Agora Financial’s Rude Awakening

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Saint-Lô, France

• The problem with the miserable American suburban habitat,
• When there’s somethin’ wrong in the neighborhood…
• Tales from “Joel and Eric’s Adventure Excellente” and plenty more…  

Eric Fry, reporting from a chateau in Normandy…

For the last few nights, your Rude editors have been chateau-hopping throughout the countryside of Normandy, France – let’s call it “Joel and Eric’s Aventure Excellente.”

For a couple hundred euros per night, they may indulge their aristocratic fantasies – i.e. their pre-Revolution aristocratic fantasies. They may scale the stone steps of an ancient tower as they duck through stunted doorways into their respective sleeping chambers. They may also survey their vast, verdant grounds by day and sip calvados by night, just like their aristocratic predecessors.

Sometimes the fantasies end abruptly and prematurely, as when the manager of the Chateau d’Audrieu grimaces and reports, “Some of the other guests complained that you were making too much noise last night.”

“Oh, we are very sorry,” your editor apologized. “We assure you that we will be as quiet as church mice this evening.”

“We appreciate that,” the manager replied, “but I’m afraid two of your three rooms are already reserved for this evening. We did not realize until just a few minutes ago that they were already blocked for tonight…and we have no additional vacancies. So it looks like you won’t be able to stay. Desolee, monsieur.”

“Pas de problem,” your glass-half-full editors responded, as they packed up their unwelcome bags and headed for the next chateau on the route. At least, they hoped to land at another chateau, even though they had no precise idea where they would be heading next. But their experience at the Chateau d’Audrieu convinced them that they simply must lodge exclusively at chateaux, preferably exclusive chateaux. A mere hotel simply would not suffice.

Therefore, after a day of touring the D-Day beaches of Normandy (a must-see for any visitor to France), your editors’ rental car – and serendipity – led them to the Chateau d’Agneaux in Saint Lo. The town is perhaps more famous for its spontaneous non-existence than for any aspect of its centuries-long existence. Nearly 95% of the town turned to rubble under the relentless assault of Allied bombing runs during the Normandy invasion. Since so little of the town’s structures remained, many folks scorned the idea of bothering to rebuild it. But the Marshall Plan would leave no bombed stone unturned, or at least shoved aside to make way for some sort of aesthetically unpleasing reconstruction. And so Saint Lo did remerge from its wartime rubble.

Among the 5% that escaped obliteration was the 13th century Chateau d’Agneaux, a magnificent stone castle, complete with towers and turrets. For more than 700 years, this castle’s robust granite blocks and massive oak beams ignored the rise and fall of kings, dukes, nations and genocidal lunatics. And it also sidestepped the slings, arrows, catapults and carpet-bombs of outrageous fortune. For more than 700 years, it served generations of aristocrats as a refuge from the poverty, filth and disease of European urban centers. And for one delightful evening, it served one generation of American hoi polloi as a refuge from the lumpy pillow of a chain hotel.

For centuries, a countryside chateau was the dream and ambition of wealthy families throughout Europe. And then, about 600 years after peasants hauled the first granite stones to the site of the Chateau d’Agneaux, an American version of this dream began to take shape across the fifty United States. Millions of Americans aspired to flee the grime of the cities for the splendor of the countryside…or at least, for the relative cleanliness of the suburbs.

But as James Howard Kunstler recently explained to the attendees of the Agora Investment Symposium in Vancouver, the American suburb is dying. It is a flawed concept that will not survive the onset of rising energy prices.

The original designers of the American suburb must have imagined that their residential innovation would endure as long as the stones of Chateau d’Agneaux. Instead, as Kunstler passionately argued, the American suburbs will fall as rapidly as the House of Usher.

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The Fiasco of Suburbia, Its Implications, and Its Destiny
James Howard Kunstler

America’s epical fiscal crisis that we are now seeing has everything to do with our living arrangement and the choices we have made about that in the last 60 years…

These choices were primarily a response to the circumstances of the time, mainly cheap land in a large continent and a lot of cheap energy. These choices were also a reaction against the great industrial cities of the 19th century. These enormous industrial worker slums had never been seen before…and it really scared people and it was full of all kinds of problems. You get the noise and the filth of the industry and the pollution and the health problems. You start to get these enormous sanitary problems and epidemics from bad water and bad living conditions with no light and no fresh
air and terrible social behavior.

And then something comes along. In the 1890s…we decided that we were becoming a great nation, a great industrial power with great cities, but we had cities that were unworthy of our greatness. So a consensus formede that we had to do something about it. The architects, the municipal officials, the money people, the plutocrats all decided it was a very important project and the first great expression of it…was a period of robust and emphatic Greco Roman revival architecture because the idea there was.

There were a couple of ideas there: First, our society was coming out of the tradition of democracy from Greece and the tradition of being a republic from Rome and the other idea was classical architecture was one of the best ordering system for designing buildings…And so you saw this wonderful expression of exuberant new city planning. The great Civic center of San Francisco, the great Civic Center of Cleaveland, the Civic Center of NY public library, the list of great buildings and great civic center is very long, all produced in this period…Another one of the responses to the
horrible industrial city was this idea that we have a heritage of settling the beautiful natural landscape…

And so for the people that are really well off, a new option comes on the menu and that is, you can live in the country villa and go into the city during the day to be a city person in business and then go back to the wonderful country villa at night. And remember at this time, when the first railroad suburb was forming, there was no Wal-mart, there were no highways. These people were really living in a country villa. Imagine how wonderfully appealing it was and imagine how everyone else in society began to aspire to this idea as a great goal in life. And it starts to be delivered as a
commercial enterprise.

