The following is a transcript of KunstlerCast #4: Parking Garages. 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: parking garages.

Duncan Crary (interviewer): Well, Jim, we’ve made it to our fourth KunstlerCast. Congratulations.

James Howard Kunstler: Thank you very much.

Duncan Crary: We’re getting a lot of comments from listeners around the country. I have one from Columbus, Ohio. Would you mind if we just play that right now and get into it?

James Howard Kunstler: Columbus, Ohio, that wilderness of free parking.

Listener Caller: Hi this is Carl. I’m calling from Columbus, Ohio. I love the KunstlerCast.

I heard Mr. Kunstler mention something in show number two about the ridiculous amount of surface parking in downtown Columbus. And I just wanted to let you know that the city is talking about dropping $30 million to build two new parking garages downtown.

The mayor put out some press release saying, “Parking has long been the top concern of businesses looking to move downtown.”

And don’t get me wrong. I’m all for moving people downtown. But bringing them in cars is a little misguided. I mean why not spend that money on improving the bus system?

Building more parking garages will only encourage more traffic and congestion. And plus there’s no street-level retail in the designs for these garages.

So I just wanted to know, from your perspective, what can people do other than throw back a few beers and call your show?

I mean I guess parking garages are better than parking lots, but let’s face it, they still suck. Thanks.

Duncan Crary: OK, Jim, well I don’t know if there’s anything left to say. I think Carl covered it all, but what are your thoughts on these parking garages?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, there actually is quite a bit more to say, although he did present a pretty coherent picture of things.

What we’re not seeing here is any recognition on the part of municipal leaders, or even the people they’re serving, that these are bad investments because the future’s not going to be about parking.

In very, very few years ahead, we’re going to have enormous problems with motoring and everything connected with it: the fuel, the oil, the gasoline, people getting the cars, being able to buy them when they’re tapped out on their credit cards and their credit generally, I mean.

The whole happy motoring dynamic is really going to be fading fast. And the fact that the city leaders all over the United States are totally clueless about it and are willing to invest $30 million –which by the way will probably be bonded, meaning they’ll be assuming a lot of debt, and paying a lot of debt service at fairly high rates now because we’re in the middle of a municipal debt, credit crisis.

Duncan Crary: This is just another example of a municipality subsidizing sprawl to yank suburbanites into their town in the hopes they’ll spend some money.

This happens in Albany, where I work, too. You have all these suburbanites who drive into the city to work, they don’t spend any money when they’re actually there and then they’re gone. And the mayors of these cities are so obsessed with luring more people.

It’s kinda sad.

James Howard Kunstler: Well, they only know what they’ve known in the past. They don’t really get the fact that we’re facing a discontinuity, a break from the past.

They only know that in the past, people have lived out there, somewhere outside the city, and we’re desperate to get them inside the city.

Now, I’ve been to Columbus five or six times in the last 10 years.

Duncan Crary: Yeah, me too.

James Howard Kunstler: And interestingly, already about 75 percent of the former downtown core of Columbus, Ohio is surface parking. So they’ve already done a magnificent job of destroying most of the fabric of the town. You could make the argument that, “Oh, well, it’s better to stack the cars up in a five-story building, ” but…

Duncan Crary: I mean, it is better, but you could still design a better parking garage than the one…

James Howard Kunstler: Even on its own terms, it’s a bad design.

Duncan Crary: Yeah.

James Howard Kunstler: OK? And the guy who called in is correct. ‘Cause let’s say hypothetically during the period where it seemed like maybe a good thing to do, like maybe the early 1990s, the idea was: OK, you’ve got to build the parking structure. At least line the ground floor with some retail so it has a relationship with the street that is more or less like a normal building, so it provides some destinations for people who are walking around town, gives people something to look at as they’re traversing the block, etc, etc.

These things are fairly self-evident, but I would maintain that continuation of building parking decks is just an enormous waste of whatever dwindling resources we have.

Duncan Crary: You can’t even retrofit these buildings. I remember I heard you talking about this here in Saratoga Springs when they were going to build the new parking garage. And you were talking about if you made each floor taller –- ’cause what are the heights of a regular parking garage?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, when you’re building something other than a parking deck, you need some room overhead to run the ductwork and the plumbing and the service lines and all that stuff. So you have to have more than a seven-foot ceiling, and the trouble with these parking decks is that they have fairly low ceilings that don’t lend themselves to be retrofitted.

