The following is a transcript of KunstlerCast #2: Small Cities & Towns. You can listen to and subscribe to this weekly audio program at KunstlerCast.com.

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Duncan Crary (as host): You’re listening to the KunstlerCast, an audio program about the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl. I’m your host, Duncan Crary.

Each week I bring you another conversation with James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency.

Today’s topic: The end of oil: small cities and towns.

Duncan Crary (interview): Jim, thank you for joining us for another installment of the KunstlerCast.

James Howard Kunstler: It’s always a pleasure to be here with you, Duncan.

Duncan Crary: I just finished reading The Long Emergency and I want to talk with you about it. But first, for our listeners, can you give a — like, a brief synopsis of what The Long Emergency is about?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, yeah. It’s really about how we are heading into a period of resource scarcity and the depletion of our oil supplies, and the disruption, long before we run out of oil, the disruption of the oil markets and the allocation of this crucial resource all around the world, and the geopolitical implications of those inequities.

And how these problems are going to combine with climate change and… In so many ways relating to everything from how we produce our food, how food is distributed around the world…

Duncan Crary: The end of the 7, 000-mile-Caesar salad, as you say.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, how we’re going to have trade and manufacturing when Wal-Mart dies. And not least, what the destiny of the suburban, car dependent, happy motoring living arrangement is. Which is probably, for me, the biggest part of the equation.

Duncan Crary: Yeah, I mean if I were to sum it up I’d say, “We’re going to run out of oil, we’ve always known this. A lot of alternative fuels are sort of fantasy.

“We’ve just been living with reckless abandon up to this point, just ignoring the inevitable future. It’s coming, it’s going to happen.”

Whether it pans out exactly the way you envision it — ehh, you know that’s — well that’s yet to be seen. But it’s going to happen.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, my version is only one plausible future. And even its plausibility may be arguable.

Duncan Crary: OK. So some of your critics on the Internets, I’ve been reading — one thing in common they all say is that they think your looking forward to this, almost like payback to all these idiots who’ve been driving SUV’s around. You know, living in McMansions. Are you looking forward to this?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, I’m not — I don’t feel vengeful about it, you know, like some character out of a Tony Soprano drama trying to whack his adversaries.

Duncan Crary: Right [laughs]

James Howard Kunstler: The way I feel about it is that we have got a manner of life that produces a tremendous amount of discomfort, distress, unhappiness, anxiety, depression, hardship, violence.

And that when circumstances compel us to live differently we’re going to benefit hugely from making these changes… from getting away from a lot of the habits and practices that we’ve been engaged in.

Duncan Crary: OK. So you’re not a “fundamentalist” New Urbanist who’s waiting for the apocalypse to bring about the end of suburbia. But you do think that…

James Howard Kunstler: Well, I’m not a Luddite. I am a New Urbanist, and I am in pretty thorough going agreement with their principles. They’re certainly not trying to destroy American society.

If anything they were among the reformers who had the most comprehensive and kindest vision of a possible positive outcome for the set of changes we’re heading into.

Duncan Crary: What about your critics — this I read more about The Geography of Nowhere — but what about your critics who accuse you of extreme nostalgia for a life before the car? How do you address that?

James Howard Kunstler: The word “nostalgia” itself is interesting because it literally means homesickness. It became evident to me that part of the whole suburban dilemma is that as a culture, as a nation, as a people, we are tremendously homesick — but not just for a box that we call “a home”; but for a real dwelling place for our society and our communities that is worth caring about.

The chief characteristic of just about everything we built in suburbia is that it ended up being stuff that wasn’t worth caring about. And that had tremendous cultural implications for us.

Duncan Crary: In reading your book (The Long Emergency), I wanted to ask you: have you sort of given up on New Urbanism to an extent? Have you sort of given up on putting the effort to curb sprawl?

Because reading your book, correct me if I’m wrong, but I almost felt like these systems are going to run out of steam anyway. So why even bother? Why not just sit back and get a good seat for the show?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, exactly. It will be self-evident that we cannot continue this for many reasons, not just for energy reasons. We’re also going to be running into severe limitations with the increment of finance that’s available to build anymore of this.

