The following is a transcript of KunstlerCast #12: Gentrification. You can listen to and subscribe to this weekly audio podcast at KunstlerCast.com.

[intro music]

Duncan Crary (as host): You’re listening to The KunstlerCast, a weekly conversation about the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl featuring James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency and World Made by Hand.

I’m Duncan Crary. Today’s topic: gentrification.

Duncan Crary (as interviewer): Well, Jim, I’ve got a good topic for us today.

James Howard Kunstler: Oh, boy.

Duncan Crary: We have a listener comment, a listener email from Kara in Washington. It’s about gentrification, so may I?

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah.

Duncan Crary (reading listener mail): Hi, Duncan and Jim.

James Howard Kunstler: Can you take an aristocratic tone with that, though?

Duncan Crary: I can’t even do it in a female voice.

James Howard Kunstler: Can you say something like, (with aristocratic voice) My good sir, we have a question here, my good man. Please answer this, if you would be so kind?

Duncan Crary: OK. My good sir… I’m sorry. I’m a total failure at that. You’re the one who went to school for theater, not me. But, here’s the question:

Duncan Crary (reading listener mail):

I listened to the latest podcast and I liked what you had to say about walkable cities. I just moved to Capitol Hill in Washington, DC and I love being able to walk to work, to the grocery store, and down town. My neighborhood has wonderful sidewalks and fully grown trees to shade us from that brutal DC July sun.

My question is about something that has been on a lot of our minds here in our nation’s capitol: gentrification. As middle-class people like me move into neighborhoods like Capitol Hill - that are wonderful in part because they were overlooked by developers - what happens to the poor people that are being pushed out? If they move out to the suburbs, where it’s become cheaper to live, they have the extra burden of needing a car because there is no mass transit out there.

Thanks for a great show! I’ve really been enjoying it!

— Kara, in Washington

Duncan Crary: OK, so Jim, what’s the deal with gentrification?

James Howard Kunstler: It’s a very complicated issue. I think we could start by making the point, maybe, that it was never the norm in city life for cities to be inhabited mostly by poor people.

That’s a distortion and a perversity that has only occurred because of what we did in America, because all of the people who were doing well had the option of living in a cartoon version of the country, which is what suburbia was. The cities were left by default to everybody else which were the people who weren’t doing well in one way or another.

So, we have to begin by observing that it’s an abnormality in the first place that our cities are inhabited by so many poor people at the center. If you go to other cities in other lands, what you discover is for the most part the cities at their centers are inhabited by the people who are doing OK and the poorer people live in the periphery.

Duncan Crary: Like in Paris, right?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, like in Paris. That’s been the norm. Now, it’s unfortunate that we have large populations that are poor and not doing well and seem to be stuck where they are. Those are social issues and social questions that may not be able to be addressed sheerly by physical form. Physical form can only do so much.

But, there are things you can do. One thing is that as neighborhoods are getting better in the cities you can typologically make provision for people of different income levels to inhabit the same blocks or the same neighborhoods. You can do that by activating the dwellings in the alleyways and allowing them in the first place, you know, allowing accessory apartments.

One of the problems we run into is that in many, many neighborhoods in America they have outlawed accessory apartments, meaning that families living in very large houses cannot assign part of the house to being the rental for someone who’s not in the market for a single family home or a single person or an older person. That’s the norm in other cities so we don’t do that. We kind of zone people out by — typologically.

But there is another kind of moral dimension to the gentrification issue that has a lot of people very worried and concerned. The problem is if you start creating rules and regulations against improving neighborhoods and against well-off people inhabiting the cities then you have to ask yourself: OK, then by default where do they go? And the answer is: They go to the suburbs; if it’s morally not cool for them to fix up the neighborhoods in the center of the city then they either have to go to the edge of the city or outside the city. It leaves us back in that predicament again.

The cities are not just for poor people, and the cities have to be the responsibility of people of all classes but particularly the well-off because if rich people can’t take care of their towns, who can? We really find ourselves in a bind, where to get back to the original form of an urban habitat — which is allowing people of all incomes to live in proximity to one another — we have to make it OK for them to do it.

Now, cities have gone through a lot of different transitions. Probably the most traumatic one was the one that let industry into the city when we entered the Industrial Age. That created a lot of difficulty that hadn’t been present before. Of course, there had been other problems before, like poor plumbing and poor sanitation and irregular delivery of decent water and stuff like that.

And you get into the Industrial Age and you start to get decent water and decent electricity, but then you also get the overwhelming scale of the industrial town and the noise and the obnoxious behavior of the factories and stuff that people want to get away from. By the early 20th Century, people were getting away from that in the United States when they could.

I guess the question really is: what are the scale and quality and shape and character of our cities going to be like from here on? And I would maintain that we have really gotten past the age of the industrial city as we knew it.

That is a story that is now coming to an end. I think the cities are going to be smaller, that they are going to contract, they are going to densify at their centers. That the people who are doing OK, if there are any in our society, will come to inhabit a lot of those places.

I don’t know where the poor people are going to go. I don’t know what the poor people are going to do. Right now, the poor people are not doing things that are necessarily that productive for themselves. That is a whole other social issue that is maybe beyond the cant of what you and I are talking about.