And also, there’s the problem of needing a central lightwell. In a structure that large, if you were going to turn it into offices or apartments, you’d have to have a core in the center that would be a lightwell that would allow you to get light in from the outside to the apartments or offices that are more toward the center of the structure.

Duncan Crary: Well forget apartments. You can’t even build a warehouse in these things, right? The ceilings aren’t even tall enough to have…

James Howard Kunstler: Well, it would be a warehouse with very short floors.

Duncan Crary: Jim, have you ever actually seen a parking garage that had liner buildings and taller ceilings and…?

James Howard Kunstler: Oh, you bet. Well, not taller ceilings, but the city of Charleston had a very successful program in the 80s and 90s under their wonderful mayor Joe Riley, who’s been mayor for like 35 years there, and is among the few elected officials in America who actually has a very firm grounding in the particulars of design.

So they built a bunch of parking decks in downtown Charleston, but they took pains to make provision for retail on the first floor. I believe I saw something like that in Savannah, too, but I don’t quite remember. But they’re around the country.

We did it in Saratoga Springs, as a matter of fact. We have a bunch of new apartment buildings about six stories high on a stretch of our downtown that used to be kind of Desolation Row. They felt they had to provide parking for the condominiums and understandably so in the age that they built them.

In any case, they did build parking into the project but they built it in such a way that they could put retail on the ground floor and load the parking in the back and they sacrificed a few spaces to get the retail on the ground floor and it was a good idea. So sure, they do it all over the country and it works fine.

Duncan Crary: So Jim, Carl, asked what he could do other than call our show. And other than cloning the Mayor of Charleston, what can people do?

James Howard Kunstler: I think it’s a very, very tough problem. And the public consensus is simply that we’re still continuing with all of the motoring and all of the accessories that got with it and we’re not willing to think about making a different kind of adjustment. The psychology of previous investment is just too big an obstacle at this point.

There will be some moment in the years ahead, probably not very far, when the shock of recognition will thunder through the population and we’ll get it. But right now, the public doesn’t get it, they’re being well represented by officials who don’t get it and the prospects of getting over something like this are not very good.

By the way, I don’t really like the idea of promoting people to be just depressed about stuff and not do anything. I think Carl should probably go through whatever motions that he feels are necessary to pursue this. And he should write a letter to the editor and go to the planning board and shout. I don’t even think it’s necessarily an act of futility. Sooner or later, the consensus will change and maybe it’ll help if one person begins by making one small move.

I, myself, go to meetings around here and you know I shout a little bit about the dumb things that we do, even though I’m under no illusion that — Here, in this town, which is a classic American Main Street Town, which has been very fortunate, there’s a consensus that we have to keep going with the car thing. In fact, tragically and, really, deeply ironically, in the previous mayoral election, we elected a so-called progressive Democratic mayor, who then took the position that it was not a good idea to continue downtown infill, which was an absurd position to take.

But she was very adamant about it and she attracted a lot of supporters. And the whole reason was that these people thought that they couldn’t park close enough to the things they want to get to. So even though the political progressives are clueless about this, and it really shows where we’re at in this country.

Duncan Crary: In an earlier show, I mentioned that I have a car, I drive a car, I like to have it sometimes. Honestly, I hate having my car, too. It’s a convenience, but most of the time it’s a nuisance. I went six months without driving it and I got squirrels in the car. They died when I turned it on, it was a horrible stink.

James Howard Kunstler: Did you eat them by the way, did they heat up there on the engine block? ‘Cause some guys have ways of cooking stuff on the engine block. You know, you put a squirrel in tinfoil…

Duncan Crary: Yeah (sarcastically)…

James Howard Kunstler: By the way I once did a story for a magazine about roadkill, and I went around interviewing a lot of aficionados of roadkill cuisine, and I asked this one guy, “What’s your criteria for freshness?” And he said, “My bumper.”

Duncan Crary: Yeah, so getting back to the topic at hand. You gotta actually maintain your car. You gotta drive it regularly or it doesn’t work.

And I’ve been thinking, my cousin lives down in New York City and he uses this thing called “zip car”, where you can just sort of like rent a car for a couple of hours, you leave it in the neighborhood. I would rather see a system like that in my town where I can just pick a car for three or four hours.

James Howard Kunstler: Well it’s very sane and rational and all. And they’re popular in Europe, they’re called “car clubs”. The zip car is one of its American manifestations.

