Suburbia Is Over: Why US Oil Dependence is Futureless

25 Comments on "Suburbia Is Over: Why US Oil Dependence is Futureless"

dashster on Wed, 23rd Jul 2014 6:41 pm 



Some advantages of suburbia over a city condo – you can have a garden. Your relatives can live in your backyard in tents. You can cram a lot more people into a house than you can a two-bedroom condo.

Makati1 on Wed, 23rd Jul 2014 8:33 pm 



US Suburbia is already becoming more and more difficult. Lose your job and it becomes almost impossible. All my family in PA live too far to walk to anything. We were sold insanity … and then big Auto/Oil destroyed the buses and trolleys of my grandparents time that connected everything.

In the US mid-west, it may be 20 miles to anything and 50+ miles to town. When I fly over the US on my annual trip to PA, I see a lot of Canada and the 49. I see houses over a mile from the next house and wonder if they will last long in the coming collapse. No car = no ability to live there. Europe has the advantage of good transportation systems and is more compact.

Even the Ps have regular buses that connect all of the towns and villages along the way, and they are extending their rail system more and more. Even so, most get around by foot, bike, or carabao for short distances like a few kilometers. Our farm is one hour’s walk from the nearest town. Even less to the Pacific to fish, swim and party.

Davy on Wed, 23rd Jul 2014 8:58 pm 



Suburbia is still better than a mega city like you live in MaK

Northwest Resident on Wed, 23rd Jul 2014 8:59 pm 



Makati1 — I surprised you didn’t mention jeepneys. Maybe they call them carabaos in Manilla? Don’t forget the two or three people per motorcycle, and the record-setting number of people that the Philippine people can squeeze onto one bicycle. Taxi is how I got around most often when I was in the Philippines. I never saw a rail system, but I was only on a couple of islands so I definitely didn’t see everything.

The houses in America that are over a mile from the next house might do just fine as long as they’re growing their own food. Not a lot of social activity though…

Sounds like you’ve got a great setup going, Makati1. I hope it works out for you.

JuanP on Wed, 23rd Jul 2014 9:36 pm 



Very few places will fare worse than the city of Miami Beach where I’ve lived most of my adult life. I am selling my condo and renting now, another step in the plan to get out. I will breathe easier with less liabilities in this city with no future. Next month my wife quits her job of 10 years as a market analyst to become an independent contractor instead of an employee. Not buying land yet, maybe next year. I believe prices will fall in Florida for the 10 acre lots I am looking at.

Davy on Wed, 23rd Jul 2014 10:28 pm 



Juan, My family has been on and off in Florida since the 40’s. They have now moved their wintering location to the Bahamas. Florida was once a paradise now it is a paradise lost. My grandfather told me stories about Florida in the 40’s and 50’s when he was alive back in the 90’s. I used to be the mate “slave” when he would run his boat around Florida and back up to St Louis. I got good with all the systems on a boat. I loved the ocean by boat and living on a boat for weeks. He used to have a place in Palm Beach. Your idea of going inland is a good plan. There is great land in Florida inland with much fewer people.

Keith_McClary on Thu, 24th Jul 2014 12:47 am 



Makati1 – “I see houses over a mile from the next house …”

That must be wheat farmers with several sections.

Richard Ralph Roehl on Thu, 24th Jul 2014 1:18 am 



People who live in the suburbs lack the mindset for self sufficiency and survival. The key word here is mindset. Imagine a suburban housewife churning a vat of real butter… in lieu of using super market margarine and/or ‘I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-real-butter. Imagine a suburban house wife butchering a hog. Don’t think so!

And folks in the cities? They’ll riot… and quickly engage in an orgy of death and Mad Max cannibalism.

Back in April of 1992… I had a studio loft located near ‘ground zero’ for the L.A. riots. In the morning everything was relatively normal. After the sun went down… there were 950 structures on fire. It was an epiphany.

Old Coyote Knose… the veneer of civilization is very fragile and ephemeral. Yeah! Been there! Done that! Seen it.

RRR

Norm on Thu, 24th Jul 2014 4:28 am 



get a horse? commute to work on it. runs on hay.

Makati1 on Thu, 24th Jul 2014 5:18 am 



NWR, I missed the eternal jeepney? Must have had a ‘senior moment’…lol. you have a good idea of the transport here. Oil power is only a small fraction of the way people get around. After all, we use about 1/20 the oil an average American uses. A jeepney can haul 14 people with a 4 cylinder engine. No high speed to worry about there. No many places you can get over 40 mph. That’s why it is ~4 hours (80 miles) by bus to our farm.

