Why are America’s suburbs failing?In ‘Disillusioned’, Benjamin Herold follows five families coping with the wreckage created by outer city development
https://www.ft.com/content/b96e6142-017 ... 653a1ab251A lot of it comes down to taxes, without which the system of suburbs crumbles under collapsing infrastructure.
The Suburbs – How American Suburbia is Doomed to Failhttps://tilln.com/season-4/the-suburbs/An old article but a good one. I never read much in-depth about these issues when I decided to leave the sinking ship and move to a rural town. I had investigated Peak Oil thoroughly and confirmed it's validity. Certainly the timescale of degradation was off by a decade or so, there was no instant collapse as predicted, but to be fare that prediction was based on mass awareness and a rational approach to the dilemma. Not the head-in-the-sand jerk frenzy we saw come to pass. Everything else after the premise of PeakOil was simply a flow on. Namely whatever was built with cheap oil was doomed without it.
The first half of the industrial revolution actually employed pretty smart tech. It was all coal powered, and with the advent of better and better steam engines it was a simple matter to use wood instead, a truly renewable fueled technology. Of course this all worked because people involved in the business and manufacturing were clustered together in hi-density living arrangements, all living near their place of work. Others lived rural of course, in fact a large portion of the population lived on small farms. All in all it was a good age to live in. You could enjoy things like refrigeration and telecommunications, solar hot water, and many other non-oil based technologies.
It would have been a good place to stop actually, oh not technology wise, that would have progressed even under steam, they built the Suez canal with steam power after all. And rock oil was being utilized as lubricants. It was the burning of the rock oil that put the fly in the ointment. It hyper industrialized every aspect of life to the point where people were living 100 miles from their jobs and those jobs were often pointless bullshit jobs, shuffling paper, talking on the phone, walking other people's dogs, and the millions of government employees thinking up new ways to not hurt peoples' feelings.
The suburban sprawl model would never have been possible without oil to pave the roads and lay the networks of services to every individual home. And that is why the suburbs are doomed, they need a never ending supply of Oil to maintain.
Outside dozens of US cities, a pattern set in the late 1940s has repeated itself, with devastating results: newly built infrastructure and government levies on new construction helped many suburban communities offer residents both a panoply of services and low taxes. But by the time the bills for maintaining and updating this infrastructure came due, the original beneficiaries had raised their children and moved on. Most communities had also largely run out of open land for new development, providing a double hit to tax returns.
These suburbs are for the most part "disposable" and the solution for many who can afford it is to move onto a newer one. But these are not what the author thinks, they are cheap builds, even the roads have less asphalt on them, the pipe networks plastic rather than concrete and steel. They will not last the 50 trouble free years their earlier counterparts have.
White FlightBecause this is America, there is also a toxic racial angle to this tale. Discriminatory covenants and biased lending practices initially kept many suburbs exclusively white, so the benefits of new construction went to them. Herold describes how black and brown families — he interviews the Adesinas outside Chicago and the Smiths outside Pittsburgh — were then empowered to move in by the civil rights movement and rising incomes. But many whites, like the Becker family outside Dallas, are moving out to the next ring of suburbs in search of newer homes.
So moving further and further out, but still without true rural living, rather still chained to the supermarket and the sewerage network, the electricity grid and the water network. Oddly enough I live in a suburb, one large one that constitutes my town. It has a sewage network and an electricity grid, supermarket and bitumen roads. But unlike the suburban sprawl it is surrounded by farms, of all types and sizes. I have offgrid water, lots of it, offgrid power, and if the sewage pumps stop I'm at the top of a hill so whatever happens to my waste, it won't be my problem.
These are things PeakOil has taught me are prudent and I can see what it's like without them when a news story breaks about a flood or major storm and thousands in the suburbs are lining up for bottled water, eating cereal with long life milk because the power is out. That is if they got to the supermarket before the shelves were stripped bare.
20th Century detritus
The last one to leave this forum please remember to put Adam_B out and turn off the lights.
![[smilie=3some.gif]](https://peakoil.com/forums/images/smilies/3some.gif "3some")
But as they say, having the knowledge that you have been dumbed down all your life doesn't make you smart. 