And the idea is you don’t have to go through all the grief of car ownership and maintenance and payment. You join this club for like $800 a year and anytime you need a car to go on an excursion or go on a picnic in the country or go to a store and bring something bulky home or move to a new apartment or to a new house, you go out and you get one of these vehicles from the car club that has many kinds of different vehicles.

They have sporty vehicles for excursions and they have pick-up trucks if you need to move your stuff and blah, blah, blah.

And it would seem to be a sensible thing. But, remember, you have to have the whole social urbanistic and architectural infrastructure in place for that to work. It works fine in Amsterdam, because Amsterdam is a wonderful, walkable city. I’m talking about Amsterdam, Holland not Amsterdam, Arizona, New York, Michigan or wherever there’s another Amsterdam.

But Amsterdam, Holland is, you know — they never destroyed their traditional urban pattern. People are living in row houses and apartments in row houses fairly close together. And certainly, well integrated with all the shopping and entertainment and civic and cultural and educational stuff, all mixed in very richly — with parks, by the way, wonderfully designed green spaces, wonderful squares and full of cafes.

And so they’re not suffering from that, and anytime they need to get a car, it’s — you know, they’re not prevented from making an excursion. And any time you want a car, you go down and you get your car from the car club and you drive out to the countryside, blah, blah, blah.

You know, one of the upshots in America is that sure, we all have our own cars at our disposal all the time, but because of that, there’s almost no place in America that’s worth being in or going to. That’s one of the unintended consequences of mass automobile use is that you actually destroy the terrain so voraciously that nowhere is worth driving to.

But the other one, of course, is it’s estimated to cost oh somewhere around $6, 000 a year to keep any car on the road between the payments, the maintenance, the insurance, and the fuel… That’s generally the going rate. So if you’re only paying a thousand bucks a year to belong to a car club, and you can have one anytime you need one, you don’t have to worry about storing it and parking it or insuring it or all that stuff, great!

Duncan Crary: Yeah, I think it’s great. If they can only get a critical mass for the need in my town, I would definitely join one.

James Howard Kunstler: Well I don’t know if it’s gonna — in the United States, it’s going to be a problem because by the time we have a critical mass for that stuff, the whole motoring scene maybe in complete disarray. Between the oil problems and the problems of people affording cars in any form because we’re hemorrhaging affluence, I’m not convinced that that’s going to happen quite the way we imagined.

Duncan Crary: Well, then I’ll join a zip horse and carriage club because, as you’ve pointed out, if you watch the movies, they drive horse and buggies as if they’re Chevrolets. But really, they’re pretty complicated devices to hitch up a team.

James Howard Kunstler: Oh, yeah. You don’t just go out there with a key and put the key in your horse’s behind and take off.

Duncan Crary: You can’t just leave your horse and buggy sitting there at the curb all day.

James Howard Kunstler: No, you can’t leave your horse and buggy in the Wal-Mart parking lot for three hours.

Duncan Crary: All right, so I’ll join a horse-and-buggy zip club at the end of cheap oil.

James Howard Kunstler: It’s called a livery stable… they used to have ‘em.

Duncan Crary: Jim, thanks a lot for joining us. It’s always a pleasure and pretty darn funny, too.

James Howard Kunstler: Well, I’m glad it’s funny for you. I mean, it’s torture for me. I have to sit here and think up all these jokes.

Duncan Crary: Take care.

James Howard Kunstler: Bye.

Duncan Crary: 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.

[music fades away]

Direct Download (6.9 MB): KunstlerCast_04.mp3

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The following is a transcript of KunstlerCast #3: World Made By Hand. You can listen to and subscribe to this weekly audio program at KunstlerCast.com.

[Musical Intro]

Duncan Crary (as host): You’re listening to the KunslterCast, a program about the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl. I’m 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 is World Made By Hand.

Duncan Crary (interview): Jim, thanks for joining us for another installment of the KunslterCast.

James Howard Kunstler: Nice to be here, Duncan.

Duncan Crary: Your latest novel, World Made By Hand, has been published by Atlantic Monthly Press. I understand you want to share a little bit about that book with us today.

James Howard Kunstler: Yes. I will read a little bit. But, let me tell you a little bit about it first.