I suspect, if the climate keeps changing, those wheat farms are going to dry up and blow away. Millions left the Midwest at another time in the last century because you could not live there. They will likely be going East this time though. California seems to be drying up.

Norm, by the time you need a horse, you will have no job to go to. And a horse takes acres of grazing and thousands of gallons of water to exist, not to mention, doing work.

Evaluate your job in the time after oil and see if it will still exist. At least 60% will be gone. A financial collapse is likely to see at least 40% of jobs disappear forever. If it isn’t a true necessity, it will be history.

rockman on Thu, 24th Jul 2014 6:53 am 



It all depends on where you live. In Houston downtown real estate runs 3X to 5X as much per sq ft. And the one area of mass transit the city does do a great job is commuter buses from the burgs: high speed isolated contraflow lanes and cheap: a monthly pass is almost half the price of just the parking expense.

And then there’s the shift in business locations. One of the prime burgs here is the Woodlands about 25 miles north of down town. Years ago Anadarko moved its staff to a new 20 story high rise in the Woodlands. And ExxonMobil is nearing completion on its new
“campus complex” in the Woodlands and relocating all the staff from numerous locations in the city. Don’t know the exact account but the number is in the tens of thousands. The Woodlands has already accumulated top notch medical and retails sales facilities.

In essence the Woodlands has become a small city in the burgs where folks either work within several miles of home or the catch the commuter bus (which the Woodlands Corporation actually owns and operates) to an office down town. I wonder how many similar dynamics are developing in other regions…so sound off.

Davy on Thu, 24th Jul 2014 7:11 am 



Mak, correction, the Midwest never dried up. That was the Great Plains. Mak, Been away too long can’t even remember your geography.

I live in the central Ozarks on 400 acres with 7 neighbors within a mile. There is a town of 13K north and a town or 3K south. This is cattle country with many small farms and some larger farms. There are small amount of people living with a few acres who commute to these towns for work. It is a rural area with access to small urban areas. The nearest large city is 2hrs either way on interstate 44 which is north of me. It is good to be not too far from a large city also. I feel this is an ideal setup for the coming collapse.

The idea location for collapse is not a large mega city that is for sure. Smaller cities in supportable locations are better. If the surrounding area can absorb people moving to the land from these cities this is a plus. One must really look at the variables of supportability (food/water/distribution) within 100mi, energy intensity (A/C, heating) per location per capita, location in relation to potential adversaries, is it in cross hairs of CC, and proximity to government/military power.

ghung on Thu, 24th Jul 2014 7:26 am 



The suburbia problem isn’t just about transportation. It’s about widely sprawling infrastructure; water, power, sewer, etc., each a single point of failure that must be maintained. As any of these systems begins to become inviable, so does the tax base. As people begin to move,, somewhere else, property values drop requiring taxes to increase or infrastructure projects to be delayed or cancelled. Suburbia is uniquely vulnerable to catabolic collapse, utterly dependent upon an upper middle class that is in decline.

JuanP on Thu, 24th Jul 2014 8:47 am 



Dave, I was my grandpa’s ship mate, too, as a child. My father’s dad was a career navy officer for 20 years before retiring at 40 as a vice admiral to become a merchant sailor and eventually owning an international shipping business.
It is very sad how the oceans are being destroyed.

Nony on Thu, 24th Jul 2014 8:55 am 



In the suburb’s eyes I learned to drive…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNdqoQWz34E

Davy on Thu, 24th Jul 2014 8:56 am 



Juan, speaking of Oceans, I skin dived on reefs in the Bahamas when I was 15. Now days I scuba dive Bahamian reefs. The destruction of what was is incredible and the Bahamas are one of the countries still in descent shape.

JuanP on Thu, 24th Jul 2014 8:57 am 



Dave, I am not American, but my father and grandfather both lived, studied, and worked in the USA for many years. My grandfather was a naval engineer from MIT and fought and worked for the US navy in WW2 as a ship captain and naval engineer, my father grew up in DC and later graduated from USC.

Nony on Thu, 24th Jul 2014 8:59 am 



you choose your side, I’ll choose my side. Dunh, dunh, dunh, DUNH!