What it comes down to is we’re not going to be building anymore of a living arrangement that has no future, because it will be self-evidently an exercise in futility.

I haven’t given up on the New Urbanism at all. But I do regard their stock and trade of the last 15 years — the traditional neighborhood development running about 400 acres, built out in a cornfield or cow pasture — I don’t think we’re going to see much more of that, for a number of reasons.

The New Urbanists, in recent years, became hostages of the production homebuilding industry, and they hitched themselves to the methods and practices and financing increments of that industry. And the production homebuilding industry is now crapping out — they’re going down.

I don’t think that the finance for projects that large is going to be available in the future, because there’s going to be a hell of a lot less capital for investment in this kind of thing.

We’re not going to build new developments of any kind in the cow pastures and meadows and cornfields because we’re going to need the ‘ag-land’ in any case.

That kind of work that was done by the New Urbanists will be viewed in hindsight as a transitional, transformational mode of development. The real achievement of the New Urbanists was not building the projects like Seaside, etc.

It was diving into the garbage can of history and retrieving that important principle and methodology for understanding how to design and assemble real towns and real cities.

And I think that it will now be applied to the existing small cities and towns, in places like Troy; it’s already happening in Saratoga — and increasingly, that will be the case.

The increment in development will be smaller. Instead of doing these 400-acre new town projects, we’ll be lucky if we can do a new intersection or a new corner in a town, or a new block; or, for that matter, one or two really good building lots on a block.

Duncan Crary: I’ve got to say, it might sound very dark to some people. To me, it sounds overly-optimistic. I feel like you’re being overly-optimistic in the American people.

Aren’t they going to be building malls and cul-de-sacs right until the very end, the very last drop of oil?

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, I think we’re doing that now. It is the very end of that. One of the things that we are seeing, just now in the winter of 2008, is that a commercial real estate crash is following the implosion of the residential real estate crash.

And you know it makes sense because, in essence, the commercial stuff always follows in sequence the residential development. And so now you’re seeing huge problems with the strip malls and office parks and ‘big box’ power centers that were permitted way back in 2005, 2006.

They are now running into enormous financing problems. Their customers are losing their disposable income as they lose their jobs and their incomes go down, and they get into troubles.

The whole equation of commercial building is changing very quickly and drastically. I think that we’re going to be in serious trouble in five years.

There’s no question that we’re going to be running into trouble with the oil export crisis, which is a new layer of market instability on top of the general depletion picture.

Duncan Crary: Now, I mean, I own a car. I drive a car. But I don’t make 11 trips a day in my car.

I like having a car if I want to drive it, but I felt myself kind of looking forward to some parts of this future you envision, a return to the local, better transportation ideas.

One of the reasons I moved to Troy, New York is I spotted it as a nice, livable, small, manageable city. I could have sort of the benefits of an urban neighborhood, but I could walk out into the country fairly easy.

People laugh at me for living in Troy, New York — they’re out in the suburbs. I feel like, once the Long Emergency starts, places like Troy will be perfectly suited for the new future. Am I a crank or what?

James Howard Kunstler: Well Troy is an interesting case, because it was so neglected for so long that it actually retained a tremendous amount of very valuable pre-automobile dependent fabric. You know, great neighborhoods composed of really sturdy, brownstone, row houses.

Duncan Crary: They left about 75 percent of the city standing.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah.

Duncan Crary: Which is a lot for these days, right?

James Howard Kunstler: You bet, because you know, for example, Columbus, Ohio?

Duncan Crary: Yeah.

James Howard Kunstler: Seventy-Five percent of Columbus, Ohio is surface parking.

Duncan Crary: Wow!

James Howard Kunstler: You see, and that’s not unusual. But Troy had just a tremendous amount of great buildings.

In fact, the part of the old downtown was so wonderful that Martin Scorsese went up there in the 1990’s and used it as a set for his movie The Age of Innocence.

Duncan Crary: Yeah, I know.

James Howard Kunstler: These places are coming back. One of the reasons that they will, is that in the future we’re going to have to have human urban habitats that have a meaningful relationship with productive ag-land outside of the city that’s not 3, 000 miles away. We’re going to have to grow a certain amount of our own food closer to home. In short, what had either already become suburbs or was slated to become more suburbs, that whole relationship is going to come to an end.

