Where did we go wrong? *UNEDITED*
September 11, 2009 
29 Comments
You may remember this story from the Inlander. Some people were inspired by it. Others felt it was intellectual self-congratulation. While we are busy surviving the rigors of Sustainable September Spokane, we thought it might be fun to revisit the unedited version of the opening comments made by local environmental advocate Kitty Klitzke.
“Kitty Ain’t Kidding” by Young Kwak
Individuals and communities in our society got off track in the post war era when we embraced the ideology that the pursuit of more (possessions, land, territory, status) was more important than our quality of life and our ability to enjoy and preserve what we already have. We began to measure our selves and communities by the size of our holdings and our accumulation of possessions and traits that advertisers and mass media have awarded prestige to rather than our contributions to our families, communities and our own happiness. We chose to invest in a culture that demands more and more of what we truly value least just to remain “competitive”.
“God of Materialism” by Chen Wenling
That competitiveness caused us to fear becoming obsolete, de-value what is not “new” and invest in lifestyles and land use patterns that are neither sustainable nor spiritually satisfying, prizing novelty and individuality over quality and efficiency. These values affected everything from food to architecture to relationships. We spent less time with our families and more time working and commuting. We allowed our city centers to crumble, only to sprawl into auto-oriented isolation where a person must own everything they could ever need. And everything is at the other end of a long drive. So, sometimes we own things we don’t have time to enjoy. We have put ourselves and our communities into deep debt by over-extending our purchasing power and infrastructure, not for what was necessary for survival and well being, but what was necessary to compete in a game that we are all losing at the expense of our health, farmland, environment, natural heritage, and community values. We went from being community members, family members and neighbors to being workers, consumers, and commuters.
“House with Yellow Hydrant” by Robert Selwyn
from “The House That Sprawl Built” exhibit
Before we reach the end of this environmental and economic rope we will learn from this. People and communities have begun to reprioritize over the last two decades. We can look to both our past, and to green technology and new perspectives to put us on a more sustainable, healthy and fulfilling path; revitalizing our cities, restoring our environment, and re-investing in a shared future that values people, the earth, and our community well being over shallow and demoralizing materialism.
“Changing Roles” by Know Hope
About the Author
“Individuals and communities in our society got off track in the post war era . . . . ”
. . . . and others got off track in the 60′s after reading too much Marcuse, Ehrlich, and Chomsky at too young an age.
A dude named Thomas Sowell wrote a book called The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for
Social Policy. The Inlander article is a prime example of what is talking about.
Mariah, thanks for posting this and adding the graphics, it is fun to see the work of artists grappling with contemporary issues.
Contrairain, I confess, my teachers at the Salvation Army pre-school on Indiana Ave in the early 80′s did teach myself and my classmates to read at four and five years old. I’m guessing that you think it was irresponsible of them. You may feel that youth is wasted on the young. But I am glad that reading comprehension, intellectual curiosity and open mindedness can come at any age. I don’t know what formula you apply to prescribe age appropriate reading material, but I would hesitate to believe anyone who thinks reading the works of great thinkers should be reserved for the middle aged. For my part, you are mistaken in which authors I have read, in both content and quantity.
TECotPSoS: I admit that it can be viewed as arrogant to spend time even contemplating the problems of the world, our society or even our local community as if our own perspective or efforts make any difference in the grand scheme of things. But if we didn’t, who would? We are all just ordinary people trying to make sense of our world. Who gets to decide who is worthy of expressing themselves? According to reviews of the book you cite it is focused on a couple of things that this article was not. First: the elite, demographically, the group that Joel chose was not solely elite, but varied, as evidenced by my being included. Second, the book addresses rhetoric directed by liberals at conservatives. While some of the respondents may have felt they were directing their response at conservatives, it didn’t appear that way to me. I and those respondents that I discussed the story with saw this a communique with our community without political roles. You might have noticed, also, that there were respondents that were conservatives included in the piece as well. I think this story is actually the opposite of what Sowell decries.
I applaud Joel for taking the time to publish some perspectives that we don’t often hear in the media–people from our own community who are trying to make it a better place to live. I felt that way he guided us toward specificity helped keep us from being redundant with our colleagues and flushed out our differences when we could have ended up sounding similar.