Duncan Crary: Well, Jim, it just doesn’t make sense to not have affordable housing within a city — even though that term is unnatural, and you’ve explained how ridiculous it is that we need to create this artificial commodity called “affordable housing”. But I remember as a reporter in Saratoga Springs, which is a very popular up and coming city, and a tourist destination in the summer time—

I remember reporting on the service industry, which is sort of the fuel of the Saratoga economy. And the people who are waiters and waitresses and other service industry professionals can’t even afford to live in Saratoga anymore. It’s really hard for them to find—

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, it’s gotten increasingly difficult, and you know it’s very much the same in other parts of the country, although I do think that that was another abnormality, another distortion that’s going to come to an end. We go through a lot of phases.

Right now, oddly enough, in Saratoga Springs, there’s a glut of apartments for rent, and the prices have been coming down, because the college built a new dorm apartment complex as they called it, because it really isn’t an ensemble. But one of the things that it did was it took away all of the college students out of the town, in one fell swoop, who were renting apartments.

And it left a lot of properties un-rented that are hard to rent because they had these three-bedroom and four-bedroom apartments that were pretty crummy, all divided up so that they could cram four students in there and collect $2,500 rent, which is a lot for an apartment.

But the students would pay it because they were only paying $500 or $700 a piece. And when the students left, these were apartments that nobody wanted to be in, because they were so crummy, even though they had a lot of space.

Duncan Crary: Jim, our letter writer is from Washington D.C., which has a substantial black population. Another city that we hear a lot of fear of gentrification is New Orleans, which is also a very black city. What are the underlying moral racial issues; do you feel that there are any going on with this fear of gentrification?

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, well, yes. A lot of it has to do with the failure of the social justice movement in the late 20th Century, and our embarrassment over the fact that we still have these large populations of one racial group that seem to be chronically unsuccessful and can’t change their circumstances and get out of this predicament.

And it’s very hard to account for, and it embarrasses us and makes us tremendously uncomfortable. So we can’t talk about it in those terms. And when you really get down to it, people are people. And it’s a question of what are you, Mr. Individual Person, going to do to take care of your life?

If you find — if you’re poor, if your family’s poor, even if your family’s been poor for three generations, are you going to make a decision to maybe try to do everything possible to not be poor? Or are you just going to submit to where you are because somebody has convinced you that structural racism will prevent you from ever succeeding?

I’m not really sure where structural racism, so-called, leaves off and personal behavior issues begin. And I think it’s very important for us to have that discussion. I think it’s very reassuring that, Barack Obama, running for president is beginning to touch on the edges of that discussion. And I think his contribution to that could be very important.

So that we are once again thinking about ourselves as people and individuals and not as stereotypes. And the question will become: what will we do? What will, as individuals, what choices will we make? And are we just going to allow ourselves to be scripted by cultural scripts and cultural scripts for behavior that condemn us to repeating old stories?

Duncan Crary: So let me ask you this Jim, should we be concerned about gentrification, and why should we be concerned about it? Should we make it a moral issue about racial relations? Or should we strictly think on economic terms? It’s not good for a mono-class society.

James Howard Kunstler: Well the implication of your question, and I would certainly say that we have to think about it in all of its dimensions… But we particularly have to think about the importance of making it OK for people who are doing well in society to live in the city.

And we can’t just take the position philosophically that it’s not OK for people who are doing OK to live in the city. Because that, by default, leaves them only the suburbs or the countryside to live in.

Duncan Crary: Because there is this unhealthy evolution of language in our culture, where “urban” is like code-speak for black.

James Howard Kunstler: Absolutely, and it’s peculiar, you know? It’s bizarre.

Duncan Crary: Well it’s offensive to black people. It’s also offensive to everyone else.

James Howard Kunstler: Well it should be. But I think it’s become the acceptable euphemism for now. And at some point it won’t be, because it suggests that the center of the city is the only place that’s suitable for black people, and black people should be urban.

The whole thing is really crazy, especially when you consider the fact that many of the black people who ended up in the cities were former sharecroppers, basically country people who moved to these cities to get jobs in the 1950’s and 60’s.

The mechanical cotton picker was invented, I think, in something like 1948, and that really put a whole class of southern rural people out of business. And they had to go somewhere and do something else.

And a lot of them went to Detroit and Columbus, Ohio, and New York City, and Philadelphia for industrial jobs, etcetera.

Duncan Crary: Well Jim, I know we just danced very lightly upon a very controversial topic. But I think it’s important to have the conversation. We’ll probably be criticized in some ways for how we handled this.

But I think we’ve opened up a dialogue, and if our listeners want to contribute to this, correct us… I for one was saying “black” and not African American. But I would like to point out that not all black people in America are African Americans.

James Howard Kunstler: Well it’s true, and I think that you deserve a lot of credit for even raising this difficult subject which most white people in America are just too uncomfortable to talk about. Somehow we do have to talk about these things. And the best thing we can do is just try to remember to be kind to each other as much as possible.

Duncan Crary: Well thanks a lot Jim.

[music]

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, read transcripts, learn about our theme music, and join our mailing list at KunstlerCast.com.

I’m your host, Duncan Crary, thanks for listening.

