The National Automobile Slum

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I disagree. We're probably going to have a natural fuels boom soon and automobile fuel mileage has simply never been this good. Besides a few complete failures (Los Angeles, DC), the suburban structure mostly works. Joel Kotkin has a good rundown.

Plus, urban life still isn't catching. Though suburbs with urban flair and a small downtown within driving distance. We're probably not going to see Levitowns (huge tracks of land with nothing but residential area), but the idea that future Americans are going to willingly flock to the big urban centers is not true. Most of their population growth has simply been people economically unable to escape.

And the idea that resource scarcity will force Americans to abandon automobiles and suburbs is unrealistic. Sure, oil may be more expensive in 2050, but I see no reason why we can't get 200 MPG cars. Hell, they just made a prototype prius that almost gets 100 mpg.

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I've lived in suburbs, exurbs, and many big cities (though never a rural area), and I don't think it's really all that different. If you're living in an apartment, it's not like you automatically get to know everyone in your building. You don't automatically become closer to people just because you can hear them screwing through extremely thin walls.

And I don't know what kind of suburb you're living in, but the time spent isn't that different. There's not much difference between walking 15 minutes and driving 15 minutes to get groceries. If anything, it was actually harder to get groceries in the city. Due to horrible zoning laws and horrible city governments (KEP THE EVIL CORPORATIONS AWAY!), affordable groceries and other stores can sometimes be hard to find. And they're usually /not/ within walking distance. When I lived in the city, getting groceries usually was an hour trip there and another hour back.

I don't actually drive (I use a Velosolex, which to all my friends, marks me as "a little bitch") but damn, cars are convenient.

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I did. It's the same crap you hear all the time from these people. They keep predicting that a new disaster will rise up and destroy the evil morally inferior suburban lifestyle. He's just peddling what is essentially a new-age religion.

Plus, Kunstler is already a well-known crank. He's one of those rare individuals - hated by both Mother Jones and the National Review.

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SF has been booming for a while and there is also a lot of gentrification going on in Oakland and Berkeley. Even in the suburbs of the Bay Area, a lot of development is going on around the downtown core as older homes are torn down and rebuilt or renovated. Tracy and Brentwood on the other hand remain depressed.

I don't know about Dallas, but there is no great urban revival in the Bay Area. SF had a brief boom in the 90's and much smaller one in the first half of the aughts, but that has largely ended. Oakland is still a sh**thole. The Oakland-Berkeley area literally has one of the worst job markets in America. What is has isn't gentrification - there's always been a cohort of rich assholes living in the Oakland Hills completely detached from the rest of the city. No one points to Palo Alto to show that East Palo Alto is recovering.  And Tracy is actually still growing pretty quickly. Though in all honesty, Tracy is more of an exurb than a suburb. The Bay Area also just doesn't have many suburbs left. Horrible zoning policy and all of that tend to move into a lot of the suburbs once they've gathered up enough steam. Surbuban cities like Dublin are still growing. And that's despite the fact that the Bay Area in general has largely stagnated now for a variety of reasons.

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I'm actually from the Bay Area, and used to live in Pleasanton, so I actually know what I am talking about. You apparently are not too fond of the Bay Area, thus the crude generalizations. There is most certainly an urban revival going on in the Bay Area. Been to the embarcadero lately? South of Market? Downtown San Jose? Downtown Mountain View?

And I wasn't talking about the Oakland hills or the Berkeley hills. I was talking about Temescal and Lake Merritt and even West Oakland to a lesser degree. Oakland and Berkeley have the worst job market in the country? Hardly. It's not that great but it's about as bad as the rest of America. And the SF-San Mateo-SJ arc has one of the best job markets in the country right now, with a lot of the jobs being high income positions. Have you seen the median income of the Bay Area lately? Have you seen the GDP growth numbers out of SJ in 2011? To say the Bay Area is stagnating is stunning, and probably indicates some sort of bitterness on your part. Population growth isn't always everything, sometimes quality matters more than quantity.