Funny Noam C is mentioned. I met him (again) at the Guggenheim museum (Manhattan one) a few years ago. Still the Socialist and getting pretty aged now. What is it about those 60′s writers…they get worse with age!!
Anyway, I reread the article in the Inlander. It’s the usual and expected outlook. Briefly though, what’s ailing this country won’t be cured with a Green movement. Balance is essential. Kitty’s ideas are skewed and bundled into a whole list of things championed by the left leaning groups. It’s good to be environmentally responsible. Nobody I know argues it.
The real problem is encroachment on the environment by too many people. Should the government legislate the location of buildings? the size of families? energy use? etc. Who is working for whom here? The left thinks government should manage the people instead of the other way around. Cap and trade is good? Somebody tell me how. Parenthetically, I think her thoughts are sincere but the foundations generating her thoughts are a bit on the leaky side.
In this case the anointed is the Inlander. Picking a local author to comment on the banking system? Because his next book has the word “financial” in the title? They empowered him to think he is personally responsible for the downfall of the banking system. Now you might say he’s an author and this is just a story and we can’t take it to seriously. A “take what you like and leave the rest attitude” is dangerous and exactly the type of thinking Sowell’s books arm us against.
I was referring to the launching of the green-left ideology, or at least its modern incarnation,Kitty. Your teachers would have been the original victims (though not likely at the Salvation Army preschool).
Re: your Inlander comments regarding rail transit, you might check the “The Myth of Transit Efficiency,” here:
http://www.freespokane.net/?p=58
Kitty, this is a beautiful essay.
I just rubbed my eyes in disbelief at comment #5. Somebody forgot to hit the laugh button because the peanut gallery is at it again: I’m no huge fan of Jess Walter but his answer was an allegorical yarn for the privileged, an artistic take on the question. Since you’re already in exile, perhaps you would be better armed with James Frey! Also, Contrarian: What motivated you to be so presumptuous in what literature Kitty or her victimized teachers supposedly subscribe to? “…referring to the launching of the green-left ideology?” This isn’t taking us very far. It’s a shame The Spovangelist forum has turned into an echo chamber of partisan redundancy because there’s no denying post-World War II America brought in an unprecedented boom of growth. Locally, the construction of Northtown mall during this period and the surrounding development indirectly demolished parts of downtown— history was displaced for progress. Kitty and the rest of the profiles are not panacea for Spokane or a bunch of hypereducated elites saying only they can save us from global doom. They’re discussing history— and you do real damage to a place if you ignore our past and dismiss experiences for the sake of shaky theories on what influenced their thinking.
Here’s my simple take: Living here well requires commitment and sacrifice. We need to work at breaking the cycle of leaving things worse than when we found them and we can’t have it all.
As a student and practitioner of architecture and theology, I could not agree with Kitty more. The totality of the impacts our world has experienced and, sadly, will continue to experience because of our cultural shift to a self-centric materialism seen post World War II is truly frightening.
Needless to say, my academic pursuits, mission and justice work in Guatemala and Colombia, and years of design work in Spokane led me to conclude that the actions and decisions of my immediate ancestors, informed by their particular social locations and exasperated by the imposition of new cultural norms by the few have created a nightmare which threatens our very way of life. Our need for more and more rapes and pillages not only our planet, but millions upon millions of indigenous and impoverished peoples around the globe whose livelihoods have been stolen by our greed.
We design buildings to stand for one mortgage period…
We left behind over 10,000 years of person-based urban design in favor of automobile based design…
We continue to exploit the world’s resources to fuel our consumption of planned obsolete goods, that require materials from around the world, often mined or pumped, which will take millennia to replenish…
We send our troops into harms way to secure resources at not only a tragic human cost, but ironically at the cost of our nation’s security…
Our family connections are taken from us by a perceived need to work harder in order to make more money in order to buy more things in order to make our family connections stronger…
Need I say more?
We must turn from this destructive and ultimately fatal path if we indeed wish to have a world for our grandchildren, let alone anyone else’s to survive. We must do so now.
