|
The
End of Summer
A
lot of Virginians went to the beach this
summer, as they have done every summer for
decades. However, not many noted the huge, rotting whale on
the shore. The same
whale could be found along every roadway
that leads to a beach. Indeed, the very same
whale was decaying and stinking up the places
vacationers left behind when they
departed.
Al
Gore has made a cottage industry out of “An
Inconvenient Truth.” The whale we are talking
about is much bigger. Al’s
inconvenient truth is just the left flipper of
the whale on the beach. As we note in Chapter One
of "The Shape of the Future,"
concerning Gore’s book. "Earth in the
Balance," until he comes to understand
the importance of human settlement patterns he
will miss most of the ramifications of his
observations and concerns.
The
whale is so much bigger than Global Climate
Change that few can bring themselves to
acknowledge its existence.
Acknowledging the existence of this whale is to
see not just the end of summer but the end of
summers as we have known them.
Since
October of 1973 – the Arab (OPEC) Oil Embargo
– it has been very clear to some that the end
of the consumptive epoch that exploded on the
planet after World War I was about to end and
that many who have built their lives, their
enterprises and their expectations for the
future on a foundation of cheap energy derived
from burning up natural capital were headed over
a cliff like so many lemmings. At the bottom of
the cliff are rocks, not a beach.
This
summer the subsidies, props, myths/illusions
that have kept individuals, families,
enterprises, institutions and agencies at all
levels of governance from facing reality began
to shrink, rot and dissipate.
The
Anatomy of the Whale
The
whale on the beach is made up of two equal,
interrelated but distinct parts. One half
of the whale is exhaustion of natural capital.
Most of the focus at this point is on burning up
the ancient reserve of hydrocarbons. This
attention is due to the cost and looming supply
interruptions of petrochemicals. We focused on
energy consumption in our column, “Soft
Consumption Paths” (August 7, 2006).
There
are other critical natural capital exhaustion
indicators: erosion of top soil, depletion of
marine and estuary fisheries, loss of carbon
sinks and biological diversity in tropical and
temperate forests, desertification of arable
lands, shrinking fresh water aquifers, polluted
and otherwise wasted surface water sources as
well as other indicators of natural system
mismanagement, over consumption and imbalance.
This list includes only those elements of
natural capital with obvious, direct economic
impact. There are, in addition, issues of
natural capital and natural diversity for which
no economic quantification is yet available.
Global
climate change appears to be accelerated by
burning hydrocarbon in cars, by burning forests
and from the consumption of other renewable and
nonrenewable natural capital resources. That the
climate is changing is beyond question. The
extent to which burning natural capital causes
or accelerates “global climate change”
and/or “global warming” is still debated by
some.
That
discussion is completely beside the point. The
need to shrink human’s ecological foot print
is beyond any rational debate. That is
especially true for First World citizens who
have huge ecological footprints but it is also
critical to reverse the rapid population growth
in less prosperous parts of the planet which
contribute to total human impact on natural
capital.
Creating
a smaller ecological footprint is more
intelligent and safer, regardless of the cause
of climate change or other natural system
perturbations. As documented in "The
Shape of the Future," the sine qua non of
shrinking the ecological footprint of humans
is to evolve functional human settlement
patterns.
The
other half of the whale on the beach is over
consumption of all commodities and resources
driven by winner-take-all global, nation-state
and New Urban Region competition. The scale of
the current epoch of over consumption is unlike
any in recorded history. The excess of many
societies like Imperial Rome or other empires
was stupendous but it involved just a tiny
fraction of the population of any past society.
The total impact of these excesses cannot be
compared on the same scale as the consumption
over the past eight-plus decades.
If
Vance Packard could only see us now! But holding
up a mirror to see societies' new super
“waste makers” might not help because in the
US of A, most believe it is their right, if not
their obligation and patriotic duty, to consume
as much as possible.
Facing
the Whale Head On
Some
may recall MainStream Media coverage or the Bacon’s
Rebellion blog post on the $22 Million
Centex proffer to the Town of Warrenton. Jim
Bacon’s
post (“There
is a Limit After All,” August 5, 2006)
focused on the issue of excessive proffers. In
fact the $75,000 dollars per unit proffer is
only a little over eight percent of the
$850,000-per-unit starting price for the
dwellings that Centex planned to build. In the
long run this amount of money may or may not
have been enough to cover the added cost of
these new units to the Town of Warrenton and
Fauquier County. More on that in future columns.
The
real story here was not the size of the proffer.
It is not the lunacy of staff at Centex thinking
the company could make money on the project. The
story is not even the dysfunctional settlement
patterns that would have evolved from the
project. The reason the $22 million proffer
story is important is that this case provides
the opportunity to examine the scale of that
whale on the beach.
