This three-part series looks at how we have redefined economic development in our communities based upon decades of "cheap energy", and how we must re-examine our relationship with energy if we want to save our neighborhoods and build them to last for the coming generations.
Most people in this country live in large cities, each a combination of communities with varying degrees of connectedness both to each other and within the neighborhood itself. I grew up in a neighborhood comprised mostly of single-family homes, where the stores sat on specific retail strips that defined the borders of most of the sub-communities within the larger one. Most of us could walk to the grocery store, drug store, church, or the train station to get to work. This proximity to services provided opportunity for someone to live without a car, without air conditioning, and except for the "lucky few" with only one television set.
The idea of "economic development" in those days centered around making sure that the community had the business infrastructure to supply the goods and services that the community members needed to survive at a minimum of cost. Owning a car was a luxury, and even with cheap gas, most would prefer the convenience of a local store where they knew the owners, perhaps had store credit to help manage their bills, and established relationships with the butchers to know the best day to buy a certain type of meat. In this economy, the community members split between those who worked in the community providing goods and services and those who would leave the community to bring in new resources. The balance provided a stable, and relatively resilient structure that survived for several decades, even as other communities suffered population losses and resource reductions from the booming of suburbs.
This urban structure worked well when manufacturing provided jobs in several centers, the downtown business infrastructure supported commuters living near, but not necessarily in, the city center, and the city government provided several services that required not only skilled labor, but additionally required that labor to live within the city limits. As the US manufacturing sector shrunk, it took with it a pool of resources on which cities had relied to fund the services they provided. With those resources shrunk, cities began to privatize services to achieve greater economic efficiency. At the same time, the cities had lost much of the earning class to the suburbs. This triple shock to urban communities - loss of private jobs, shift of good-paying city jobs, and flight of high earners to suburban communities - devastated a large portion of Chicago and other major metropolitan areas. As an aftershock of this transition, communities that survived took on a different economic feel in order to compete with their suburban counterparts, one that has undermined the resiliency that the original economic development delivered.
The modern community economic development model uses consumptive retail to lure capital from people who do not live in the community, allows a portion of that capital to leave the community through corporate profits, and keeps a smaller portion for the provision of community services. Community members still need to leave the community to find work, and now at a larger rate than under the previous model. This "shopping mall/strip mall" development model requires a level of consumption both within and without the community that we cannot maintain with the standard one-income-earner model of domestic life. It also depends heavily on the community's ability to respond to the cyclic desires of the "consumption class". One can see this in my neighborhood: where we once had five significant grocery stores in our portion of the community, we now have only two. One has grown to provide capacity, while another has changed ownership four times in the last twenty years. Within three miles of our borders, five different "supermarkets" have sprouted to lure consumers with low prices and national brands. Most of the food needs of our community now get satisfied through resources outside the community. Meanwhile, one of the lost stores became a medical office, one became a pre-school/daycare facility, and the third was demolished to make way for condominium development near the commuter rail station. These three industries have grown because of the sharp increase in the need for consumerism to drive our global and local economy.
This shift has been fueled - quite literally - by cheap energy and low-cost manufacturing. When my parents bought a second car in 1982 because, for the first time, both of their jobs required them to drive, it was a huge deal. Now, it shocks no one to hear of a family with teenagers having three or four cars. Where stopping by the local store on the way home provided the supplies for tomorrow's meals, we now drive an extra ten minutes to save five to ten dollars on a week's grocery bill. Manufacturing allows us to pay the same price for a car today (in inflation-adjusted dollars) as we did forty years ago, while financing gives us greater access to the purchasing of vehicles than it did in the past. The freedom of travel also made it unnecessary for communities to provide the retail needed to support their population near where the community members live. A subdivision explosion placed people in residential settings far enough from retail that they could not survive without at least one car. "Park and ride/Kiss and ride" stations grew near commuter rail to maintain some connection to the city center, and the number of parking stalls at retail centers grew and grew to enable this new dependence to the tune of approximately 1 billion parking spaces across the country for the 240 million passenger vehicles we own and operate. That equals one vehicle for each citizen over the age of 15, and slightly more than three parking spaces for each citizen of the US.
Our communities have become little more than areas of forced residential proximity, supported by a constant and increasingly unstable flow of material, energy, and information. We lure resources into our communities through consumption-based enterprises, we leave our communities to find more resources through employment, then we let almost all of them leave requiring us to maintain this cycle at an increasing pace.
When people talk of needing a more sustainable lifestyle, it is against this backdrop that they make that claim. This situation cannot be sustained...especially as our resources grow more scarce and our population continues to increase.
Part 2: Energy...Our relationship with energy drives a loss of stability, and can just as easily restore it.
Part 3: Developments...The key to this restoration lies in creative redevelopment of our main streets.
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