Paul wrote,
“Locally, the construction of Northtown mall during this period and the surrounding development indirectly demolished parts of downtown— history was displaced for progress. Kitty and the rest of the profiles are not panacea for Spokane or a bunch of hypereducated elites saying only they can save us from global doom. They’re discussing history— and you do real damage to a place if you ignore our past and dismiss experiences for the sake of shaky theories on what influenced their thinking.”
Northtown Mall (and the development of shopping malls elsewhere) no doubt did have some role in the decline of central business districts. But that was because the 19th century arrangement of residential neighborhoods surrounding a central business district was no longer optimal. Mall developers guessed that shoppers would prefer venues closer to their homes, were climate controlled, provided ample parking, and which were privately patrolled. And they were proved right.
The past is always displaced by the present, Paul, which will in turn be displaced by the future. That is what history is — the record of that ceaseless dynamic process. It it not wise to ignore the past, but neither is it wise (and indeed is futile) to try to fossilize it. Settlement patterns will always adapt themselves to the needs and desires of the people inhabiting them, given the resources and technologies available to them, provided that natural adaptive process is not thwarted by Utopians determined to impose some future arrangment they’ve fantasized or some past arrangement they’ve idolized.
“We were not given land, we gave you land.”
–Tlingit elder
The “past is always displaced by the present” is an extremely broad justification but you did just give a great response to where we went wrong. (Wink!) Settlement patterns? Consider this: Greens like Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir achieved conservation, progress for protected areas at the expense of impoverishing poor, indigenous people. Around the globe…languages have disappeared, cultures destroyed, human rights violated, communities evicted for imperialism. Yeah. But as for the Northtown mall, unfortunately, the thirty store vacancies is not quite proving to be a healthy, sustainable model. (GNC excluded, are malls healthy?) There’s not a straight pathway to sustainability but it certainly isn’t futile to fossilize especially when I “fantasize” what Spokane would look like today if we had preserved more of our downtown core rather than provided more ample, inconvenient parking?
My Utopia is producing economic well-being without compromising ecosystems. That hardly seems like a radical concept, right? History has proven communities were able to survive and flourish together at this intersection before until they were materially exploited.
A steady state economy is defined largely by a stabilized human population and true controlled consumption, consumption that is practical and foundational to equity throughout the world. As steady state economists say: Such stability means that the amounts of resource throughput and waste disposal remain roughly constant.
These freaks calling themselves Contrarians need to join their other loser role models and flounder in the Middle East looking for Osama and Sadam’s ghost.
“We must recognize the earth’s limited capacity to provide for us. We must recognize its fragility. We must no longer allow it to be ravaged. This ethic must motivate a great movement, convincing reluctant leaders and reluctant governments and reluctant peoples themselves to effect the needed changes.”
________________________________________
Plea made in 1993 by over 1,500 of the world’s top scientists, many Nobel Laureates
Again, these pea-brains can rail against people who actually see the writing on the wall and are working toward change.
Here’s our current economic character, in a globalized mindset. Economic growth, two, three, what, ten percent in China or India two years ago, whatever the economic growth engine numbers are, they bring with them destruction and imbalance — growth of other aspects, negatives, real deal breakers, in a world that puts economics above all other things in the sustainability picture – Equity, Environment, Education, Energy and then Economics.
Richard Heinberg has written about the Century of Declines, that is, the 21st century which will be marked by huge declines in cheap and easily gotten to energy, including coal. Peak resources – and expensive and peaking oil – will require us to accept a reversal of the capitalistic gains over the past 100 years. We need to go beyond having these conversations with pigs who can’t see beyond their red. white and blue tissues.
[http://www.steadystate.org/]
Here’s what the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE) has to say about exponential economic growth as a paradigm:
• jobless growth, where the economy grows, but does not expand opportunities for employment;
• ruthless growth, where the proceeds of economic growth mostly benefit the rich;
• voiceless growth, where economic growth is not accompanied by extension of democracy or empowerment;
• rootless growth, where economic growth squashes people’s cultural identity; and
• futureless growth, where the present generation squanders resources needed by future generations.
