Signs From Earth

Rebuilding America From City to Farm

 

Map from The Atlantic showing "Top 30" city population across the United States in 2007. A related article contemplates which cities and regions will benefit or wither once, if, the country pulls out of this current economic tailspin.

What will America's inhabited landscape look like, where and how will people live and move about, which cities and surrounding regions will thrive or wither after the clouds clear from our housing and economic collapse? (If they clear?)

Some ponder this post-crisis reshaped landscape, while others like small farmers already invent an emerging future that differs from the recent past.

In an Atlantic article How the Crash Will Reshape America, Richard Florida assesses regions and cities that will likely "win or lose." He thinks that some "mega-regions" with educated and creative classes will prosper, but old-line manufacturing and sunbelt regions that built false prosperity on debt-laden housing "booms" will implode. Suburbia and its housing bubble spawn, exurbia, likely will shrink.

An accompanying interactive map The Shaping of America examines trends in patent, income, and population across America to give a geographical sense of our stocks of past and current intellectual and human capital. In a related Q&A Florida ponders whether the recent "stimulus" package will just throw money after places doomed to collapse instead of focusing on building forward-looking infrastructure like intracity passenger railways that can create regional strength. 

Earlier this month the U.S. Department of Agriculture released the 2007 census of agriculture, and within the data are harbingers that the "get big or get out" conventional wisdom espoused by Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz in the 1970s is being challenged by new farmers on the ground.

The number of farms is up, and the face of farming grows diverse as the number of women running farms has risen about 30 percent. For sure very big farms dominate in terms of overall production, and mid-size farms are being sucked up by the very big. But within we see a boom in very small farms, where people also hold down a day job. 

Map from NYT, Farm Living 

People are moving back to the land and reclaiming a connection to the food in their lives. Perhaps what goes around comes around, and as the bloom is off suburbia we will see a reshaping of the suburban landscape and continued growth in "subfarmia," more small-scale farms near cities that grow the food city people eat. 

In the interim perhaps it is time to grow your own garden, if you have not already started.

Driving: Fewer Car Miles, More Bus Miles

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Driving is the road less taken in last year

Americans cut back on miles, even after gas prices fell; change in habits also means less in taxes.

"It may not feel like it, but the American road is a lot more open these days.

"In a year of historic changes in how we live, the federal government today is expected to announce yet another blockbuster. From November 2007 to October 2008, the U.S. saw the biggest sustained decline in miles driven in recorded history, according to the Federal Highway Administration.

"Never before have Americans put the brakes on automotive travel in such a decisive way. Month after month, for an entire year, drivers put fewer miles on the road than they had the year before. It was an unprecedented stretch of highway-driving decline, according to FHWA spokesman Doug Hecox. The agency has been keeping records since 1942..."

Better Stock Up on Extension Cords

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom in Salon on electric cars:

Recharge America with Electric Cars: "...Electric vehicles represent an overarching, game-changing solution that allows us to transform, and recharge the American transportation sector for the 21st century. By accelerating the conversion of the car industry from its oil dependent past, to a new electric century, we can jump start the car industry, eliminate our dependence on oil, reduce our required presence in the middle east, create millions of jobs, and eliminate a significant portion of our CO2 emissions...."

From McMansions to Apartments?

Big Houses: Indigestible Leftovers of the Housing Bubble

by Stan Cox

"In Los Gatos, California, controversy has raged over the city planning commission's approval of a proposed hillside home that will occupy a whopping 3600 square feet - and that's just the basement. Atop that walkout basement will be 5500 more square feet worth of house.

"The prospective owner says he'll build to "green" standards, but at the August 8, 2007 meeting where the permit was approved, the city's lone dissenting planning commissioner stated the obvious when he told the owner, "You have a 9,000-square-foot house with a three-car garage and a pool. I don't see that as green."

Clucking Yard Alarms

The New Coop de Ville: The craze for urban poultry farming.

Jessica Bennett in Newsweek: "....Over the past few years, urban dwellers driven by the local-food movement, in cities from Seattle to Albuquerque, have flocked to the idea of small-scale backyard chicken farming—mostly for eggs, not meat—as a way of taking part in home-grown agriculture. This past year alone, grass-roots organizations in Missoula, Mont.; South Portland, Maine; Ann Arbor, Mich.; and Ft. Collins, Colo., have successfully lobbied to overturn city ordinances outlawing backyard poultry farming, defined in these cities as egg farming, not slaughter. Ann Arbor now allows residents to own up to four chickens (with neighbors' consent), while the other three cities have six-chicken limits, subject to various spacing and nuisance regulations...."

Worldwatch Institute Report on City Chickens

Big Boxes After the Store is Gone

Followers of James Howard Kunstler and his Rolling Stone article and book "The Long Emergency" will not be surprised by this development.

So what to do with all the empty big box stores in far (or not so far) reaches of suburbia and exurbia as the economic system collapses either of its own accumulated debt or because of chronically (just wait) high energy prices (and/or oil shortages?)