When I finished The Long Emergency, which was a nonfiction book, I wanted to write a novel depicting vividly what it was like to live in a post-oil future in America. Of course, I know my own part of the world best, so it’s set in Washington County, New York, which is that little piece of land between the Hudson River and the Vermont border. It’s set in a small town.

The story opens and a group of Christian evangelicals has moved to this little town of Union Grove from the Sun Belt, which is very disorderly down there and a lot of bad things are happening. This group called “The New Faith Brotherhood” has moved to Union Grove and bought the high school — which is no longer being used — and they’ve moved in.

In this scene, the head of that group — an interesting character named Brother Jobe — is being introduced to a landholder in Union Grove. His name is Steven Bullock. He has assembled a huge plantation composed of all the small farms that were around him over the last several years, as his neighbors have gone out of business, died off, or met with misfortune.

He has become a local lord of the manor. Brother Jobe is being introduced by the protagonist of the book, Robert Earle, who is a carpenter and has worked for Mr. Bullock over time.

I’m going to read a little of this chapter:

Excerpt from World Made By Hand, by James Howard Kunstler, Atlantic Monthly Press 2008. Read by the author.

Bullock poured us each a generous sample of his whiskey from a cask in the rear, where many barrels were racked [portion not read out loud: into jade-green pony glasses made there on the premises, too. Brother Jobe tossed his dram straight back, said it was "fit for all occasions and all weathers," and Bullock refilled his glass. I had not been there for a while, but it seemed that everything was coming up at Bullock's establishment whereas everything in our town was running down. You could understand the allure of the place].

We proceeded to the horse breeding barn. Bullock was raising big Hanovers for the cart and saddle, and Percherons for freight loads. Brother Jobe said he favored a mule in the field, that it was the coming thing with all the hotter weather. Bullock said he hadn’t seen a jackass in Washington County that was worth breeding a mare to. Brother Jobe said he had just such a one and would lend it over.
“Have you tried oxen?” Bullock said. “They’re peachy in the woodlot and behind the plow.”

“I don’t know the first thing about an ox,” Brother Jobe said. “We’re all about mules where we come from.”

“I’ll tell you something about an ox,” Bullock said. “You can eat him when he’s past his prime for work.”

“That makes sense, I suppose,” Brother Jobe said. “I confess, I never tried to eat a mule either in or out of its prime.”

Bullock refilled our glasses. He said he admired Brother Jobe’s team of blacks, but the latter said that the sire had been left back in Virginia.

“We’re miserably short of new blood,” Bullock said.

“You’re welcome to try our stallion. He’s a liver-chestnut, fifteen-and-a-half hands Morgan. Maybe some time we can swap out.”

They were in excellent spirits by the time we strolled through the orchard to the beginning of Bullock’s extensive fields. The corn seemed to go on forever, but we crossed a hedgerow over a stile and came to what Bullock really wanted to show.

“Why, iddin that sweet sorghum?” Brother Jobe said. It was not a crop plant that I recognized.

“You are correct, sir,” Bullock said. “With the maple borers killing our sugar trees, and mites on our bees, we’re a bit hard up for sweetening lately.”

“Is that a fact?”

“Well, it’s this heat, you know.”

“We always had sorghum syrup on Momma’s table.”

“It’ll be a new thing here, but our people will like it, won’t they Robert?”

“I suppose they will, Stephen,” I said, not really knowing.

“It beats heck out of blackstrap molasses, I’ll tell you,” Brother Jobe said. “Milder.”

“It’s got a flavor all its own,” Bullock said.

“My point exactly,” Brother Jobe said.

The two of them seemed to be getting on like boon companions. It made me a little sick to see it, or maybe it was just the heat and the whiskey.

We made our way around the extensive property, down grassy lanes between fields of one crop and another. The corn was knee-high and lush. The buckwheat was in flower. From his years in Japan, Bullock was fond of soba noodles made from the grain. He was particularly proud of his experiments with spelt, an antique precursor of our common wheats and apparently immune to the rust disease that lurked in our soils. It did not have the gluten content of modern wheat, he said, but it was better than rye.

Copyright © James Howard Kunstler 2008

James Howard Kunstler (speaking): OK, I’m going to jump ahead a little bit. It’s the same scene but a few minutes later.

Excerpt from World Made By Hand, by James Howard Kunstler, Atlantic Monthly Press 2008. Read by the author.