Direct Download (10 MB): KunstlerCast_12.mp3

Comment & Discuss at KunstlerCast Forum

The following is a transcript of KunstlerCast #11: Picturing Suburbia. You can listen to and subscribe to this weekly audio podcast at KunstlerCast.com.

[Intro music]

Duncan Crary (as host): You’re listening to The KunstlerCast, a weekly conversation about the tragic comedy in suburbia sprawl featuring James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency, and World Made by Hand.

I’m Duncan Crary. Today’s topic: Picturing Suburbia.

Duncan Crary(in interview): Jim, I’ve heard from a lot of our listeners who imagine that we’re in a studio. We’re actually in your home office.

James Howard Kunstler: Yes, it’s sort of like a studio. It’s a professional place where good things happen.

Duncan Crary: If I can describe to some of the listeners, hanging on the wall are paintings of a burnt-out car, a somewhat dilapidated streetscape, and a car on a sort of a country highway…you know cars on the road—very beautiful paintings of cars on the road.

James Howard Kunstler: That’s not all that’s in here, but…

Duncan Crary: Well I’m selectively picking them out, but I think people might be surprised to know that you spend a lot of time painting the American landscape, which includes a lot of paintings of parking lots and McDonald’s and Mobile stations. When I first learned that you are a painter and I saw some of your paintings, I was really surprised at the subjects that you chose to paint.

James Howard Kunstler: Well maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise. I’ve really painted my whole life. I went to a special school in New York City called the High School of Music and Art where we received a fair amount of decent training. It wasn’t fabulous. It was OK. It’s something I’ve carried on in the background of my life forever and I take it seriously. I do get out a lot. I’m what’s called sort of a sur la motif painter. I go out to the motif with my French easel — it speaks French. It’s a box that unfolds into an easel and I’m out there with the subject matter in the field. I’m interested in the landscape of our time and the landscape of our time is mostly about the highway.

Van Gogh painted the peasants sleeping next to the haystacks because he was in a landscape that was populated with human beings. I’m in a landscape that’s populated mostly by automobile, so I paint them.

Edward Hopper did something similar. Although we look at Hopper’s paintings today –his paintings from the 1920s and the ’30s when he was doing a lot of his highway stuff -– and we recognize that as a landscape that is now bygone because the scale of it is smaller and it all seems kind of quaint. It’s not as overwhelming as what we’ve got. But I’m very interested in it.

Now, there’s some additional things about it that people who haven’t tried this might not know. It is very hard to see what you’re looking at out there on a commercial highway strip with all the contesting signage and all the sort of visual clutter. So it becomes a great challenge to be able to make it legible and that’s one of the things that I like about painting the highway strip.

I also got really interested, as I was going out there, in the contrast between the natural light and the artificial light, especially at sundown.

So I would go out and set my easel up, let’s say in the juniper shrub bed of the Burger King, painting the K-Mart a quarter of a mile away with the sun going down in a certain way. So that the lovely kind of violet and purple and pink and orange and salmon-colored clouds would be contrasted to the bright primary colors of the electric signage and stuff. I found that kind of interesting and sometimes, it’s beautiful although it shouldn’t be construed as a reason to promote suburban sprawl. It’s out there, it’s what we’re living in. It’s not going to be there the way it is now in 50 years. And people will look back on these paintings, if they survive, people will see a landscape that looks different from what they’re living in.

Duncan Crary: When I first heard that you’re a painter, I assumed your paintings were going to be sarcastic — I knew that you were painting about these topics — but they’re not.

James Howard Kunstler: No, they’re not ironic at all. I’m not trying to make a joke about it. I’m literally trying to be a straightforward reporter of the landscape of our time and its many moods.

I do like to paint in the evening. I like to paint at night. I found one particular strip mall nearby where the supermarket had a particular lighting scheme under the soffit. It allowed me to see the colors of my palette and the canvas very clearly while the rest of the stuff around was sort of dark. You could paint the McDonald’s in the dark and still see what you’re doing and that was a great boon to me.

I also found a lot of satisfaction in the industrial ruins that are all over this area of the Upper Hudson Valley. In fact, in the time that I’ve lived here over the last 30 years, a lot of the factories have been bulldozed so that I was able to actually witness the process of demolition.

Duncan Crary: I just bought a book called Hudson Valley Ruins and it’s an excellent book that goes up and down the Hudson Valley, sort of giving you the history of all of these ruins, many of them are industrial. But here’s the little nugget I like: The Hudson River School of Painters, sort of America’s first formal “school” of painting, these artists were lamenting in their day that they didn’t have any ruins to paint.

James Howard Kunstler: Absolutely, and the figures in that period–Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Church and all those guys–would go through this initiation rite of traveling all the way to Italy and painting the ruins there as young men. They’d stay for a year or two or three and they’d make their bones by painting the ruins of Rome. Then they’d come back to America and what they finally settled on was the idea that — OK, we don’t have ruins here but we do have this wonderful romantic natural landscape. Let’s make that our subject matter.

So that became the subject matter of 19th century American landscape painting in the absence of having ruins and it became a kind of a fetish.

The situation is different today. We have a lot of ruins out there. And when I go out there, I feel very privileged like I feel like Thomas Cole might have felt on the Roman Campania, painting the disintegrating aqueducts of the Roman Empire. I go out to Clarks Mills by the Hudson River and I paint the ruins of the wallpaper factory that are there and it’s sort of thrilling. It’s also a thrilling place to be physically because it’s a place of nebulous ownership.