I happen to believe that the suburban project in the larger sense is coming to an end. The collapse of the housing bubble is viewed by a lot of people as just another part of a down cycle, in an endless set of repeating cycles. But I think in fact this is the end of all those cycles, and we’re simply not going to be doing it anymore.

Duncan Crary: So, just for the benefit of our listeners, I wanted to describe really briefly, Troy is a small city. It was built for probably 75, 000, now it’s about 45, 000 residents.

It’s pretty dense urban structure, but (downtown is) only about five blocks deep, situated on the Hudson River. So you have access to waterways, an extensive system of waterways.

There is some sprawl outside of town, but, I don’t know, the hilly geography or something has prevented your typical sprawl tumors that bubble up on the outside of town. So I’m sure there are tons of other cities, small cities around the country, situated in a similar spot.

James Howard Kunstler: You’d be surprised how in many ways different they are, and how different their circumstances are.

There are some things that fairly uniform. Just about every town in America has its mall, has its asteroid belt of suburban, commercial crap outside.

But Troy is an especially interesting case because its economy died so completely after about 1960, and a lot of that suburban stuff just didn’t happen on the outskirts.

Duncan Crary: Well, you also, in The Long Emergency kind of go through different regions in the country and you predict, you foresee their future.

Troy being in the Northeast, you think the Northeast is going to do pretty well after the end of cheap oil. Except for the megapolis from Boston to Baltimore, right?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, yeah. I gave some thought to these things. It seemed to me that the places that had brighter prospects were the places that were near water; water for different purposes: drinking water certainly and water for households, but also the possibility of water power generating electricity on a modest scale.

And water transport, which I think is going to become a much bigger thing again. And of course, Troy is in the Hudson River estuary, which is one of the truly great waterways of our country.

I also said that the Sun Belt was going to be troubled going into the future. And that there was going to be an inverse relationship to the degree that it prospered in the late 20th century and to the degree that it has tremendous trouble going forward now.

Duncan Crary: Let me just clarify, the Sun Belt you’re talking about, on the West Coast?

James Howard Kunstler: Actually, there are really sort of two sun belts. There’s the wet Sun Belt which is the Southeast, Atlanta, basically from the Atlantic Ocean to Dallas. And then there’s the dry Sunbelt which is everything west of that to the Pacific Ocean, and that includes Phoenix and Tucson and Los Angeles.

Both of those regions are going to be in a lot of trouble, but not exactly for the same reasons.

Duncan Crary: So do you have any recommendations for a young guy like me? Should I stay put in Troy or what should I do?

James Howard Kunstler: I have a very different view of what’s going to be happening to the big cities than many other commentators.

I think that the big cities are going to be contracting substantially, and in probably a pretty disorderly way. They’re going to enter insolvency, bankruptcy, difficulty in maintaining services. It’s going to be pretty gnarly in the big metroplexes of America.

Personally I think that the small cities and the small towns are going to tend to be the more successful areas. And that young people ought to be very careful about choosing the places that they go.

Part of that whole decision will be a regional decision. Do I move to Phoenix, Arizona or do I move to the Northeast or to the Upper Midwest?

I think the places that are around water, that have good agricultural land. Places that have small cities that exist at a scale that can be rebuilt are all going to have advantages.

The Upper Midwest now is a basket case, but it’s also the center of the Great Lakes, which is the greatest freshwater inland sea in the world, and has tremendous possibilities at least for maritime trade on a regional basis.

These are things that we’re not thinking about at all yet, but they’re going to come to play a much larger role in our society.

Duncan Crary: All right, well Jim, it’s always a pleasure talking to you. Thanks a lot.

James Howard Kunstler: Always a pleasure to be here with you.

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Duncan Crary (as host): You’ve been listening to “The KunstlerCast,” featuring James Howard Kunstler. To leave a listener comment, call toll free at 866-924-9499. Send email to

You can download episodes of this program and read transcripts at KunstlerCast.com. I’m your host Duncan Crary, thanks for listening.

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