We followed the road along the extensive hay fields and oat fields where they raised animal feeds, and came, at last, to the collection of little cottages that Bullock had erected over the years for his people. It really amounted to a village, but of a kind that had not been seen in America for a very long time. The cottages were deployed along a picturesque little main street with a few narrow lanes off it. There were about thirty buildings in all. This main street lacked shops or places of business because the only business there was Bullock’s business. There was a commissary building, where his people could get their household needs. I didn’t even know if they used money in it, or whether Bullock’s people even got paid. Two new cottages were under construction, meaning I supposed that more people were joining up. This, too, seemed to pique Brother Jobe’s interest.

“What do you call the place?” he said.

“Metropolis,” Bullock said.

“Ain’t that were Superman lived?” Brother Jobe said.

Bullock grinned and winked at me, and Brother Jobe grinned, too, back at Bullock. It was grins all around.

“We just call it the New Village,” Bullock said.

“I like that,” Brother Jobe said. “It’s plain and to the point.”

“Maybe when I’m dead they’ll name it after me. Bullocktown.”

“They ought to.”

“Doesn’t really roll off the tongue, though, does it?”

“There’s worse. Near us back in Virginia was a little burg name of Chugwater. And another one called Stinktown. Well, that was more like a nickname for Stickleyville.”

One larger structure stood out at the center of things, and that was the meeting hall, offset from a little grassy square at the end of the main street. Bullock’s people all generally took a mid-day meal together there and schooled the few children that they had managed to produce. It was a plain but dignified clapboard building, with large light-gathering windows, and a cupola on top for additional light. All the buildings were whitewashed.

“Is this your church?” Brother Jobe said.

“Sometimes,” Bullock said.

“Where do you stand on religion, if I might ask?” Brother Jobe said.

“[We're] not against it.”

“But you don’t minister to them.”

“Beyond my competence.”

“Maybe you’re unnecessarily modest.”

“Well, I’m not Superman. After all.”

Copyright © James Howard Kunstler 2008

Duncan Crary: [chuckle] That was great! I wasn’t expecting it to be funny.

James Howard Kunstler: Well, one of the elements of this book is actually that it contains a certain amount of comedy. This character Brother Jobe I’ve created is especially interesting.

I originally imagined that these southern evangelicals were going to be kind of dark villainous characters, and that Brother Jobe would be the chief villain, but as he came on stage, he started doing things that were more and more amusing.

And I liked having him around. And I decided I didn’t want to make him a villain after all. And if anything, he ended up being kind of quasi-crypto supernatural. But he’s not the bad guy in the piece.

And for me this is going to be an interesting element is that the evangelicals do play a large part in this book. One of the funny things about it is that their constantly proselytizing everybody that they meet, right? And they’re always failing.

Duncan Crary: [laughs]

James Howard Kunstler: Every time they come on to somebody about “Have you found Jesus?” the characters usually say things like, “Well, I really don’t have time for that crap.” And they dismiss the whole thing.

So they’re not particularly good at that, but they do have a lot of skill. They do even have a lot of good intentions. And so they’ve been set up an opposition to the rest of the community in this strange situation.

Duncan Crary: Well, in The Long Emergency, one of your predictions is that one of the only corporations that’s going to survive in the post-cheap fuel era is the Church, correct?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, yeah, and I was speaking in sort of — as an extreme case. But in the story of World Made By Hand, the townspeople in this little town in upstate New York, their activities really do center around the congregational church, which is a very mainstream, not very dogmatic, not very weird kind of church.

And the minister who is the best friend of the protagonist, the minister’s name is Lauren Holder, and he’s a middle aged man who’s going through a lot of — he’s being challenged in his faith.

He’s an interesting character. One of the weird things about it is, he’s one of the few characters who even curses in the book. I kind of decided as a policy that there was going to be less cursing in this book than in most contemporary novels.

Because I decided that in the future we would have different attitudes about it and that would be a distinction between this society in the future and how we behave now, where everybody is using bad language all the time.

But the church has become the center of the community’s activities in the absence of regular jobs. There are no corporations left. They’re not reporting at nine o’clock in the morning to some building to give their life structure.

Even the schools are basically defunct. The little school that’s going on is basically a form of church schooling or home-schooling. And probably the most important activity around this “church thing” is that the people in town have to make their own music.

It’s very important to them; it’s one of the few adhesives that holds their collective life together.