The Georgia-Pacific company actually owns the site but there’s nobody there guarding it anymore. They’ve given up guarding it. The fences have big holes in it now so you can get in there. It’s become a kind of a strange natural park that has no supervision. But there hasn’t been a whole lot misbehavior there yet because it’s really in sort of a country place.

So it’s thrilling to be out there alone with an easel by the river. It’s starting to get populated, too. There are people who are going through the fence and fishing along the river. So finally there’s some human figures out there.

Duncan Crary: Speaking of Thomas Cole, one of the paintings series you mentioned in The Geography of Nowhere is…

James Howard Kunstler: The Course of Empire.

Duncan Crary: Tell us a little bit about that painting series and how it influenced you.

James Howard Kunstler: Well, I don’t know that it did influence me. I certainly appreciated it, although I haven’t done anything remotely like it.

Well, Thomas Cole, the great American landscape painter, was interested in painting series of things. He did one called The Voyage of Life, which I think was a four-panel series in which a young baby starts out in a river in a basket like Moses, floating along a river. And then he becomes a young man fighting the gales and storms of life. And finally as an old man he’s delivered into some quiet eddy where he will be born to Heaven by the angels.

He has another called The Course of Empire which depicts in, I think, five panels, the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, really, although it’s never stated — going from the pastoral phase to the big buildings being built up, and finally the climax of it is this huge pageant that’s going on and this gigantic kind of amphitheater on the water. It’s like a harbor but there seems to be some great spectacle of empire going on.

Somebody has just returned from a remote land with giraffes and elephants and being born on litters and all this stuff. And then we get a little further and there’s nobody there anymore and the buildings are disintegrating and there’s some kind of war that’s taken place. It’s left a lot of damage. And then finally, the utter desolation of the ruins hundreds of years later.

Duncan Crary: You can identify…there’s like a hill in the background in every painting so you can kind of tell…

James Howard Kunstler: All the canvases are done from a similar perspective. I don’t think they’re absolutely identical but very similar. And, yeah, there’s a landmark in the background and it’s quite a tour de force of paintings.

Duncan Crary: Well, the funny thing is that if I were to come up with a more recent example of the same thing, I would think of Robert Crumb’s A Short History of America. You know that cartoon series?

James Howard Kunstler: Oh, it’s a fabulous thing, showing the development of a little country road into a small town into the beginning of the automobile age and all of a sudden the small town starts to fall apart and finally it ends up in like the 1980s as a Pizza Hut or a convenience store, surrounded by all this crap of technology: the horrible broken signage and the telephone poles and the condensers and the electric installations and the trucks and just all the crap out there.

Duncan Crary: Yeah. But that’s not exactly what your paintings are like, though. Are you interested in exploring that area a little bit more?

James Howard Kunstler: Well like I said, I don’t really have an ironic attitude about it.

Duncan Crary: You think Crumb was being ironic?

James Howard Kunstler: Oh, absolutely. Well, in the sense that it seemed to be remarkably straightforward reportage of what was going on there. In fact, in that movie with Crumb, they show him drawing that kind of scene and he’s sitting there saying, “You can’t make this stuff up. You have to really pay attention to the details.”

Duncan Crary: As soon as he said that, and this is the documentary, I think it’s called Crumb.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah.

Duncan Crary: I think he mentions something about how once you start paying attention to transformers in the air and all the wires, it just ruins it. That’s all you can focus on. And that happened to me for months, that was all I could focus on. There’s so much of that crap up there that you just ignore.

James Howard Kunstler: Well, there is! And when I’m out there painting that stuff, I edit some of it out. But I leave a lot of it in. If you tried to put it all in, two things would happen: it would become as visually illegible as it actually is, and you would drive yourself crazy.

Duncan Crary: Yeah. So Jim, out there in the field, painting, you had some encounters. Right? Isn’t there some story of you painting a Burger King?

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, I was doing one of my paintings at a Burger King and the manager guy came out, this young man with a 23-hair mustache came out and said, “That ain’t allowed here!” And I wanted to mess with him a little bit so I said, “What? What ain’t?” And he said, “That there!” I said, “What?” He said, “You know! What you’re doing there!” I said, “Painting’s not allowed, huh?”

So finally we went through this for a while and I thought the situation was so ridiculous that I really wanted to have fun with him so I finally said, “Look. It’s fine with me if you go call the sheriff and he can arrest me for painting at Burger King on their property. I’m sure that’ll be great public relations for your company. Because I’ll make sure that lots of people know about it. And it’ll be real cool.”

Duncan Crary: Do you know if that actually did happen, it’d probably make the Associated Press wire.

James Howard Kunstler: Oh, absolutely.

Duncan Crary: And you’d probably sell that painting for three hundred grand.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah. Dude. I should have encouraged him. I should have actually been more provocative because then I would have made more money on the painting.

Duncan Crary: Well Jim, thanks a lot for talking with us about your paintings.

James Howard Kunstler: Well thank you for being here.

