Jay Currie

The end of the suburban build-out will be a stupendous trauma for the United States because, unfortunately, we have made it the basis of our economy for a generation, as well as our living arrangement. Not only will incomes and livelihoods be lost on the grand scale, and never come back, but, as the global oil predicament deepens, the existing fabric of our vast suburbs will become increasingly useless and worthless. The people stuck in them will lose whatever wealth they have accumulated and our arrangements for daily life will become increasingly nightmarish.
This is the part of the story that the mainstream media still can’t put together. Peak oil and the housing bust are a mutually-reinforcing clusterfuck. jim kunstler

I like to stop by Kunstler’s blog once in a while. I think he is pretty much wrong about almost everything he writes but he writes so very well and has a gift for sustained outrage.

I think he is right about the end of the build out of suburbia. Housing starts are way down. The need for yet another strip mall is next to zero. The price of gas is going up – though not, I suspect, because of peak oil but rather because of an increased global demand and a reluctance in the West to construct more refineries in the face of the greenie onslaught – and the virtues of suburban living are coming under increased scrutiny.

In Canada this is likely to mean that people will be moving back downtown. But this is less of an option in many large US cities which have become donuts with a rather nasty black or Hispanic underclass inhabiting the hole. Canada has been pretty good at keeping the centers of our major cities alive. We need to keep doing that and recognizing that density is the only way that can happen.