The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome E-Book

John F. Wasik

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Serie: Bloomberg
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 352

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

An incisive look at the consequences of today's costly and damaging suburban lifestyle In The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome, Bloomberg News' John Wasik exposes the economic, cultural, environmental, and health problems underlying life in suburbia. Wasik provides powerful insights into how the U.S. suburban lifestyle has become unsustainable and what can be done to salvage it. His observations are firmly grounded in exclusive on-the-ground research, interviews with thought leaders, and the latest studies and statistics. The book * Exposes the untold truths about suburban home ownership: green isn't always so green, life isn't cheaper after accounting for gas, water, and taxes, and modern suburban living isn't so idyllic considering the toll it takes on our health * Includes exclusive research and analysis by experts in the field that debunks the many myths associated with suburban living * Explores innovative solutions being developed in cities across the country The American Dream of moving further from a city to buy a bigger house and find better schools has become a costly nightmare. The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome examines why and what can be done.

Leseprobe

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Part 1: A Dream Gone Bad

Chapter 1: False Economics

The Home as an Investment

Spurb Corridors

Chapter 2: Origins of a Dream

Jefferson’s Broader Vision

Sacred Places: Homes as Moral Bastions

Revolutionary Home Financing and the New Deal

Chapter 3: How Debt Addiction Fed a Housing Crisis

Sloppy Economic Thinking

The Risk Shift: A Decayed Social Contract

Debt Addiction and the Tax Burden

Chapter 4: Cul-de-Sac Nation

Energy Use and the Unsustainable Home

Water, Water Everywhere? Not Anymore

Unpaid Infrastructure Bills

Chapter 5: The Spurbing of National Health

Driving Ourselves Sick

Changing Direction

Part 2: Reinventing Home and Community

Chapter 6: Toward Sustainable Dreams

Scrapping Traditional Homebuilding

Green Building for Healthier Homes

The Faux-Green Phenomenon

Chapter 7: Building Smarter

Inside the Smart Home

The Energy-Intensive Home and How It Started

The American Dream Updated

Solar, Sexy, and Expensive

The Green-Marketing Muddle

Subsidies Needed

Chapter 8: The Near Death of a Suburb

Creating a Model Community

The Decline of the Model Suburb

The Revival

Hometown USA

The Abandonment of Suburbia

Chapter 9: Reclaiming the Inner City

Jobs, a Community’s Anchor

The Rebuilding

Barriers to Revival

The Affordability Crunch

The Steep Cost of the Exodus

Rampant Exploitation

Moving Forward

Chapter 10: Sustainability and Development

Measuring Environmental Impact

The Re-Imagined Home

The Spurb Shakeout: A New Urbanism Agenda

There Will Be Blood

Chapter 11: The Bill Comes Due

Machine-Driven Living

The Ecodynamic Community

Poised for Recovery—or Not

Revitalizing the American Dream

Good Ecology Makes Economic Sense

Epilogue

Notes

Index

About the Author

Praise for The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome

Turning Around the Unsustainable American Dream

by John F. Wasik

“John Wasik’s The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome offers enough to chew on for three sets of teeth, enough to digest for three stomachs and then alerts the mind faster than an approaching siren.”

— RALPH NADER

Consumer advocate

“Wow! Get ready for a totally original look at the American dream. Yes, we slipped off track. Now we need real solutions. And fast. Here they are. Wasik delivers the first truly multidisciplinary examination—using psychology, planning, law, architecture, and history to focus on working solutions that get us back on track and keep the American dream alive for future generations. This is a must-read winner!”

— PAUL B. FARRELL, JD, PhD

Columnist, MarketWatch.com

Author, The Millionaire Code

“As John Wasik eloquently writes in his new book, The Cul-De-Sac Syndrome, quoting national statistics to describe the most local of all markets—the residential real estate market—almost misses the point. This excellent book takes a ground-level look at the causes of our housing crisis and offers a myriad of ideas on reinventing the concepts of home and community.”

— ILYCE R. GLINK

Syndicated real estate columnist

Author, 100 Questions Every First-Time Home Buyer Should Ask

Publisher, ThinkGlink.com

“The Cul-De-Sac Syndrome is a genuine kick to the head, showing how our individual quests for the biggest house on the hill is destroying our environment, the economy, and our physical and mental health. But The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome is no dead end. It offers a new, green, urbanized promised land with real community, more free time, and a higher living standard. It’s a masterful blueprint to unpave paradise and restore the world we cherish.”

— LAURENCE KOTLIKOFF

Professor of Economics, Boston University

Coauthor of Spend ’Til the End: The Revolutionary Guide to Raising Your Living Standard—Today and When You Retire

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Copyright © 2011 by John Wasik. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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ISBN 978-1-57660-320-8 (cloth); ISBN 978-0-470-91808-1 (paper);

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To my father, Arthur Stanley Wasik

Preface

One of the worst housing busts in history began in 2007 and was still ravaging the U.S. home market and several European countries by early 2011. Except for a few areas, foreclosures continued and home sales (through 2010) were the slowest since the Kennedy administration. Not even an $8,000 first-time homebuyer’s credit in early 2010 was enough to revive the market. Many of the worst-hit areas (see Chapter 11) were still hobbled by foreclosures and huge inventories of bank-owned homes while others in Texas, the Northwest and Northeast were hobbling along.