Recognize any of this? Not the idiots spewing Spokanistan drivel. Head on out and see the world, not on a US Naval Destroyer either, and see how pissed off the rest of the world is — 3 billion living on $3.50 a day so pukes like Contrarian can spew his banker’s delight. He can just keep on throwing money at idiot generals, creepy contractors, rotten Wall Street pervs, and those lovely creatures of habit — deluded souls that you are kissing up to.
These are the major sustainability issues unrelated to the equity and cultural questions raised in a world where three billion live on $3.50 — water, ozone, diversity, soil fertility, population, energy, climate change, toxins in everything
[http://www.globalissues.org/issue/2/causes-of-poverty]
That’s $3.50 a day, in a world where 5 percent of the global population controls 80 percent of wealth. Or, look at it this way — The World Institute for Development Economics Research at the UN University says that the poorer half of the world’s population own barely 1% of global wealth.
[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6211250.stm ]
Let these creeps read Chalmers Johnson and see the failed state of the USA groveling for more military might.
Jon wrote,
“Needless to say, my academic pursuits, mission and justice work in Guatemala and Colombia, and years of design work in Spokane led me to conclude that the actions and decisions of my immediate ancestors, informed by their particular social locations and exasperated by the imposition of new cultural norms by the few have created a nightmare which threatens our very way of life.”
Wow, a concise recitation of green dogma. You managed to squeeze almost all the entire catechism into two paragraphs.
No, Jon. No one “imposed” any new cultural norms on anyone. No one forced anyone to trade in their horse-drawn wagons for automobiles, or abandon streetcars for them (a trend that began well before WWII, BTW). No one forced anyone to buy homes in the suburbs, or patronize shopping malls. Nor are cultural norms created by a few; that is an oxymoron. Nor does anyone who lives that lifestyle consider it a “nightmare.” On the contrary, most suburbanites are quite content with their lives and are not about to change them appreciably — or if they do, it will be toward newer products and technologies which make their lives more comfortable and satisfying, not to regress to 19th century lifestyles, which were abandoned for good reason.
Nor do their lifestyles entail “rape and pillage of the planet” — a silly metaphor which presumes that an insentient orbiting ball of rock upon whose surface some interesting chemistry occurs is a moral agent which can be healthy or unhealthy and which has interests, desires, and goals which can be thwarted by rapacious humans. The goddess, Gaia, is dead, Jon. In fact, she never lived, except in the fevered imaginations of her acolytes.
As for the “millions and millions impoverished and indigenous peoples who have had their livelihoods stolen by our greed,” well, the fact is that millions and millions of people around the world have been elevated from poverty since WWII, almost entirely as a result of techniques and technologies developed by those rapacious Westerners. Rates of poverty worldwide have declined steadily since WWII. They have been reduced 25% just since 1980.
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTPOVERTY/0,,contentMDK:20153855~menuPK:373757~pagePK:148956~piPK:216618~theSitePK:336992,00.html
Sorry, Jon, but you have donned a shopworn *weltanschauung* haphazardly woven from skeins of myth and nonsense. You need to unravel it thread by thread and start over.
Paul wrote,
“There’s not a straight pathway to sustainability but it certainly isn’t futile to fossilize especially when I “fantasize” what Spokane would look like today if we had preserved more of our downtown core rather than provided more ample, inconvenient parking?”
Had that parking not been provided you would today have even less of Spokane’s 1920 CBD than you have now. They, along with Spokane’s relatively slow growth rate between 1940-70, kept downtown Spokane viable, if not robust. Had people not been able to find convenient parking they would have abandoned those merchants sooner, and in much larger numbers. Property owners cannot maintain their properties, much less improve or expand them, without tenants and customers. They cannot maintain them as museums for the amusement of Sunday visitors in search of nostalgia.
“Sustainability,” BTW, is a nonsense term. Human societies and economies are dynamic adaptive systems with endlessly evolving successions of states, none of which need be, or will be, sustained for very long.
“My Utopia is producing economic well-being without compromising ecosystems. That hardly seems like a radical concept, right?”
It is only “radical” if “compromising ecosystems” is taken to imply any alteration to an ecosystem which would not occur in the absence of humans. Ecosystems adapt to whatever influences impinge upon them, and are indifferent to those influences. An ecosystem can be sensibly said to be “compromised” only when some human impact reduces its value to humans.