In
mid-August we held a work shop on the future of
Greater Warrenton. The idea of the workshop
originated with the incomplete MainStream Media
account of how the Town of Warrenton would spend
its $22 million share of the too-good-to-be-true
proffer before Centex retracted its offer. We
fired off a brief note to Mayor George Fitch and
several Council persons. George responded
quickly with a thoughtful note that corrected
much of the incomplete and incorrect press
coverage.
While
the Town strategy for use of the $22 million was
sound from a historic perspective, we had
reservations. Our further comments led to a
flurry of e-mails and to an invitation for
concerned Council members to share a quiet
discussion at S/PI’s studio. This offer
morphed into a public workshop with most of the
Town Council, the Mayor, the Town Manager, town
staff and concerned citizens as well as the
Fauquier County Supervisor who represents the
Center Magisterial District that includes the
Town and most of Greater Warrenton.
We
took the opportunity presented by the workshop
to outline our thinking on the future of Greater
Warrenton. Those in the audience at the workshop
were attentive and asked good questions during
and after the session. Most of the questions
were based on the assumption that the trends
with respect to transport, settlement patterns
and government’s role in shaping the future
that have evolved over the past 10, 50 and 86
years would continue.
Few
are yet willing to say flat out that the future
will not be an extension of the past and that
things that were good in the past -- e.g. a low
tax rate and solid, traditional municipal
services -- will not be sufficient to protect
the interests of Greater Warrenton’s citizens
– or any other citizens – in the future. We
suspected this would be the case and opened the
workshop with several vignettes to get everyone
focused but the questions revealed that our
message about Fundamental Change did not get
across to everyone.
Fundamental
Change
The
Town of Warrenton, the National Capital
Subregion and the First World are on the brink
of Fundamental Change. It is profound change
that has been clearly visible to some since
October 1973 and broadly predicted long before
that.
The
entire First World, but especially the US of
A, has been living on our savings account. We
have created:
Those
two realities assure that the past trajectory
of civilization is not sustainable.
Over
a year ago, on August 9, 2005, we had addressed
several Town Council members at an advisory
committee meeting on the “through traffic”
problem. We pointed out that in both Greater
Warrenton newspapers Butch Davies (then the VDOT
Culpeper District Representative on Commonwealth
Transportation Board) had quoted Phil Shucet
(then VDOT Commissioner and now employed by a
Hampton Roads developer) as saying, “There is
no indication that automobile use will decline
in coming generations –- even
considering the increased cost of
gasoline." (Emphasis added.)
That
was insanity in 2005 and it is clearly insanity
now.
How
Fundamental will the Change be? We framed the
scope of change in terms that everyone in the
audience could understand: “By the end of next
year everyone will travel only by walking on
their hands but Business-As- Usual has created
an environment paved with shards of glass and
you will not be able to afford gloves. Never
mind that many of us are too old, too young or
too weak to walk on our hands.”
Here
is another way to characterize the scope of
change:
“By
the end of next year no one will be taller than
two feet but Business-As-Usual has created an
environment with all the physical, economic and
social door handles six feet off the ground.”
My
advice to the town was that, given the
institutional and economic resources of Greater
Warrenton, if they acted very quickly, they may
still have the option of harnessing and taking
advantage of Greater Warrenton’s resources
like a surfer on a wave. If not, we will all be
washed under like a surfer who falls off their
board.
Comparable
Times Past
Following
the workshop it occurred to us that there are
only two events recalled by those living today
that are even remotely comparable to what
citizens of the United States face at the
present:
1.
The economic prospects in the Fall of 1930 when
it was clear that “The Crash” of a year
before was not a blip and that the '20s would
not be roaring back.
2.
The early months of 1942 when the United States
was at war and there were few positive signs
that there could be an acceptable outcome even
with an unprecedented nation-state effort and
the sacrifice of many citizen lives.
The
fundamental difference between these two events
and the current situation is that:
The “common enemy” in both cases was not
“us,” which made possible a unified
national commitment:
Stick
together, sacrifice, work hard and we can
beat this grave threat to America and our
way of life.
The
Whale on the Beach is Different
The
current threat – the whale on the beach – is
different. It is the direct, cumulative result
of billions of actions by the majority of
citizens in the voting booth and in the market
place. In taking these actions almost all
believed – and most still believe – that
they were making the right decisions.
Citizens
now hope that the current clouds will pass over
and that they can get back to “the way we
were.” We call this mass stumbling toward
entropy “Business-As- Usual.” The
hoped-for-future is a place without terrorism,
wars, and dwindling natural capital. The
pipe-dream is that somehow the shaky global
economic fundamentals fueled by mass consumption
will morph into something that is sustainable.
