Suburbia: Collapsing Under Its Promises? -- Author James Kunstler Says Isolation Has Created A False Sense Of Security
NEW YORK - James Howard Kunstler is a prickly man with a pointy face who thinks the American dream of paradise in suburbia is collapsing, falling in upon the fantasy that supported it for more than a century and a half.
"The process is already beginning and it will continue for the next 50 years," he predicts. "Many of the residential suburbs of today will be the slums of tomorrow."
The fantasy upon which suburbia was built, Kunstler believes, lives in the singular desire of most Americans for an ideal "little house in the natural landscape," some place removed, serene, rural.
That ideal has been pursued since the 1850s, but with particular frenzy in the years since the end of World War II, becoming the most immense demographic shift since the settling of the West. It has been so successfully realized that today many people across the United States are determined to halt it.
Like Kunstler, they, too, see the ugliness of sprawl as evidence of the dream gone sour.
Kunstler's books, "The Geography of Nowhere," and "Home from Nowhere," are full of intelligent argument and scornful language. So is his conversation. He dismisses with a certain unnecessary roughness those who fail to embrace his message.
His books may not be the most definitive works on the phenomenon they describe. But they radiate a splendid messianic heat.
They identify the mechanisms that make suburban sprawl possible, almost inevitable. These include zoning laws that discourage mixing generations and people of different economic power, a tax system that discourages improvement of property in cities, possibly the cheapest gasoline in the world, federal subsidies for roads and other suburban infrastructure, mortgage-interest tax deductions that encourage people to buy and builders to build, and large arrogant houses ever farther removed from the old centers of population.
They are polemical books, written by a man offended by banal architecture - and more. Kunstler is a street-corner prophet with sign: "The end is near!" Others may see suburban blight and denounce it as an aesthetic nightmare. Kunstler looks out and sees the death of civilization as we know it.
The prophet, in black suit, red and ivory tie and hip gold ring in his left ear, is at lunch in the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal. It is established: He hates suburbia.
It is "deleterious, insalubrious; it is damaging to our culture, to our aspirations, to our humanity." It is bankrupting the country economically and destroying the ecology.
And, he adds, "it is making people dreadfully lonely."
The suburban ideal
It is probable that these opinions put Kunstler at odds with most of his fellow Americans, who still idealize suburban life.
But that's not to say he's wrong.
"The problem with the little house in the natural landscape is that it is designed to exist in civil isolation," he says. "When you assemble them in a conglomeration of 300 on 150 acres, we give that another name. We call that a housing subdivision. We recognize there is a big difference between an authentic integral town and a fakey, inauthentic construct called a housing subdivision."
Yet people continue to choose such places to live. The inclination to suburbanize lies deep in the culture of America. For Kunstler it reflects what he calls a "historical antipathy for cities that arose simultaneously with industrialism and became pretty nasty places early in our history."
Kunstler, 48, is an urban man, a believer in the city as a wellspring of civilization, of its arts and sciences, and human social progress. He regards Manhattan as "the most successful public realm in the country, with its libraries, theater, culture and such, the fullest functioning urban center in America."
Today, though, Kunstler lives in Saratoga Springs, a town in upstate New York. He describes his life there in idyllic terms, snug in his "little gray 1820s cottage," with his loving life partner, who writes children's books. He bicycles each day to his office to write.
Kunstler was a newspaper and magazine reporter before he turned to writing books: eight commercially unsuccessful novels, and later his more successful screeds on sprawl and suburban overdevelopment.
The fatal flaw in the suburban idea crystallized for him about 25 years ago, he says, when his newspaper relocated to a new suburban business center outside Albany, a project which he said destroyed the commercial centers of the three nearest towns.
During his first year there the Arab oil embargo occurred.
"It made quite an impression on me when the music stopped there for about a month-and-a-half and you began to see how dysfunctional people became when they were at the mercy of larger economic forces beyond their control."
The fragility of a widely dispersed society, without mass transit, utterly dependent for its functioning on millions upon millions of individual internal combustion engines, became apparent to him. As it did to a lot of other people, most of whom promptly forgot their fears after the oil flow resumed.
Kunstler didn't.
Over the years Kunstler has become convinced that many people in suburbia are "profoundly unhappy" with their lives, and don't know why.
"People approach this whole issue in terms of the ugliness they are confronted with day in and day out in their surroundings. Many ordinary Americans sense that the places they live in are pretty terrible, that there's something important missing."
They tend to express it through phrases like "lack of community," or "no sense of place," he says.
Kunstler does not think of himself as a polemicist, or as someone amplifying a single idea possibly beyond its worth. He likes to describe himself as a "prose artist."
"One reason I'm writing these books is to persuade people that we've got serious problems for our civilization," he says.
Suburbia called anti-civic
Kunstler does not expect enlightenment from the country's traditional political leaders. Both major parties, he believes, are hostage to "self-defeating" beliefs that frustrate any hope of regenerating cities, or fostering policies to draw a middle class back into them.
"The Democrats believe rehabilitating cities is a war against poor people of color. The problem with that is it leads directly to the idea that you should never renovate a city neighborhood because if you improve it somebody might have to move out.
"The Republicans want to reinstate a civic society, but their favorite living arrangement is suburbia, and suburbia is profoundly anti-civic and profoundly uncivil."
So what impends?
"It may get so bad that suburbia will collapse before people are ready or willing to reinvent civic life," he says. "In which case we will go through a period of gross cultural and political disorder." Even, if you can believe it, "the equivalent of a dark age."