Listener Caller: Hey guys. This is Ben Lowe from San Francisco. You guys mentioned in your last show that schools look a lot like prisons, I think, at one point. And it actually reminded me that my high school was designed by the same architectural firm that designed the prison in my hometown where I grew up. It was explained to me that the school architects were chosen because the idea was industrial-style throughput. That schools were pretty much student factories and to have students there and sort of crank them out just the same way that prisons process prisoners.

So it made sense to hire an architect who had experience dealing with the same type of crowd. So, as a result, my high school looked like a medium-security prison. So it’s really not a surprise when you end up with the same results when your goals are the same going in. Thanks for your great show, and I can’t wait to hear the next episode.

[music]

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, read transcripts, learn about our theme music, and join our mailing list at KunstlerCast.com.

I’m your host, Duncan Crary. Thanks for listening.

[music]

Direct Download (10 MB): KunstlerCast_11.mp3

Comment & Discuss at KunstlerCast Forum

The following is a transcript of KunstlerCast #10: Children of the Burbs. You can listen to and subscribe to this weekly audio podcast at KunstlerCast.com.

[Intro Music]

Duncan Crary (as host): You’re listening to the KunstlerCast, a weekly conversation about the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl, featuring James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency, and World Made By Hand.

I’m Duncan Crary. Today’s topic: Children of the ‘Burbs.

James Howard Kunstler: Nice to see you, Duncan.

Duncan Crary: Nice to see you, Jim.

James Howard Kunstler: [joking] I’ve just consumed a quart of paint thinner to try to clear my mind.

Duncan Crary: So, Jim, I have a question for you. It may sound a little lame, but one of the things that people always say — the first thing they say when they choose the suburbs over living in an urban environment is, “Oh I have children. I’ve got to raise children.” But I want to ask you, is raising children in suburbia good for them?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, I think that it has a lot of drawbacks. When people say that, generally what it means is that they’re afraid to send their kids to schools in a city. And behind that are racial issues that are too toxic for us to have a public discussion about. But then there are the other aspects of living in suburbia for a child that go beyond school, that have to do with their “normal life,” supposed normal life. And they end up having a pretty abnormal life in the ‘burbs.

Apart from the school issues, kids over seven years old have a tough time in the suburbs. Under seven, they don’t really have to go anywhere. They’re happy in their little cul-de-sac, playing cops and robbers, or flies up. In fact that was my experience the three years that I lived in the suburbs between the age of five and eight. That was OK.

The trouble starts a little bit later when they have to start becoming socialized. And by that I don’t mean becoming socialists, I mean learning how to use their daily environment themselves and developing their own sense of sovereignty.

And that tends to not occur because it’s too hard for kids to get places. They can’t get to their soccer match by themselves. They can’t get to their clarinet lesson. So the family “chauffeur” ends up taking them to all of these places. And a kid doesn’t develop any sense of moving through space himself or herself under his or her own power.

And then there are other things. Now, I happen to live in a small town that is set up so that kids really can get to things on their own. They do come downtown, and they do go to the coffee shop. They go to the stores. They buy things. They learn how to do things that will eventually lead them into being fully functioning adults. The kids in the suburbs don’t learn how to do that. Mommy does everything for them.

When I was a kid, I moved from the suburbs of Long Island into Manhattan at the age of eight. Previously, my whole life was kind of centered around throwing baseballs around the cul-de-sac and riding my little bike. Then I got into Manhattan, and I didn’t even have a bike anymore when I moved to Manhattan. That was over with. My whole life, all of the sudden it was about learning how to get on a Madison Avenue bus, to go from point A to point B at the age of eight, learning how to take the crosstown bus from 86th Street to the planetarium at the Museum of Natural History.

That was kind of a scary thing for an eight year old to learn how to do, but I did. Then I got over it and I wasn’t scared anymore, then I did it over and over again. I was just a normal person using part of the city, the planetarium, going there when I was able to go.

Duncan Crary: Well, Jim, I grew up in the ‘burbs, too, and there was sort of this dead zone between the age of like 13 and 16, where you can’t drive.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, and your needs at that point are greater than they were when you were seven years old, and you need to be connected to stuff. And you’re frustrated continually by not being able to do it.

Duncan Crary: Well, there’s a lot of drug use in, like, Dad’s rumpus room in the basement. It’s really depressing.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, playing with Dad’s guns.

Duncan Crary: [laughs] It’s true, but also, we send our kids in the suburbs to these schools that look like penitentiaries. They’re really demoralizing, these suburban high schools.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, well I don’t understand why the schools just look so terrible and scary, why it’s necessary to do that. Obviously we didn’t do that in an earlier period. If you go up to Glens Falls, New York, there’s the old high school, which I think was converted into an office building. It’s a wonderful, dignified building. It fits in with the city. It sends a message that what goes on here is all about the eternal verities, the classical verities. The school building is a neoclassical building, so it sort of speaks in the language of the classical verities.

And then you go see the new junior high school on Route 9 in Saratoga, it looks like as Tom Wolfe described it: “an insecticide factory.”

Duncan Crary: Yeah, it’s scary. I went to a private school in Albany. I went to the Albany Academy, which a beautiful building designed by Marcus T. Reynolds. It’s a nice classical — it looks like an institution of higher learning.