For millions of Americans who overbought homes and were unprepared for the consequences of the bust, it represented a great reckoning. For others who prudently lived within their means and paid their mortgages, it represented an unfair loss in equity. Their stake in the American Dream, a stable middle class lifestyle and upward mobility was diminishing.

How did the United States succumb to one of the most devastating housing recessions since the 1930s? Weren’t homes supposed to be the safest investments on the planet? Ultimately, the housing bust may turn out to be one of the biggest financial blowups in history, rivaling the Great Depression with more than $4 trillion in wealth evaporating. Millions entered a financial dead end during this period of irrational exuberance. It may take years for them to escape from it.

What drove this flood of exuberant optimism? Did everyone from mortgage brokers to Wall Street simply get greedy? Or do the true causes lie much deeper, in the American dream itself and in the goal that eventually became an obsession with ever-bigger homes? A bubble in which demand exceeded realistic economic fundamentals was triggered by a number of uniquely American cultural values, desires, and economic shortcomings. These underlying reasons for the debacle have been ingrained in Western culture for almost half a millennium. They’re myths that have flourished precisely at a time when Americans’ view of themselves, their post-9/11 security, and their shaky financial future were being tested as never before.

The stereotypical villains in the subprime story have been Wall Street bankers, the government, and greedy participants, from speculating “flippers” to the Federal Reserve. There’s plenty of blame to spread around when it comes to who was motivated by pure avarice or criminal exploitation, and much of that picture has been illuminated. Those who thought they would profit handsomely have already been exposed, have taken their losses, and are known to anyone following this calamity. It’s far too easy, though, to point fingers at the purveyors of human excesses. That’s only part of the story.

The American dream—and what it has cost us—is what underlies the crisis and what this book explores. How did we come to believe that a home should be an investment worth enough to propel millions to leverage beyond their ability to pay? In an age of burgeoning info-technology, why are we still building homes with the latest nineteenth-century techniques? What was the market behavior that drove homeowners into subprime loans and moving ever farther away from jobs and cities? How did we come up with the idea that we should buy as much house as we can afford, with no regard for the cost of heating and cooling it and the time and expense of getting to it?

We’ve gotten stuck in a vicious cycle, a cul-de-sac of unsustainable costs and serious long-term consequences for our health and our environment. After following the bubble and its aftermath since 2001 as a personal finance columnist for Bloomberg News, I’ve gained some insights into urban planning, resource depletion, and homebuilding techniques and economics that cast a critical—and disturbing—light on the American dream of homeownership. That dream led to the creation of what I call “spurbs,” the car-dependent sprawling urban areas, unconnected to core cities by public transportation and beset by unsustainable costs for infrastructure, services, and resources. As highly leveraged locations ravaged by foreclosures and falling property values, these enclaves will hurt the most in coming years.

We’ve suffered from a cul-de-sac syndrome on not only how to finance the American dream, but how to build it in the future so that it’s economically and ecologically sustainable. How do we cure this malady, one that’s responsible for global financial calamity? Even if the home market fully recovers with higher prices, home starts, and sales, the deep-seated problems this shortsighted cultural mythology brought about will haunt future generations if we don’t correct them.

I’ve traveled from coast to coast several times to highlight the myriad stories of innovators, dreamers, activists, and visionaries who are still creatively searching for a way to make the American dream attainable and affordable. I’ve consulted with the leading minds in architecture, economics, engineering, homebuilding, and urban planning to uncover insights on the past, present, and future of the home market.

Readdressing, reimagining, and redesigning the foundation of the American dream has no downside because we will be creating and preserving jobs and wealth and even addressing global warming. In the words of John Ruskin, “That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest, who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.” It all starts in our homes and communities—my home, your home.

Introduction

The Foundation Cracks

The last Spanish sultan, Boabdil, sobbed as he left the Alhambra. His heart was broken as he looked back upon the heavenly complex of crenulated arches, fountains, and pools within the splendid palaces of the Moorish rulers of Granada in southern Spain, on his way to exile in Africa in 1492. He was not only mourning the loss of his bastion to the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella but also grieving for what might have been—a culturally vivacious state where no group had to supplant the other due to lack of land or resources. Although there was certainly barbarism during and after the Alhambra’s golden age, the combined will of the houses of Castile and Aragon set in motion a land lust that would ravage two continents.

Christopher Columbus had met with Queen Isabella in the newly conquered Alhambra, and he had his marching orders. Gold and land were the primary objectives of the Spanish crown. They had coffers to fill, armadas to build, and conquistadors to finance. Keeping everything in check was their form of the Gestapo—the Inquisition. Jews or Moors who would not convert to Christianity were tortured or killed. Even if they were baptized, they were subject to abuse and discrimination. Jews, who had contributed immeasurably during the halcyon days of the Alhambra, were eventually exiled.

As strangers in a strange land, the Moors were the most successful diplomats on the Iberian peninsula, building their dominion over a seven-hundred-year period. During their tenure, they practiced tolerance, translated the great works of antiquity from Greek into Arabic and Latin, and then entreated Europe to feast on the knowledge and imagination of the classical authors. Pythagoras, Ptolemy, Aristotle, and the great theoreticians of ethics, physics, and philosophy were reborn in the learning enclaves of Toledo and Córdoba. Andalusia became the Harvard, Princeton, and Yale of Western civilization from the eighth century through the fifteenth. Establishing a multicultural ministate on a peninsula that had been invaded by Celts, Romans, Franks, and Visigoths, the Moors had few peers in the realm of cultural sustainability in their heyday.