“Ecosystems adapt to whatever influences impinge upon them, and are indifferent to those influences.” Wow. That sort of speaks for itself. Humans have found various ways to reduce biological diversity without going near the land in question. Since indigenous people are one with that ecosystem, they too have been marginalized which is unforgivable. But you make a convincing argument for Manifest Destiny, consequences be damned. The concept of sustainability is to maintain the interdependence of ecological balance and cultural/economic survival. Sustainability is living smaller, and living smaller is an “adaptive system” as a response to an increasingly crowded place. Far from the nonsense of your detached logic, laissez-faire approach.
I realize this debate on urban growth in Spokane and other cities is often reduced to simplistic notions about city versus cul-de-sac: one good (dense, walkable, full of the creative class) and the other bad (SUV-friendly, sprawling, perhaps people turned off by urban lifestyles). The reality, for anyone who has lived in both, is more complex. The problem is that right now this growth is revealing itself to be a multi-headed hydra, a desperately dispersed economic region that is failing and polluting when the more intensive use of existing urban space (like those big vacant parking lots I mentioned) could be used to help shape economic progress.
(Side historical note: We burnt the remaining trolleys for amusement in 1936 and 10,000 people gathered to watch. Six girls in bathing suits and firemen’s red hats sprang into action with the three leads of fire hose, two on a nozzle, and poured on the water that extinguished the flames and then souvenir hunters tore it apart. Man, where did we REALLY go wrong!?)
P.S. “The goddess, Gaia, is dead, Jon. In fact, she never lived, except in the fevered imaginations of her acolytes.”
Wrong again Mr C. Whoopi voiced her every Saturday morning on “Captain Planet” in the early 90′s. I was there. That’s how Gaia got her groove back.
Paul wrote,
“Here’s our current economic character, in a globalized mindset. Economic growth, two, three, what, ten percent in China or India two years ago, whatever the economic growth engine numbers are, they bring with them destruction and imbalance . . .”
And yet,
“. . . see how pissed off the rest of the world is — 3 billion living on $3.50 a day so pukes like Contrarian can spew his banker’s delight.”
You lament that 3 billion people live on $3.50 or less per day, but then you complain when some of them manage to escape that poverty. That economic growth of “two, three, ten percent” has lifted about 400 million people out of poverty in China since 1980, and another 400 million or so elsewhere in Asia. Is that the “destruction and imbalance” to which you refer?
“We need to go beyond having these conversations with pigs who can’t see beyond their red. white and blue tissues.”
We need a citizenry well enough educated to know that the best guide to the future is the past, and who rely on economic theory and history for their cues, rather than the tea leaf prognostications of Chicken Littles like primitivist Richard Heinberg and his predecessor prophet Paul Ehrlich, who never made a correct prediction in his life.
“Here’s what the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE) has to say about exponential economic growth as a paradigm:
• jobless growth, where the economy grows, but does not expand opportunities for employment;
• ruthless growth, where the proceeds of economic growth mostly benefit the rich;
• voiceless growth, where economic growth is not accompanied by extension of democracy or empowerment;
• rootless growth, where economic growth squashes people’s cultural identity; and
• futureless growth, where the present generation squanders resources needed by future generations.
Before you swallow too much of that swill, Paul, you should at least do some retro analysis. If those predictions had been made in the 1970s (as many of them were, in fact, by Ehrlich), how many of the subsequent trend lines would confirm them? How do you suppose, for example, that those 400 million Chinese were lifted out of poverty if that growth had been “jobless”? It is true, of course, that economic growth will “mostly benefit the rich.” Always has, and always will. That is because “the rich” are the persons who build and operate the engines of that growth. That’s how they got rich. And because they created those technologies, products, and methods, millions of other people are better off — they have cheaper food, better medicines, better jobs, more toys (which add enjoyment to their lives), and longer lives.
Too much nonsense here to deal with. But you might keep in mind that until the mid-19th century there had been no growth in per capita GDP for well over 500 years, and in every society on Earth, at least 90% of the population was poor. Primitivism has always seemed romantic and idyllic to those who don’t have to live it. Those who do escape it as soon as the opportunity arises.