Duncan Crary: Kurt Vonnegut talked about that once. I don’t know, I can’t remember exactly what he said but it was something like — Every little clan, every little tribe, had the talented singer, the talented actor, talented performer. But once, TV and radio and mass media came out they just weren’t as good. Nobody watched them anymore. They really lost their role in society.

James Howard Kunstler: Well, it became professionalized and canned. In World Made By Hand, there are no longer any canned entertainments.

Duncan Crary: One of my favorite science fiction books about the future is H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine. I know that’s an obvious one, but what I really love about it is that, in H. G. Wells’ future, there is no technology. Everything is run down and reverted back to a more natural state in a way.

There’s this other thing with Morlocks and stuff but when we envision a future, a lot of it we think of flying cars and all that stuff. And your book takes it a whole other direction.

James Howard Kunstler: The mentality of the 20th century, especially in sci-fi literature, was always this idea that there was going to be more of everything, and everything would become more complex. In fact, the whole Long Emergency is largely about the failures of complexity and the collapse of complexity, and the diminishing returns of technology and how we got ourselves in trouble with that.

I chose the title World Made By Hand, very carefully because what’s happened is we have reverted to some quasi-medieval existence. Although with a whole lot of recognizably American culture, landmarks, and hallmarks and earmarks.

Duncan Crary: Well here’s something I’ve noticed about these “Apocalypse” movies like Mad Max. You know these future — Do you notice that even in Mad Max they’re all driving cars?

James Howard Kunstler: Absolutely!

Duncan Crary: [laughing]

James Howard Kunstler: One of the queerest things about that, and people are always imagining that my version of the future is like Mad Max, which couldn’t be more wrong. Yeah, Mad Max is a car chase.

Duncan Crary: Even Kevin Costner’s Water World, there’s no land left but they’re still driving jet skis.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, and it’s hilarious. In World Made By Hand, there’s really only one car in the whole book, and it’s moving under rather peculiar, pathetic, and tragic circumstances. And it’s not on stage very long before it stops running.

And in fact, the whole automobile thing is over. And indeed, the electricity has flickered out. These people are not getting radio or TV. They barely even know what’s going on in the United States. Somewhere out there is a president named Harvey Albright.

Duncan Crary: Where is he, in Minnesota?

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, he’s in Minneapolis because Washington’s been bombed. But they have no idea how he got elected or what he’s doing. For all practical purposes, life is all about what happens in their county, and not much beyond that.

Duncan Crary: Well, thanks for talking with us about World Made By Hand. Everyone go out there and buy a copy. Thanks a lot Jim.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, it’s a ripping yarn.

[background music]

Duncan Crary: [laughing] Thanks a lot.

Listener Caller: This is David Reese. I’m in Waltham Massachusetts. I’ve just listened to the first two KunstlerCasts. I think this is just a great addition and I will eagerly look forward each week to a new KunstlerCast. Thanks very much for having them.

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.

[music]

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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.

[intro music]

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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Direct Download: KunstlerCast_02.mp3

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The following is a transcript of KunstlerCast #1: Drugstores. You can listen to and subscribe to this weekly audio program at KunstlerCast.com.

[intro music]

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

Today’s topic: drugstores.

Duncan Crary (interview): Jim, welcome to your inaugural episode of the KunstlerCast.

James Howard Kunstler: Nice to be here, Duncan.

Duncan Crary: I understand that you’re recovering from some traumatic oral surgery.

James Howard Kunstler: It wasn’t the worst thing in the world. I had a wisdom tooth extracted about 40 years after it should have come out. You go in there and it’s actually pretty cool. They give you the IV sedative cocktail, which is like drinking about 17 Martinis, and you turn on the iPod and you start listening to UB40 or something. Before you know it, it’s all over and here I am. I’m semi-coherent.

Duncan Crary: So basically, you showed up stoned to your first KunstlerCast.

James Howard Kunstler: I’m about one-third in the bag, but I’m functioning relatively well.

Duncan Crary: Yeah. Our listeners, and that includes me, appreciate that. So, throughout this program series we’re going to be talking about the catastrophe of suburbia, the end of the cheap fuel fiasco…

James Howard Kunstler: Fiesta.

Duncan Crary: …fiesta.

James Howard Kunstler: Although it has produced a fiasco.