James Howard Kunstler: And by the way, by saying this, I don’t think that either one of us is necessarily pimping for neoclassicism as the only way to decorate a building, or the only way to design something. It happens to be an architectural language that’s suited to our democratic society, our republic. It takes the idea from Greece of being a democracy, and the idea from Rome of being a republic and combines them.

And so we express that in a lot of our civic buildings, not just schools but libraries, museums, and all sorts of things, courthouses. But we’re not pimping for that. It’s not the only way you can — there are plenty of wonderful other styles. It’s not about style. It’s really about making a statement to the user of the building that this is a dignified place, and that it’s an honor to be here, and it’s a privileged activity that goes on in here. It’s not punishment.

But with our mentality of just creating “facilities” rather than actual typological buildings like schools, churches, etcetera. When everything is a facility, it’s really nothing. And a facility is also a prison. In fact, most of our prisons are now officially called facilities. That is actually their name. We have gotten into a lot of trouble by sort of technologisizing these things. And we manage to take all of the artistry and humanity out of them.

Duncan Crary: Jim, let me ask you something. When I was a kid in the ‘burbs one of the most common disputes, at least, among the boys when they got mad at each other, they would say, “Get off my property.” They would have these arguments over property lines. Eight, nine, ten-year-old kids. It’s absolutely insane. Did you experience any of that when you grew up?

James Howard Kunstler: It’s funny that you mentioned it. I seem to dimly remember exactly those kinds of things. I guess what it shows is that the exaggerated sense of hyper-individualism out in the suburbs is even communicated to eight-year-old kids.

Duncan Crary: You know, Jim, one of the things that kills me, there is a strip mall in a suburban town that I visited that has a sign saying, “No bicycle riding. No skateboarding. No horseplay.” And I just think “What the hell are these kids going to do?” These are their public spaces now, strip malls, and because they are privately owned the kids can’t interact with the centerpiece of their town at all. It’s really sad.

James Howard Kunstler: The whole key to understanding the suburbs, I think, has to do with the impoverishment of the public places and the glorification of the private realm. We have more bathrooms per inhabitant in our houses of any nation in the world, but we have extremely poor public places in most of suburban America, which is most of America.

Most of the public places for kids are the leftover scraps, you know, the berms, the parking lots, the places that nobody really cares about. We have very few places that really demand respectful behavior from the kids, and so you put them in a place like that they are going to tend to be as wild as possible.

You put them in a berm between the Wal-Mart and the K-Mart, and they are going to torture kitty cats and make homemade tattoos and smoke bongs and drink aftershave. That is how they behave in the public place of the berm in suburbia between the K-Mart and the Wal-Mart.

Duncan Crary: I had a pretty good childhood. I’m not trying to complain, but one of the lingering psychological effects is that I have anxiety whenever I find a nice open, undeveloped natural place, because growing up in suburbia the landscape got so gobbled up as I grew older. I don’t want to get attached to any patch of woods or field or anything. Do you experience any of that? I feel an anxiety about that.

James Howard Kunstler: Oh, yeah. I think it creates a lot of tension and anxiety. Tony Hiss wrote a wonderful book back in the late ’80s called The Experience of Place in which he said pretty much that nobody in America anymore feels that they are entitled to go back home and find it being the same thing that it was when they left a few years earlier.

The rate of change has been terrible. It’s not just the rate of change. It’s the quality of the changes that have taken place because almost everything we’ve built in the last 50 years has made people uncomfortable or made their lives worse.

In fact, that is what is really behind so much of the NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) activity today when the demonstrators come out. First, the bulldozers show up. Guys in the yellow hard hats show up, and then the NIMBY protesters come out. They don’t want anything new built next to them because all these things have made their lives worse. The old expression is they don’t want a house just like their house next to their house.

Duncan Crary: Yeah, they originally moved into someone else’s backyard, too, before they started protesting. The whole situation has got me — it’s funny because the word “development” has been hijacked. I dread the word “development.” Development should be a positive word, shouldn’t it?

James Howard Kunstler: Oh, yeah. But to us basically, it just means a new parking lot will appear next to your house.

Duncan Crary: I don’t want to see any more “developments.” I’ve heard people actually say that raising children in suburbia is a form of child abuse. I get the feeling you wouldn’t actually agree with that statement, would you?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, you know, I don’t think it’s that far off the mark. But, obviously, this is really mostly not intentional. Most people move to these places because that’s what we’ve got in America. We don’t have a whole lot of choice, especially when it comes to the schools.

People are making these decisions because they feel like they are compelled to make them. It’s just unfortunate. The suburbs are not good places for kids. The cities are not really adequate the way most of them are in America.

You know, New York City has a lot of wonderful amenities and attractions and opportunities, but it’s really an overwhelming place. I don’t think that kids necessarily feel comfortable in it. The scale of the streets and the buildings is huge. The traffic is overwhelming and frightening. There are very few places in Manhattan or Brooklyn that are really scaled very well for kids, and that’s one of the better environments in the U.S.

You go outside of New York, and you start talking about Akron, Ohio, and Kansas City. It’s really hard. For me, the default solution would be small town America, but a lot of people don’t have the ability to get there, and there isn’t that much of small town America left that’s still OK, you know. A lot of it is really struggling.