JuanP on Thu, 24th Jul 2014 9:06 am 



Davy, The Bahamas are very lucky that the Gulf Stream creates an impassable barrier for Miami’s garbage. I go there whenever I get a chance, but not that much since I sold my boat.

rockman on Thu, 24th Jul 2014 10:34 am 



ghung – That’s the perhaps very unique aspect of suburban sprawl in the Houston area. The Woodlands that I mentioned as well as other booming burgs (Fort Bend County, 25 miles SW of Houston, had the fastest growing population of any area in the entire country for many years) may be a new model for suburban sprawl. IOW these burgs are separating themselves to a fair degree from the urban areas.

But as far as infrastructure goes it is very new in the burgs I’m referring to compared to the inner city. And these areas have a great tax base which often improved as a result of business shifts as well as the higher income folks moving into those areas. IOW these areas today are much more sustainable then Houston in many aspects. And as more of the business (and their job base) move out of the urban areas the suburbs become even more sustainable.

Maybe a better term for these “suburban areas” would be satellite cities. Some 20 something could take his first job in the Woodlands, drive 3 miles to work every day, buy a house, raise kids who go to great schools, get first class medical care and then in 40 or so years retire. And not once during that time had a need to drive 25 miles south into Houston. That’s pretty sustainable.
I don’t live in the Woodlands. I live in an old ExxonMobile refinery town that’s in the burgs 25 miles east of Houston. Houston could burn to the ground tomorrow and, other than losing my place of employment, it wouldn’t have any effect on my lifestyle. And when I retire in a few years I wouldn’t even have to worry about the job loss. I don’t know if this area is unique but other than the employment connections for some the suburbs in this region don’t really have any need for the city of Houston.

JuanP on Thu, 24th Jul 2014 10:45 am 



Rock, “Some 20 something could take his first job in the Woodlands, drive 3 miles to work every day, buy a house, raise kids who go to great schools, get first class medical care and then in 40 or so years retire. And not once during that time had a need to drive 25 miles south into Houston. That’s pretty sustainable.”
I envy your optimistic vision of the next 40 years, but I disagree about what you describe as sustainable. I don’t see anything sustainable about it in the next 40 years. I am not trying to pick a fight, I hope with all my heart you end up being right and I wrong.

dolanbaker on Thu, 24th Jul 2014 2:00 pm 



Rockman “Maybe a better term for these “suburban areas” would be satellite cities. ”

Yes I think that is the most likely outcome as well. Eventually suburbs (& rural areas) that are a long distance from meaningful employment will gradually become depopulated as people migrate to where the work is when the cost of fuel makes the commute unviable.
So suburbs that build local “centres of employment & commerce” will thrive while those that remain “commuter dormitories” will decline without a decent transport link to the place of work. With all the fuel substitution & increases in fuel economy, the decline will be a lot slower than many here expect. As it is, EU per capita fuel consumption is far lower than the US as it was during the boom times. There’s a lot of fat still to be trimmed from this pig before there is any real hardship as the result of “fuel starvation!”.

Davy on Thu, 24th Jul 2014 2:17 pm 



D, I am not sure we will have the options if there is fuel starvation. I see systematic collapse with anything more than a minor short lived fuel shortage. Too many connections will be disrupted tearing the social and economic fabric apart. Since this has never happened this is only theory. It almost happened in the UK with the nationwide strike a few years back.

bobinget on Thu, 24th Jul 2014 3:31 pm 



It’s simp[ly not fair to play two or three year old futurist tapes. All such tapes should have a some sort of self destruct timers..
Would not it be better to adapt?
If a single person in each automobile seems wasteful, it certainly is.

Instead of cursing the darkness let’s light up with solar powered LED’s.

Let’s have self driving, shared, electric autos that can be summoned with a smartphone.

Let’s have free (WiMax) internet access in EVERY big city.

Let’s have electric trolleys back.

Let’s have community gardens.

Co-generation. Geothermal Heat-pumps.

Neighborhood solar or wind power.

People working on line—- at home..

Order food, playthings, clothing, machines, on line for next or same day delivery..

Oh… you say all these things are Already Here?

Quickly, tell Mr Clusterfuck..Before he goes back in time again making predictions…. about the future too.

GregT on Thu, 24th Jul 2014 8:18 pm 



The only long term future hope for suburbia, and the inner cities, has already been proposed in a movie not that far back. That movie was called the Matrix.