Duncan Crary: …and lamebrain architecture among other lamebrain ideas. So, you can’t have this conversation without talking about ubiquitous drugstores and their disposable architecture. I’m showing you this article here — it’s from my local newspaper. I won’t name the drugstore, but fill in the blank. “Said drugstore” is purchasing the last historical building in this suburban town near my city. They’re going to knock it down and they’re going to build a drugstore. However, there happens to be the same identical company drugstore, like, two blocks down the road. So, what’s going? Are they just trying to take over the world? What are these drugstores doing to our environment?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, they’re trying to maximize their operations and along certain economies of scale, which are gigantic, meaning that they try to spread themselves as much as possible and grow incessantly and continually by putting up new ones.

Duncan Crary: They don’t care which ones go out of business. Right? They sort of do battle with their other competitors on every intersection in our town.

James Howard Kunstler: Sure. They don’t even care if their own go out of business in other locations because it’s just a write-off.

Duncan Crary: One of the main problems with these buildings — not only do they occupy really valuable corners of our communities, but they throw up what you’ve call “disposable architecture.” Right? These buildings are meant to last 20 years tops?

James Howard Kunstler: Well. The interesting thing is people are very confused about two different things. One is the programming, which is the drugstore business. But, the other one is the container that the programming is in. You can go to plenty of other places in the world where they have wonderful buildings that contain this programming. It doesn’t bother anybyody, nobody complains. The programming goes in. Before there was a drugstore in that location, there was something else.

Now, because of the sort of throwaway culture we live in, it’s more convenient for these big chains to just tear down what is ever there and put up their own special purpose built box with all of the things in the right place so that the building is sort of pre-programmed. It is a machine for dispensing goods. It’s not even a building, it just happens to come in a form that resembles a building.

Duncan Crary: These companies don’t want to rehab old buildings because they can’t put their aisle of candy bars exactly where they want, to maximize our psychology to buy this crap. Right?

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, basically, if there’s a wonderful historic building that has 9,000 square feet of space and the drugstore needs 9,402 square feet of space, they’d rather knock down the historic building just to get exactly the right amount of space.

Duncan Crary: Yeah. Actually, there was a case in Albany, N.Y., where a drugstore was purchasing an old school building, and next to the school building was a vacant lot. Rather than rehab the school building and use the vacant lot as a parking lot, they wanted to knock down the school building for their parking lot, build their building in the vacant lot. This is what they do.

I’ve heard you speak to audiences before about the fear of gentrification and also just Mom and Pop stores versus big chain corporations coming to town. You advised the crowd, “Look, don’t try to fight to keep these companies out.” Right? You need to fight to get them to either rehab historic buildings or sometimes better yet just build a building that has some use.

James Howard Kunstler: Actually, the point I was making back then was about 12 degrees off of that. It was really a matter of — we were getting a lot of substantial new downtown infill buildings in Saratoga Springs. A lot of people were complaining that the new tenants were The Gap or Eddie Bauer. What I was saying to them about that was, “Don’t worry about the programming on the first floor. What you got to worry about is the quality of the building.” Because time will go by, the decades will go by, and those chain stores will leave; they won’t be there anymore. Then, something else will be there, possibly even a locally-owned store, because, our economy will be changing.

The national chains will begin to have their problems with their business equations and in particular, operating at the economies of scale that they enjoy. Economies of scale — what it really means is, making an operation so big that you can avoid a lot of redundancies and that you can really pare down your cost. For example, it’s economical for you to ship anything 3000 miles. That will be coming to an end when, by necessity, we’ll have to construct these more local and regional networks of commerce, and things won’t be coming from so far away.

Duncan Crary: It’s seems like they’ve done a pretty good job here in Saratoga Springs, as you mentioned, with insisting that these companies build attractive buildings that respect the streetscape.

James Howard Kunstler: Yes and no. For the most part, yes. The most unsuccessful one in recent years was a drugstore. It was pretty close to the center of downtown. The town officials were insisting that the building be a two-story building, more than a one-story box; and that something else, some other activity, should go on the upper floor. The drugstore chain was just fighting this and fighting this and fighting it for years. You know, they had deep pockets, they had enough lawyers to keep the town officials doing Chinese fire drills until the end of time. So, they didn’t really care how much time this took.

And the outcome of the building was really peculiar. Instead of getting a normal two-story building with the drugstore in the ground floor and offices or something upstairs, they put the drugstore half a story above grade, and then, half a story below grade they put two other retail things, and then, they put a dummy second floor on that doesn’t really have anything in it. It was a completely half-ass building.