Around here where we are, the town of Saratoga Springs is doing fairly OK. It’s healthy, but most of the other towns around here are in a kind of a post-Soviet backwater haze of desolation and dereliction. Their school systems are suffering. Physically, the places are deteriorating. It’s a really tough one.

Where are you going to live in America? You can count on your hands the places that are really wonderful, and there are very few places that are even adequate beyond that.

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

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

Duncan Crary: See you next week.

James Howard Kunstler: OK.

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, read transcripts, learn about our theme music and join our mailing list at KunstlerCast.com.

I’m your host, Duncan Crary. Thanks for listening.

Direct Download (10 MB): KunstlerCast_10.mp3

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The following is a transcript of KunstlerCast #9: Urban Planning. You can listen to and subscribe to this weekly audio podcast at KunstlerCast.com.

[Intro music]

Duncan Crary (as host): You’re listening to the KunstlerCast, a weekly conversation about the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl, featuring James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency and World Made by Hand.

I’m Duncan Crary. Today’s topic: Urban Planning.

Duncan Crary (in interview): Jim, it’s nice to see you.

James Howard Kunstler: Nice to be here Duncan.

Duncan Crary: I have a cold this week so listeners forgive me. But luckily Jim will be doing most of the talking today. The folks at Planetizen have collected questions from professional planners that they would like to have answered by James Howard Kunstler.

James Howard Kunstler: Uh, oh.

Duncan Crary: Planetizen is an online planning and development network. You can check them out at Planetizen.com. They have an email newsletter, a podcast, a discussion forum and tons of great articles. I actually registered my remarks on one column that I’m sure KunstlerCast listeners would like to check out. It’s called, “How Mechanization Can Help Cities Rethink Parking” and it’s by architect Shannon Sanders McDonald.

And if you thought the parking garages in our recent program sounded bad you’ve got to check out Planetizen.com and look for this article and check out the diagrams. Basically this is what parking garages would look like if they were designed by Gobots. [laughs]

James Howard Kunstler: Just what we need, more techno-fantasies.

Duncan Crary: Well, one garage lowers your car through like a shaft underground and basically the garage parks your car for you. There’s also…there’s another little thing called a car loft. Have you…Jim have you seen these?

James Howard Kunstler: Oh yeah.

Duncan Crary: You basically drive your car into an elevator and it brings your car up to the floor of the building where you live.

James Howard Kunstler: Does it bring it into your bedroom though? Can you have sex with your car?

Duncan Crary: [laughs] Well, yeah well you might get the chance if your three-year-old, like, gets in your car and drives through your wall.

James Howard Kunstler: I like to think of the car coming into your bedroom and then you have to try to seduce it, you know?

Duncan Crary: [laughs] OK. On that note let’s get to some of these questions. This is Nate Berg host of the Planetizen Podcast reading questions that he solicited from the Planetizen community.

Nate Berg: As a critic not formally trained in planning or architecture, how do you address critics that say you don’t really have the formal knowledge base to be making judgments about urban design and development?

Duncan Crary: Jim, would you like to respond to that?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, it’s certainly a fair question for people to wonder what my credentials are. I mean, I’m mouthing off about these things and here are all these planners with credentials and they see me mouthing off and they resent it. I understand that.

It’s pretty obvious though that the kind of training that so-called urban planners have gotten over the last 50 years has included almost nothing about real urban design. And certainly nothing about the real historical methodologies of how to construct and assemble a human habitat that’s worth being in.

Mostly they get trained in statistical analysis, and traffic engineering, and mitigation of water run-off and things that…you know, they’re not unimportant or certainly haven’t been unimportant to the way we set things up during the time they were practicing. But we’re entering a new period where it’s not going to just be about water mitigation and not just going to be about handling traffic, and not just going to be about counting the number of so-called consumers who pass from point A to point B on a given day.

It’s going to be about—we’re going to really have to return to methodologies that were lost, and that’s one of the reasons that I was so attracted to the New Urbanists. Because these were people who realize that their training was inadequate. They’d come out of the architecture schools and the urban planning schools, realized they knew nothing about really designing and assembling places that were rewarding to be in.

And they had to go back themselves into the dumpster of history and get all the literature and read the Vitruvis and read Hegeman and Peets’s great Civic Art Compendium from the 1920s and go visit the places where people still lived in wonderful habitats, and measured things.

The early New Urbanists were freaks for measurement. They would go to a European town and they would measure the heights of the curbs and the distance between the shop front and the street, and how big the medians were, and the ground floors of the building, where the transition lines began and the depth of the balconies and the porticos.

They had to sort of reestablish what the perimeters were going to be for creating an environment that people wanted to be in. The really big lesson of urban planning and design from our time is that given the kind of education the professionals received, look at the environments they created.

Look at how awful they are to be in. Look at how unpleasant and fearful they are. And think of children having to be on an eight-lane highway on the shoulder in their bicycle going to Baskin & Robbins from their housing subdivision. Was that a great job of urban design? I don’t think so. They really sort of disgraced their profession and they deserve all the opprobrium that is being heaped on them.

We’re certainly going to be doing things differently in the decades ahead. If nothing else, the scale of the way that we build things and assemble them is going to be much more modest because we’re going to be a less affluent society. We’re going to have less energy to indulge in. We are not going to be able to traverse these pharaonic distances.