I guess when your charms fail on heavyset community college girls you come on a blog and start calling people names?
I may be part of the less educated peanut gallery but even I saw the problem with your argument against unfettered economic growth and then whining that most people only live on $3.50.
Paul wrote,
“I realize this debate on urban growth in Spokane and other cities is often reduced to simplistic notions about city versus cul-de-sac: one good (dense, walkable, full of the creative class) and the other bad (SUV-friendly, sprawling, perhaps people turned off by urban lifestyles). The reality, for anyone who has lived in both, is more complex. ”
The complexity derives from the fact that what is “good” differs from person to person. There is no “common good.” For some people, a dense, walkable, even raucous urban environment is a good; for others, a quieter, more pastoral, less dense environment is a good — that is where they will feel more, tranquil, comfortable and secure. That latter group has absolutely no duty to forgo their own happiness in order to enhance someone else’s.
I couldn’t agree with you more. You directly addressed a lot of what’s wrong when greens discuss people shifting, and I mentioned that to address the “common good” conventional wisdom. But if you want to reduce sprawl, I would build in a previously populated area and in effect create an economic opportunity. When it comes to new development, the city is not capturing any economic benefits of peripheral growth, rather being drained of its assets, while Spokane Valley is still trying to figure out how to become an independent municipal entity because of their landscape gobbling.
” But if you want to reduce sprawl, I would build in a previously populated area and in effect create an economic opportunity.”
How do you build in a previously populated area when there is no, or only a small, market for new housing in that area? Who is going to buy the houses? Housing styles, types, sizes, and locations are driven by demand. You can’t build housing which the market does not want, any more than owners of downtown buildings can maintain them if they remain vacant. Well, you can, but only by forbidding some persons to live the lifestyles they prefer and forcing them to lifestyles some planner prefers.
China’s common good culture (with armed police on every corner to make sure the agreed upon “good” remains agreed upon) versus what’s seen in the US incorporates Contrarian’s last sentence.
Lots covered here. An amazing amount . Biologic systems and kinetics measures involving them are only accurate in the most control controlled situations. Never do they approach what happens in natureor in the real world.
Throw in some humans and modeling simply evaporates. Green types seem to be confounded and angry when face with the freewheeling performed in societies and nature. I have a lot more to say on this since “rights in conflict” or “insights in conflict” seem to be the order of the day now as it was in the 60′s.
40 more years of ideas to describe the same issues. whew!…Honestly , the only person I’ve ever seen who had a decent perception of all these things was fellow named Teilhard de Chardin. He’s worth a read if you like to get a feel for philosphy, justice and how both work within biologic systems. Nice work Paul, Jon and Contrarian. I’ve enjoyed reading tonight. Lots of other people’s jargon but some terrific interaction. Keep it nicer though. Fences don’t help discourse…. usually those fences reflect fear.
Strange. On #21, nobody’s forbidding them to live a lifestyle at all, and we’re fortunate to live in a city where the peace and tranquility you mentioned earlier are easily within our reach. “Near nature, near perfect” which should hopefully transcend our boundaries. It’s a stubborn market in Spokane, we’ve mostly rejected the downtown condo kool-aid; affordability is frequently quoted as a dilemma yet we can’t keep developing around the outliers as a solution, eat the land, and poison the waterways with shoreline development. It’s like the theory of building new roads to ease congestion which is like buying bigger pants if you have a weight problem. (Ahem, N-S. Freeway.) Let’s keep an eye on that new green building on S. Adams constructed on a vacant lot—apologies, the name escapes me right now— as one example if Spokane can support a more sustainable approach or if the demand isn’t there. And then one of us can reserve the right to say, “I told you so!”
Paul wrote,
“. . . we’ve mostly rejected the downtown condo kool-aid; affordability is frequently quoted as a dilemma yet we can’t keep developing around the outliers as a solution, eat the land, and poison the waterways with shoreline development. It’s like the theory of building new roads to ease congestion which is like buying bigger pants if you have a weight problem.”
No, Paul. Bad analogy — it mistakes healthy growth for pathology, because it presumes the growth patterns of the 19th century (or some other pattern envisioned by planners) are “normal.” Hence any deviation from that “norm” is deemed pathological. But such “norms” are wholly arbitrary.
