on those properties also goes up. This is a mechanism that historically created new wealth, but it no longer works that way.
Zoning codes established for the rapid replication of the auto-oriented development pattern were also applied to urban neighborhoods. These codes do not allow neighborhood evolution; their central feature is to “protect” existing property owners by locking the current development pattern in place. For example, a neighborhood of single-family homes must remain a neighborhood of single-family homes. The person living there is unable to turn higher property values into a redevelopment opportunity that expands the number of units.
With demand driving land values up and the neighborhood pattern sealed in regulatory amber, the most likely outcome to bring the Improvement to Land Ratio back into balance is to demolish the existing home and build something equivalent, only at a high-end price point. This is commonly called a “scrape off” and the net effect is to dislocate the existing population.
All of this can be seen in hyperreality in a city like Detroit, which I’ve described as being an early adopter of the Suburban Experiment and, thus, a demonstration of one likely path American cities will take.
Strong Towns Page 12
