The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle
Commentary on the Flux of Events
Interview with Tom Breuer,
Staff writer for The Scene newspaper
Appleton, Wisconsin
by e-mail, May 9, 2002
Q: You mentioned Appleton in your new book, The City in Mind. Can you
elaborate on your assessment of the city or our region as a whole?
Appleton did what every other town in America did -- it decanted all the primary business from its downtown and put it in an astroid belt of architectural garbage outside of town. This had many nasty unforeseen consequences. The overall result is that it left Appleton in the condition of being just another ruined American place that is no longer worth caring about. When we have enough of them, we'll have a nation that is not worth defending. You also have to consider that the alternative universe of muffler shops, fried food shacks, car dealers, and Big Box stores has poor prospects for the future. So the further effect is that you will soon have two ruined Appletons.
Q: Most critiques of suburban sprawl center on its sustainability from an
environmental perspective (i.e. the impossibility of maintaining current
rates of outward growth indefinitely). Do you think there's a parallel
here with regard to its effects on the culture as a whole?
What authorities call "growth" in our nation is a very narrow range of statistical criteria, mostly about money-making. This is obvious insufficient. The evidence that we see starkly on the ground with our own eyes is a devastated public realm. Have you ever sat through a planning board battle over the permit for a new WalMart? Many citizens will get up and declare that the American Dream is all about their right to save money on discount merchandise. So, the WalMart gets built, all the local merchants go out of business, the town loses a whole group of middle-class people who used to support local institutions, and now you have to apply to the state of Wisconsin for a recreation grant to run little league because the guy who owned the appliance store is no longer there to buy uniforms, et cetera, et cetera -- this is the consequence of those clammoring "consumers" (notice they're not citizens) who insisted on their right to save nine bucks on a hair dryer. We have now gotten so beaten up by the diminishing returns of foolish choices like this that there is almost nothing left of our communities. Here's the good news: it's going to head back in the other direction. We're going to have to live much more locally in the future. Here's some bad news: We are entering a period of austerity and hardship, in large part because we squandered our national wealth building the throwaway infrastructure of suburbia
Q: Even some who might agree with your dour assessment of suburbia will
throw up their hands and say, in effect, the genie is out of the bottle.
To what extent can suburban environments improve themselves and become
what you might term real communities?
In my opinion suburban environments have very poor prospects, in part because we will simply not have the wealth to retrofit them that we had when we built them in the first place. Some of the pieces are unretrofittable, namely the cul-de-sac housing pods. I believe that they will be the slums of the future. The New Urbanists have admirable methods for turning dead malls into mixed-use town centers, and a few have been done, but I'm sorry to say that I don't believe that many of these places will achieve that positive outcome. The destiny of most suburban fabric is to become first slum, then salvage and then ruins. It will take a hundred years or more to clear the crap away. First, though, there is going to be a fantastic orgy of devaluation, default, foreclosure, repossession, bankruptcy -- a huge fight over the tablescraps of the 20th century. People may not like pessimists, but I find phony optimism much more distasteful. The truth is, we are going to pay a steep price for the bad decisions we made over the past half century. Life is tragic. History won't shed a tear for us. We'll have to be brave and carry on in the face of all this difficulty, and try not to become a menace to ourselves and other peoples.
Q: How can city centers, large and small, be reinvigorated? Are there
effective models in the U.S. for doing this?
The coming hardships -- which will include chronic oil market disruptions -- will compel Americans to live differently. We will have to recondense our lives into walkable communities. Working on the non-car-oriented scale will help a lot. Once you get people back to that scale, many good things happen automatically, including the restoration of public space. By the way, it should go without saying that we desperately need a passenger rail system. Amtrak in its current form would embarrass the Bulgarians. It amazes me that we gave $14 Billion to the airlines last October without requiring them to invest part of it in passenger rail, to convert themselves into multimodal transportation companies, not just airlines. The total lack of debate on this at the time shows where are heads are at. In the larger sense, we face the project of severely downscaling virtually all American activities. We will have to restore local-and-regional networks of commercial relations (exactly what the WalMarts destroyed) in all their rich layers. We're going to have to do agriculture differently, more locally, more carefully, perhaps more labor-intensively. Education, too, faces the need for massive downscaling and redistribuition of facilities. I'm inclined to believe that smaller cities and small towns will make out better than the big cities in the near term. Places like Detroit and St. Louis, et cetera, are pretty far gone. Anyway, I doubt the big cities of the coming century will be like the industrial metropoli of the previous era in character. They will shrink. Giant factories are things of the past. There will be more parity between big city and small town in terms of potential economic activity. I hasten to add that I believe the Sunbelt will suffer disproportionately in the coming era of hardship and austerity -- just as it benefited disproportionately during the cheap oil fiesta of the past 50 years.
Q: To what extent do you think people understand the problems you raise, to
what extent might they understand them on an unconscious level, and to
what extent are they ignored?
Not at all. Nada. Zip. I think the American people are sleepwalking into the future. I believe we are completely clueless, tuned out, nodded out in a narcotic rapture of infotainment. The few moments we're actually awake, we're complacent, smug, prideful, chauvenistic, and since the attacks of 9/11 we've added a patina of victimhood to our national psychology. We are very poorly prepared for the realities to come. Because of this, I believe we will have a lot of internal strife in the USA as life becomes more austere, as the DiTech home equity loans are foreclosed and the foreign oil markets start to wobble. Americans will not understand why "normality" failed. There will be a tendency toward blame and recrimination. There may be strife between groups and regions. I can imagine Americans voting for political extremists who promise to bring back the good old days of the 1990s. If we woke up and decided to be intelligent, we could begin the huge project of downscaling America, but I don't think it's going to happen that way.
Q: Do you see a significant government role in fostering certain types of
communities (as in Wisconsin's Smart Growth legislation), or is it more
important to change people's minds?
So far, the excellent ideas of smart growth have met a furious opposition from those parts of our culture in charge of land development and building (and their enablers in banking and finance). That's because the dirty secret of our economy is that it is now almost entirely based on the creation of additional suburban sprawl and its furnishings and accessories. The public debate has been futile and often lacking in coherence. You have weird sideshows going on, for instance the efforts of "environmentalists" to "cure" the catastrophe of suburbia by militating for "green space" -- which ends up being delivered in the form of meaningless bark-mulch and juniper shrub installations. Meanwhile, government at every level has begun to suffer a massive destitution due to the costs of our various wars on terrorism at home and abroad. These outlays are only going to increase as a proportion of our expenditures. Government will struggle to just maintain the pavements on our limited-access highways. Don't expect much from them. What we are witnessing is the Law of Perverse Outcomes colliding with the stark reality of diminishing returns from over-investments in complexity. Bottom line: people don't get what they expect, but they get what they deserve. Prepare for austerity. Prepare to be a good neighbor. Prepare to live locally. Be hopeful, but get real. Prepare to live locally. Be hopeful, but get real.