Extending roads and utilities to new a ring of subdivisions is more like buying bigger pants for a growing boy. The patterns of urban growth reflect the interests and desires of the people living in them at each increment, constrained by the resources and technologies available to them at the time. As with the evolution of all other complex systems, those adaptations are not predictable in advance; there is no preordained pattern, and the optimum pattern is always a function of the current conditions.
The phrase “eating the land” makes the same question-begging presumption. The market takes the value of the land for agricultural purposes into account when deciding whether to change its use. If the use is changed, it is because the better use of that land at than time is for housing, rather than farming — more people will derive more benefit from it in the new use than the old. There is no shortage of ag land in this country, or any prospect of one. There is, indeed, a surplus. That is why some of it is converted.
Nor need shoreline development “poison” waterways. It can, of course, if the development is unmindful of that possibility or of the consequences. But there is no reason why it should be. Most types of shoreline development will have negligible impact on water quality, if properly designed.
Nice story. I would like share this paper, for those of you who have not read it already. Called “Better to Together”. http://www.bettertogether.org/pdfs/FullReportText.pdf
Really at the end of the day it is not only our environment that is suffering. The very fabric that holds our society together is busted. I think the simplest and biggest step is to turn off your T.V. and get to know your neighbors. I know it wont fix all our problems, but it will start moving us closer.
Contrarian,
While it is tempting to slap up a dozen peer reviewed studies that support transit to refute your assertions, I think most people know better, so I will not address that. It’s a matter of common sense that transit is more efficient.
I am going to break my policy of not replying more than once to comments about something I have written to address a fallacy that I hear too often when it comes to land use. That what gets built is a matter of supply and demand, that it is market based, and that whatever gets built must be good for our economy. That is far from the truth. What gets subsidize by infrastructure and incentives and encouraged by local government policies is what gets built in the U.S. And far too often local governments’ development regulations are most influenced by industry lobbying and political wrangling, not citizen input.
The National Association of Home Builders own studies http://www.nahb.org/page.aspx/landing/sectionID=113 reveal that there is a much greater demand for walkable urban than suburban style development, about 35% nationwide if I remember correctly while there is only about a 5% supply while there is already about 100% supply extant to meet the demand for single family. So why do they continue to build primarily car-friendly suburban style developments? Because they don’t have to supply the consumer with what they want, when they decide what the consumer has to choose from. Because raw land outside of cities is cheaper, cookie cutter single family homes are cheap to build, and there are less regulations, and since it has been such a dominating trend, it is also what banks are most familiar with and therefore willing to finance. Good, people-friendly design is more expensive complicated to build, and often turns less of a profit. And what is most profitable for corporations does not equal what is best for the people in a situation where there is limitations on choice–which all communities have. If you really want to understand this matter there is a quick read that I highly recommend called The Option of Urbanism by Christopher Leinberger. People like to live where the families and jobs are, very few have the luxury of moving to a community that is better designed merely for that purpose.
Kitty Klitze wrote,
“While it is tempting to slap up a dozen peer reviewed studies that support transit to refute your assertions, I think most people know better, so I will not address that. It’s a matter of common sense that transit is more efficient.”
If you could cite even one study, peer-reviewed or otherwise, which concludes that transit is more efficient than POVs and which does not involve the goal substitution I mentioned in that post, I’d be interested to see it.
From your comment I’m guessing you did not read that post, or appreciate its point. Transit only appears efficent if you subsitute some abstract and synthetic goal, such as those set forth by planners and various Utopians, for the actual goals of individual travelers. When such a substitution is made the transportation choices of those individuals can certainly appear inefficient. But that is an invalid methodology. You can only analyze the efficiency of a process by examining the costs incurred to meet the goals *of those engaged in the process*. The goals of backseat drivers and other third parties are quite immaterial. You also have to calculate the costs using the acting agent’s ordering and weighing of the resources consumed; some arbitrary, third-party assigment of values to resources will only give you wildly inaccurate and irrelevant results.