Duncan Crary: Yeah, it’s ridiculous. It made your eyesore of the moment I think, a few years ago.

James Howard Kunstler: It was completely inconsistent, really, with the historic pattern. They did manage to build a building that was two stories high, but in the process they did every peculiar thing they could possibly do to make it look abnormal.

Duncan Crary: It seems like they’re trying to do this on purpose.

James Howard Kunstler: The other thing is that the businesses that are located half a story below grade, really aren’t doing that well, because they’re in a dismal place, the stairway leading down to them is always encrusted with ice and people don’t feel safe going down there. For any number of reasons, it was a dumb outcome. And it was interesting to see how the city guys simply could not get these people to do the right thing.

Duncan Crary: Yes, but these companies do not want to be landlords. You look at these supermarkets, these huge one-story buildings. You could put residential space above it, especially in the downtowns, when they build them downtown. They don’t want to be landlords though?

James Howard Kunstler: Nobody does, neither do the municipal people. One of the interesting things, if you go back in history and look at some of the interesting buildings of yesteryear, one in particular that comes to mind is the old Madison Square Garden in New York City, which was essentially a sports venue. But it was built within the confines of a normal city block. The building envelope actually came out to this edge of the sidewalk like a normal Manhattan building. So, you have, basically, a sports arena with stuff on the ground floor and normal retail all along on the outside.

So clearly, the Madison Square Garden company at the time was willing to do this, but they also enjoyed benefits from it. They got a tremendous amount of rents from being there on 8th Avenue — or wherever they were — from businesses wanting to locate there and pay substantial rents for the storefronts.

We could have done the same thing for the City Center in Saratoga Springs. The Pepsi Arena or whatever the heck it is — The Times Union arena, they change the name all the time — in Albany could have been a normal building with some retail around the edge, but that’s just not how we do it anymore. Everything is zoned in a mono-cultural way and there’s no expectation that you’re going to mix anything up.

Duncan Crary: Let’s jump ahead. What’s going to happen to these buildings in the future after the cheap oil fiesta is over?

James Howard Kunstler: First of all, let me state my serene conviction that we are not going to be building that many more of these things. America is so unbelievably over-retailed. We don’t need a single extra silver souvenir spoon shop in this country. We don’t need anything more. But, there’ll be a few twitchings of a few things that were permitted in 2005 and are just now getting into the ground.

So, what is the destiny of these places? As far as I can see, the most likely thing is as salvage, because we’re not going to need that many evangelical roller rinks. They’re not going to really work out that well for homeless shelters, because they’re too far, really, from the centers of town.

Duncan Crary: Really, they’re not design to last very long.

James Howard Kunstler: No, they’re just sort of tilt up buildings that were meant to be there for 25 years, and then, they’re gone. We’re going to be getting far fewer expensive fabricated building materials as the oil age dwindles away. All these things like panelized aluminum, those metal sashes around the windows and the enormous amount of glass and stuff that we use in the quantities that we use them in, and all the synthetic materials made out of petroleum are going to become scarcer and scarcer. We’re going to be reusing a lot of that stuff. So, I think you can expect these stores to be disassembled not too far down the line, and, probably, before the actual end of their design life.

Duncan Crary: OK, so I’m Joe Schmo. I live in town. I’m sick of all these stupid drugstores coming in, what can I do now to stop this so that we aren’t left with this crap?

James Howard Kunstler: As I said, I really think that we’re at the end of meta cycle of the suburban project. We’re going to be building really far fewer additional stuff. We have so much retail, we don’t need any more. The national chains themselves are going to start running into very serious trouble with their business equations, with their huge continental supply lines and getting all their merchandise from 12,000 miles away, and the just-in-time inventory system that depends on the incessant circulation of tractor trailer trucks all around the country. So, the whole system of doing this is going to change.

Duncan Crary: Can I sum it up before the end of our show, just hang tight because these things are on the way out?

James Howard Kunstler: They may be operating for awhile, but we’re not going to be building a whole lot more of them. I think, there will be far fewer battles over that by definition if there are a fewer applications to build new ones.

Duncan Crary: Jim, thanks a lot for talking with me today. You did pretty well for being stoned.

James Howard Kunstler: Thanks a lot, I think, I’ll now just do a header on the floor until someone will scrape me up and put me on the sofa for the rest of the afternoon.

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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