So much is riding on this silly assumption that
no one is willing to look the whale in the eye,
or even admit it is on the beach.
It
is not just “global” concerns that impact
citizens. Closer to home there are everyday
problems of high energy costs, a nation-wide
mobility crisis and an affordable/ accessible
housing crisis in every prosperous New Urban
Region.
Crime
and auto deaths are back on the rise. Illegal
immigration seems to be beyond the capacity of
the nation-state and state leadership to
address. All but those at the very tip-top of
the economic food chain are concerned with
deteriorating public and private services...
Then there is the environment... parents are
concerned with poor schools and... the list goes
on and is well summarized in the current work
program for PROPERTY DYNAMICS. More on that
soon.
The
Big Difference
There
is one other common characteristic shared by the
two historic events – The Great Depression and
World War II -- noted above. Both required, and
were addressed by a nation state-scale
responses. The litany of problems represented by
the whale on the beach and outlined in the prior
section has nation-state-scale impacts but many
of the solutions must be forged at the
Regional-, Alpha Community-, Alpha Village-,
Alpha Neighborhood- and Alpha Cluster-scales.
This is because most of these problems are
rooted in dysfunctional human settlement
patterns as documented in "The Shape of the
Future." (Also see “Discordant
Trio,” July 25, 2005, and “Collapse,
an Appreciation,” August 8, 2005.)
This
reality puts governments like the Town of
Warrenton on the front line. Because the Town
is blessed with economic, social and physical
resources that few, if any, small urban
agglomerations have, the ball is squarely in
the court of the Town's elected and appointed
leaders. They could make a difference.
Reality
One
Creating
functional settlement pattern in 21st Century
will be expensive. Governments must invest in
the future, not just paper over past problems
and hope things will change. Every time a
politician says they will lower taxes, finding
real solutions or improving the quality of
services becomes harder to accomplish.
Talk
of keeping taxes low and continuing to
subsidize dysfunctional scatteration of human
activity and the disaggregation of
civilization perpetuates the illusion that
society can live off natural capital
indefinitely.
A
sustainable future will be very expensive and
the longer public agencies wait, the more
expensive it will be. The longer leadership
waits, the less likely it will be that there
will remain the resources necessary to do
anything but follow conventional wisdom down the
path to entropy. We noted in our workshop that
those in Greater Warrenton now live in a great
place but asked for how long will it remain a
great place? (See Chapter 23 of "The Shape
of the Future" on sustainability.)
Overarching
Forces
After
laying out the reasons why workshop participants
should be concerned about the prospect of
Fundamental Change and should be doing something
about it, we next pointed out that the forces
causing Centex to back away from the pipedream
of selling $850,000 houses to the over-55 crowd
are now impacting all residents of Greater
Warrenton, and most of the residents of
Virginia.
A
spot check of Realtor.Com last week suggests
that there are about four times the number of
houses for sale in Zip Code 20186 as there were
a year ago. The prices are lower by a factor of
about 20 percent and slipping. Homes are staying
on the market far longer.
The
day after the workshop the Fauquier
Times-Democrat headline for a story by Don
Del Rosso read, “Slow Going: Homeowners Cut
Prices, Wait for Buyers.” The Business section
of the Washington Post for 24 August
headlined, “Signs of a Buyer’s Market:
Latest Figures Show Sales Dripping, Inventory
Rising for Existing Homes.” On 25 August the
same section of WaPo printed a Bloomberg
News story, “New-Home Numbers Add to Housing
Woes.”
So
what is the big deal? We have had housing slumps
before. We lived through the housing crash of
the mid '70s and the one in the late '80s,
right? Why the fuss? The region has
survived the REIT crash, the Savings and Load
crash, the Dot Com crash. Why can we not
just weather this economic blip?
One
simple reason: Every “recovery” since 1930
has been catalyzed either by a war and /or a
surge in auto and home sales.
We
are now at war over the very resources that are
being over consumed. According to the national
leadership it will be a long war. That, if you
can believe it, is the good news.
The
bad news is the non-war economic “silver
bullets” have been consumption related to
autos, houses and land development. Those are
exactly the things that the United States and
its citizens will not be able to afford. We
cannot afford big expensive cars. Have you
noticed what is happening to Ford and GM?
Even
worse, for 30 years the shelter industry has
been building the wrong size houses in the wrong
locations. That settlement pattern accelerates
the consumption of energy and natural capital.