And that is going to influence the next generation of people who get into urban design. They’re already out there. I meet them in my travels, many of the members of the Congress for the New Urbanism, the official party of the New Urbanists, the official professional society.

A lot of these young people have very laboriously self- educated themselves in the things that they’re not getting in their schools and they come into this cohort of people who think similarly. They get a lot more training from them, from the older guys who are around.

So I’ve just been part of that process as a journalist, really. And I’ve absorbed a tremendous amount of information, knowledge, skill, methodology. I have to add, I don’t practice as a consultant. I don’t charge any towns for my services in urban design and I make a real point when people ask me of saying that that’s beyond my competence. I’m not a professional consultant and I don’t ask to be paid for it. I will come to a university, or to a civic organization and I will give a speech or a talk, or I will inveigh against their past practices, but I don’t fob myself off as a practicing urban designer.

Duncan Crary: Well you don’t need me to defend your credentials, but I do want to point out you said you were a journalist when you began this. The role of a journalist is to cut through political spin, to sort through academic jargon and to shed light on some valid ideas and criticisms, and it seems like that’s what you’ve done with The Geography of Nowhere and your other books.

James Howard Kunstler: Well that seems to be the effect. And certainly the hyper-specialization that has gone on in American graduate schools and in professional practice in the last 50 years has been so extreme that there are just very few generalists out there who are even willing to look at the big picture. You have the traffic engineers who are solely concerned with the geometry of the turns and banking the freeway ramps. They don’t care about what your experience is in the city of Milwaukee or Oklahoma City—all they care about is taking care of the cars.

You have the parking experts who are only concerned with car storage. They don’t care about what the quality of the street is like outside of their car storage units, the parking structures. You have the municipal officials that end up being more concerned with economic development issues—which themselves are perverted because they tend to involve national chain stores, or chain hotels, or convention center schemes—duplicating the infrastructure in other cities and towns right next door. That whole economic development field is full of ‘voodoo’ economics.

So you get a lot of preoccupation with stuff that has nothing to do with how we feel about the places that we live and whether we care about them, and whether they make us feel OK, whether they really provide a dwelling place for us to have civilized life.

Duncan Crary: Well I think we have time for one more question, so here’s Nate again.

Nate Berg: And the next question comes from Jennifer Evans-Cowley, a professor of Urban Planning at the Ohio State University. She asks, “What is the one thing that cities could do to most improve the quality of the built environment?”

James Howard Kunstler: I think there’s a couple of things: One thing is to come to terms with the fact that the automobile really is going to be less of a presence in our life in the years ahead, and to start making decisions that are going to reflect that. No more parking requirements for any kind of activity at all, whether it’s a restaurant or a store or an apartment complex. Just forget about it. Forget about accommodating the cars because we’re not going to have that many with us.

The other really important thing is we have to develop a real firm consensus about standards of excellence in architecture. Right now, pretty much anything goes. The “starchitects” have their little world of trying to mystify us in order for them to seem more like supernatural beings—we’ve got to stop that. We have to arrive at some real firm standards about what will produce a rewarding environment.

Now here in my town, for example, we have a design review board. It has been unbelievably ineffective and incompetent for its entire life, which has been about 50 years. Why? Because there is no firm consensus among the board members about what their standards are. They’ve never written them down really. They’ve never even created a list of the things that they agree about. And so, they’re left purely with their personal tastes or what their mood is the night that some applicant comes in, and that’s just not enough.

There’s one guy on the board who likes modernism because he likes it, for whatever reason. He’s nostalgic for the 1950’s. OK, who knows? He’s nostalgic for the trappings of his childhood. There’s somebody else on the board who just doesn’t have a clue about things like proportioning. There are other people on the board who think that everything’s a style issue.

These things aren’t about mood and style. They’re about agreeing that the behavior of buildings on a main street has to be consistent, that there are unities of design that matter in a street or neighborhood to even allow diversity to occur.

If you look at some of the best streets in America, let’s say you look at 82nd Street between Madison and 5th Avenue in New York City. There you have a series of row houses, and there are some basic unities that exist in that street. The buildings are generally under six stories high. They’re generally made of masonry or brick, and they’re generally 25 feet of frontage. And within those unities, you get some marvelous diverse architectural expressions. You can do your building in any style: Greco-Roman, Gothic, Aztec revival, whatever you want. And the street hangs together, it’s a beautiful street, and it’s the highest priced real estate in America.

But we just don’t have any standards and we don’t have any agreement among either the citizens or the people who regulate this stuff that goes on in our town. And it’s perhaps a product of our immigrant culture and the fact that we have so many different ideas about what’s OK. We need some real firm architectural standards about what’s OK, what works, what’s really rewarding.

Duncan Crary: Well thanks a lot, those were some great questions from the folks at Planetizen. Be sure to visit them at Planetizen.com. Special thanks to Nate Berg, assistant editor of Planetizen and host of the Planetizen Podcast.

We had way more question submissions than we could possibly get to in one KunstlerCast, so we’ll probably be hearing from these folks again soon. Jim, thanks a lot. I’ll see you soon.

James Howard Kunstler: See you, Duncan.

[music]

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, read transcripts, learn about our theme music and join our mailing list at KunstlerCast.com. I’m your host, Duncan Crary, thanks for listening.

[music]

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