This flawed methodology is adopted, of course, because the planners and Utopians have succumbed to the “organic fallacy” and thus assume that the choice of a transportation method is a collective decision to be made by a collective body, “society.” But it is not. There is no collective body; societies are not collective bodies, but simply collections of individuals, each of whom has goals of his/her own and who weigh the value of resources differently. Decisions concerning transportation methods are thus decisions to be made by each individual traveler, who will make it with respect to her own goals and and in light of the value she places on the various resources required. Only when the analysis proceeds on that basis can the overall efficiency of the system(s) chosen be evaluated.
Kitty Klitzke wrote,
“I am going to break my policy of not replying more than once to comments about something I have written to address a fallacy that I hear too often when it comes to land use. That what gets built is a matter of supply and demand, that it is market based, and that whatever gets built must be good for our economy. That is far from the truth. What gets subsidize by infrastructure and incentives and encouraged by local government policies is what
gets built in the U.S. And far too often local governments’ development regulations are most influenced by industry lobbying and political wrangling, not citizen input.”
Well, it’s certainly true that what gets built has become more and more determined by what politicians beholden to interest groups to whom they have promised free lunches, and by what planners enchanted with the latest fad in urban design schools, have decided to allow. I.e., it is becoming less and less determined by the free market.
But that is a fairly recent phenomena. Most of the development patterns visible in extant urban settlements in the US were determined primarily through the operation of the free market. And you are probably misusing the term “subsidy.” Developments which make use of existing public
infrastructure, or which occasion the extention of that infrastructure, are not thereby “subsidized.” The new users of that infrastructure will be paying for that public good on the same terms as all other users (and in fact, will usually be paying more for it).
“The National Association of Home Builders own studies http://www.nahb.org/page.aspx/landing/sectionID=113 reveal that there is a much greater demand for walkable urban than suburban style development, about 35% nationwide if I remember correctly while there is only about a 5% supply while there is already about 100% supply extant to meet the demand for single family.”
Couldn’t find any data at that link to support your claim, Kitty. The link is to a page of dozens of other links. Could you give a more specific link?
But the stats you give do not support your claim that construction patterns are not market-driven. If there is indeed a greater demand for infill and inner-city housing than the present supply (and that is entirely possible in some markets), then the industry will respond to that demand. It is certainly not true in this market. Numerous condo and other inner-city housing projects announced over the last 10 years or so have been abandoned or placed on permanent hold — Rob Brewster’s Vox Tower, the YWCA Twin Towers, the Wall St. condo project, Mick McDowell’s project above Peaceful Valley, the Kendall Yards project, *et al*. Ron Wells placed the units in his Latah Valley micro-housing project for rent a couple of months ago. All those cancellations, BTW, except Wells’, occurred *before* the housing bubble burst last fall. And until then suburban housing sales continued apace.
“So why do they continue to build primarily car-friendly suburban style developments? Because they don’t have to supply the consumer with what they want, when they decide what the consumer has to choose from.”
Sorry, Kitty, but that claim cannot withstand a moment’s scrutiny. Builders are not building housing of the type you favor because units of that type which have been built *have not sold*.
“Good, people-friendly design is more expensive complicated to build, and often turns less of a profit.”
That is not true either. More complex design drives up costs, but has no effect on profits. A builder earns just as great a profit margin on costly projects as on less costly ones. Costs affect the demand and thus the size of the market, but not the profit margin. The builder will be happy to build whatever the market seems to want.
Although a member a of the left I have developed a certain disdain for the likes of Klitzke and her ilk. As Contarian has rather artfully demonstrated much of what their thinking is based on is not grounded in any type of empirical reality. Although sophisticated, it appears to be more a subterfuge for an elite driven ideology that aims to control the masses for its own whims. Its ironic that after years of studying the right and their use of “shock doctrines” to push class and ideologically motivated ideas on the masses that the same elite would co opt the left with similar tactics. Much like the rhetoric of government debt or why we need austerity, the rhetoric of “sustainability” and smart growth never seems to add up when you look at the numbers. However, regardless the entrenched ideology of these types continues to pushed bad public policy. Even in the face of their recent attempts to fight Spokane’s self determined Urban Growth Boundary they continue to push. To borrow a term from Marx I would say that Klitzke etc. are what you would call useful idiots……