One of the first prototypes is Riverside, near Chicago - the great suburban project by Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of central park. They come to Chicago just before the Chicago fire breaks out and they plan this town…It must have been a wonderful thing, it was a 9 mile trip to Chicago.

The next incarnation comes along after about 1893 when you get the electric street car and you start to get the great street car suburb of America and they’re very well known. The Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Myer Park, Charlotte, North Caroline, Hyde Park in Cincinnati. The list of these wonderful places is very long. They were some of the best neighborhoods built in America because they were grand and magnificent and they were green and wonderful. They were very close in and they used public transportation very well. In fact, some of you may realize they were places that have retained the most value in the last 100 years.

Something else comes along now. Henry Ford invents the Model A in 1907, but its got a little problem with it. It’s handmade. You can only turn out so many of it. And it’s relatively expensive at this point, more than $1000. But in 1913 he devices the Ford assembly line and then you can pump these things out in massive numbers and the price starts to come down, down, down – from $500 to $300. By the end of the First World War, the Model T cost about $280 and just about everyone that wants one can get one.

Something is happening in the mean time. This wonderful program of the “City Beautiful” that started in the 1890 has been going in full force throughout the 1910s. And all these great civic centers have been built, and the libraries and the city halls and the court houses. But the First World War is a real turning point because when that is over, we abandon the “City Beautiful moment” just like that. And we start to retrofit the American Industrial city for the car and in the process of doing that we make it worst than ever. Not only does it have all the industrial crap all through it and the huge slums are bigger than they were in 1890 cause we’ve let millions more worker into the country, now we’re putting this overlay of noisy cars.

Now admittedly, there were a lot of horses there before, but there are still enormous problems and the expense of the signaling and paving the streets because the cobblestone aren’t very friendly. So immense amounts of money go into the retrofit of the American city. And now another thing starts to happen, you start to see the massive development of the rural agricultural hinterland and the first real dedicated automobile suburb like Radburn in New Jersey starts to get built. These are the prototype to what is to follow.

However, only a certain amount of this stuff gets done before the economy implodes and after 1929 the industry that is hurt the most is the construction industry and very few of the motors suburb get built during the Great Depression. And it’s a 10-year hiatus in which the city gets older and then you get another catastrophe, World War II. So the hiatus is prolonged for another five years.

Then the war is over and wonderful, interesting, strange new things happen in
America…We take this great knowledge of war time production and expertise of producing massive amount of stuff to win the war – and all the confidence that went with it – and we turn that into the project of creating housing and housing subdivisions and that becomes the great competition now for city life.

And all of the advertising and public relations muscle of our culture is put to the task of proclaiming the wonderfulness of the American suburb. By the mid 50’s you can take your choice, you can live in a lifeless, slummy apartment with a view of the air shaft, like Ralph Kramden, or you can move to the suburbs and live with Beaver Cleaver. And the choice becomes obvious. The interstate highway comes along in 1955, a lot of people said we built it because we had this idea that we had to evacuate the city from the nuclear holocaust and all that stuff. Forget it, that’s not why we did it. We did it
because we needed an economy of suburban land development and it was a wonderful opportunity to do it.

We were at our most confident in that period, we just won this tremendous war against manifest evil so we used our resources to build this great suburban project starting with the highways and, by and by, over the decade all the subdivisions were built and all the other stuff followed. For a while people would live in the suburb and go in the city during the daytime and do their job and maybe their wife would come into the city and do their shopping. I’m not making this up, my mom did this for a little awhile. But after a while they purged the cities of the shopping stuff and that went to the suburbs and
some of the office stuff went to the suburbs until the suburbs began to elaborate as a self-organizing system into a kind of hypertrophic growth of their own. Kind of like a giant network of tumors around America.

And something else happened at the same time, the American mind starts to get cartoonified. We start to loose a lot of our sensibilities and our aesthetic and also our reasoning abilities and we become a cartoon nation with a collective cartoon imagination. One of the unintended consequences of this whole package is that for all of our blabber about the American Dream and suburbia, it ends up to be an unrewarding place to live in a lot of ways….

As suburbia morphed and mutated, it was not country living for everybody, but a cartoon of country living in a cartoon of a country house in a cartoon of a country and that’s one of the great unexpressed agonies of the failure of suburbia and one of the reason why its ridiculed by some of the people that live there, because at some level, subconsciously we understand this.

You know, the common complaint is that the trouble with the suburbs is that they are all the same. When you ask a room full of people in a design studio what’s wrong with the suburbs, they’ll say, “Oh, they’re all the same.” But you know, there are a lot of places around the world that are all the same. The hill towns of Tuscany are hard to tell apart from 500 yards away. Have you been there? You know…you don’t come back from Tuscany with a headache saying, “Oh, they were all the same, made me feel bad.” The boulevards of Paris are hard to tell apart at first. But, you know…it doesn’t ruin your
vacation to go there.

The problem with the American suburban habitat is not that its all the same, its that it’s the same miserable quality…

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[Rude Endnote: Keep an eye out for more of the best presentations from the 2008 Agora Financial Investment Symposium over the coming days. If you wish to secure yourself an audio copy of the entire event, you can do so here.

The entire conference is available on both CD and MP3 format. So whether you want to listen to them at home, on the road, while doing housework or while you’re at work, there’s a medium to suit you.

The first round of these audio sets were snapped up pretty quickly so if you want to avoid a possible delivery delay, we suggest reserving your copy now.

Grab Your Vancouver Audio Set Here

Until tomorrow…

Cheers,

Joel Bowman
Rude Awakening

aussiejoel@the-rude-awakening.com