Mountain View is hardly an urban center. It is quite self-evidently no San Francisco, Oakland, or San Jose. And Mountain View is actually pretty representative of how cities in the future might look like. Yes, there's a downtown, and I know there are a handful of apartments, but the vast majority of people who work in Mountain View live in single-family homes either in or near Mountainview. It doesn't seem like a urban revival to me.

Also, Oakland-Berkeley-Fremont was rated as America's third worst job market in 2012, which was actually a step up from 2011 (when it was dead-last). There is quite no reason in the world to open up a business in that area. There are still things that draw people to the Silicon Valley. There is absolutely no reason to do business in the East Bay if you can avoid it.

It's the whole terrible "quality over quantity" that certain NorCal folks love to cloak themselves in. It shields them from the fact that they no longer have an economy capable of providing jobs for the vast majority of people. Even San Jose, while doing much better than rest of the Bay sans the Mountainview area, still has an unemployment rate considerably above the national average as well as tepid population growth. Largely because recent tech innovations don't actually employ many people. At least in the ye olde days, you needed to hire a bunch of people to design and hammer out semiconductors or microprocessors. One reason places like San Francisco seem like they're prospering are because a horde of stupid, bubbly social networking stuff are popping out of the woodworks. Of course, there are still some pretty innovative start-ups here and there. But they're overshadowed by businesses with no real long-term strategy (most virtual/social networking and entertainment) and the core industries (R&D and manufacturing) of the Valley are still stagnant. From all the people I know who work in the Silicon Valley, I don't think any of them think the core industries are heading in the right direction. Of course, there are some super-optimists figure that we'll keep on discovering new innovations that will keep the Bay Area charging forward, but my views are much more in line with Thiel than with Schmidt.

Also, the idea that it's progressive regulation that is improving fuel efficiency is laughable. For one, cars sold in Japan usually match or improve mpg on the cars sold in America, and if there's any global poster child of regulatory capture, it's Japan. There are very strong and self-evident market incentives to create cars with good mileage, incentives that only greater stronger the more expensive gasoline is.

Plus, don't you think there are probably good reasons neither of us live there anymore?

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Ok, maybe urban revival was going too far, but I do think cities like Mountain View with a fairly dense core will become more common around the country. And even those single family homes around the core have things like sidewalks and grocery stores and parks fairly close by. This is actually not the case in a lot of the really sprawly areas around the country. Here in Nashville sidewalks are a rare commodity. Don't know if that is the case in NH as well.

In terms of Alameda County and employment, it's good to remember a lot of people commute to jobs in SF and Silicon Valley from there. In addition doesn't it also cover Contra Costa County? In which case you have the unemployed construction workers around Brentwood and Oakley increasing the unemployment rate there. But the biggest factor is the nature of the economy. It's based on blue collar jobs, transportation, warehousing and construction. Same could be said of Solano County. These industries just haven't recovered that much from the recession. Look at most of Southern California for instance. Even there where the economy is more tech focused, like Orange County, things are looking up. But an even greater share of the economy is based on blue collar jobs in Southern California, thus the continued slump and the east bay is similar to that.

I also agree that GDP growth doesn't necessarily translate into a lot of jobs in the Bay Area, but still the Bay Area had the most job growth in the nation last year. I also think innovation will continue. I don't really see that as being very controversial. The question is whether it will happen in the Bay Area, and I think there is good reason to believe it will continue to be the case. There are a lot of tech hotspots around America and the world, and yet the latest thing still tends to come out of the Bay Area. Yes, this creates bubbles but it also creates Google's and Apple's (notice how I didn't mention facebook ). Another thing is cloud computing...I don't know whether most of the work on that will happen in the Bay Area or not. I would suspect a lot of it will be though and that is also an area of growth in the tech sector currently.

I don't live there anymore because I am going to grad school here in Nashville. I wouldn't mind working in the Bay Area, but I hear it's hard to get a job in my profession there since so many people would like to live and work there.

I don't disagree with that about Mountain View. Places built like Mountain View, mostly surburban with a small downtown, are growing very quickly. But I don't think that's a repudiation of the surburban lifestyle, because life in Mountain View is still essentially suburban. If anything, the suburbs are simply being honed.

Well, there's a reason why blue collar manufacturing jobs are sinking in the East Bay. Stuff like regulatory overhead, the general difficulty of doing business in the bay, high taxes, high cost of living, those aren't really much of a problem when we're talking about tech start-ups. Just the general way pay-offs for those type of businesses work, location is really far more important than overhead? But for more traditional industries? Absolutely. And it's why the East Bay (and Los Angeles) aren't going to recover.

Places like Google and Apple are not the bulk of growth. Google employs what? 10,000 people in the Bay? And Apple is a global company that probably doesn't employ that many people in the Bay either. I mean, there are several successful businesses that I think are creating a lot of wealth (and I even think Facebook created a lot of wealth - just not as much as the hypers thought), but the recent tech boom in this area (as shown by the employment statistics), has largely been in entertainment/virtual networking. Which is a very volatile market that I suspect has largely achieved its growth potential.

Plus, it being extremely hard to get a job is...not a good sign.

Even if things were closer together here, nobody would want to walk anywhere in Memphis because it's too damn hot and humid. We hide ourselves in air-conditioned houses, office parks, and autos because to do otherwise would be absolutely miserable. And there's no doubt that people in California have it better. There's a reason why people are willing to pay the crazy money an apartment in the Bay rents for. But it can't always be replicated everywhere.

I mean, the weather is nice. But that's largely because large amounts of the USA have a uniquely terrible climate. But terrible climate is hardly an excuse to not go outside? Look at Singapore, Shanghai, or Tokyo in the summer, all which give the South a run for its money.

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Yeah, but even Los Angeles saw strong job growth last year. The problem is that the housing bubble was the worst in California causing its economy to recover slowly. The slowest recovery has been in the central valley and far flung areas of the IE which are just uneconomical to live in. Houses were being built there for god knows what reason. Those jobs are gone and we shouldn't expect them to come back. In addition there has been large drops in the value of homes in California, much more than the rest of the country. This causes people to feel poor and constrain spending, which hurts the local economy even further. I know you probably have an ideological axe to grind, and I agree the high cost of living discourages growth, but these larger forces are much more important to consider.

House prices didn't really collapse in the Bay or near LA itself. It was places like the Inland Empire that got wiped out. Because the rate of housing construction vastly outpaced the number of jobs that were being created in these areas, thus houses were worth a less than people though. Well, that and California's refusal to levy a property tax (and insistence on sky-high income and corporate taxes). A housing drop was precipitated by people who didn't realize how much so many employment-heavy, core industries have stagnated or shrunk. And the general business climate of California ensures that those industries aren't coming back. It's not realistic to blame these economic woes on a temporary housing crisis because the hollowing out of California's core industries has been a secular decline. It really comes back to the business climate. And it's hardly an ideological crusader, because there are actually many "blue states" with good business climates. Like Oregon and Washington. Though of course, the vast majority of states do lack the natural, non-government, advantages that California has.

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This discussion is horrible. It's not about whether cities or suburbs are better, it's about how to make suburbs (and even towns and cities) better than they are now. But I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that conservatives viciously lash out at any criticism or suggestion of change rather than take in another point of view. What a mess.

It's hardly a "conservative/leftist" thing. Certainly, I do think it's jarring to have a screed shot down so thoroughly, but the product Kunstler is peddling has been thoroughly rejected by all sides of the political aisle, from the National Review to the Center for American Progress. Unless you know, the Center for American Progress is now a right-wing propaganda outlet.