The majority of the energy consumption is for
transport to get citizens from where the are to
where they want or need to be. See any of the 80
columns we have written at Bacon’s
Rebellion since November of 2002 that have
“housing” or “mobility” in the title or
the introductory paragraph.
Reliance
on the two economic “accelerators” of the
past 50 years would be nation-state economic
suicide.
There
are no silver linings in those clouds. There is
no “solution” that does not involve hard
work and fundamental changes to settlement
patterns so that citizens do not need to consume
two thirds of the energy supply in order to
assemble the elements of a quality life.
Decisive action must come soon, before the
governance structure runs out of social, as well
as natural, capital.
Thing
Are Worse Here in Greater Warrenton
The
housing downturn is much worse right now in
Greater Warrenton than it is other locations in
the Virginia portion of the National Capital
Subregion. That is because buyers are coming to
understand the scope of the impact of new
development in Western Prince William and along
U.S. Route 29 in Fauquier County.
The
net result of this “growth” is that soon
“you cannot get there from here.” The
problem is that without dramatic action by
municipal governance agencies to create
Balanced Communities, “there” is where one
has to go to find a job to pay for the cost of
housing and living.
Farther
from the Core of the National Capital Subregion
-- for example in Culpeper County, and in the
panhandle of West Virginia -- sales of lower
priced homes were still brisk according to the
most recent data.
Getting
from southern Culpeper County (near the Town of
Culpeper aka, Greater Culpeper) or western
Culpeper County (another Centex project at
Clevengers Corner) requires commuting through
Fauquier County, around Greater Warrenton and
then through Prince William County.
Getting
to the Core of the National Capital Subregion
from West Virginia requires going through
several counties in Maryland or Virginia which
cannot meet the travel needs of their own
citizens, much less accommodate “through
traffic.” For this reason the sales of cheaper
houses farther out will dry up soon. (See
Backgrounder “Anatomy
of a Bottleneck,” and “The
Commuting Problem,” Jan. 17, 2005.)
The
foundation of PROPERTY DYNAMICS is the
recognition that the most important asset of
most citizens is their house. In Greater
Warrenton, members of the Town Council have the
economic, social and physical future of 20,000
citizens in their hands. The Town can take the
initiative and create a special place or it can
allow its citizens to become part of Greater
Manassas, which is what the map on the cover of
the Yellow Book phone directory suggests has
already happened.
There
Are Two Choices
For
the Town of Warrenton and for municipal and
state governments in general there are two
choices.
The
first choice is what Business-As-Usual will
yield. Pursuing Business-As-Usual will mean that
in a decade or so, Beta Neighborhoods, Beta
Villages and Beta Communities both inside and
outside the Clear Edge in Virginia will land
somewhere along a spectrum of possible futures,
none of which are desirable.
One
end of the Business-As-Usual continuum assumes
that somehow individual and family prosperity
will be maintained for at least for a decade or
two. At this end of the continuum, the problem
is that there is no place anyone can go because
of traffic congestion. A good example is
outlined in the Backgrounder, “The
Anatomy of a Bottleneck," noted above.
As
suggested earlier, the impact is already
affecting the housing market in Greater
Warrenton. Traffic generated by scattered new
urban residences that are...
1.
South and west of Fauquier County
2.
To the east of Greater Warrenton in Fauquier
County, e.g. in Greater New Baltimore/Vint
Hill
3.
In Prince William County
...make
it impossible to count on getting to the Core of
the National Capital Subregion from Greater
Warrenton in a reasonable time on any given day.
At
the other end of the Business-As-Usual continuum,
citizens live in places where prosperity has
eroded. In these places only a small percentage
of the population can afford to drive anywhere.
This is the Sao Paulo condition: The rich rely
on helicopters, the poor walk, the rest in bus,
taxi and private vehicles are stuck in traffic
jams up to 60 miles long. (See “Regional
Rigor Mortis,” June 6, 2005.)
The
Other Choice
There
is an alternative to landing on the Business-As-
Usual continuum that stretches from prosperous
gridlock to Sao Paulo’s poverty gridlock. This
alternative requires the evolution of Greater
Warrenton (and every other village-scale and
community-scale place) to be one where there is
little need or desire to go anywhere else
because citizens are where they want to be. In
other words there is a Balance of
Jobs/Housing/Services/Recreation/Amenity
(J/H/S/R/A). (For
a glimpse of what “balance” means, see “Balanced
Communities,” August 23, 2005.)
Under
this alternative there would be plenty of
roadway and railway capacity on existing
facilities and plenty of energy for the desired
travel because everyone will not need to travel
long distances or to random locations to
assemble every element of a quality life.
As
noted in past columns, the first step towards
this actuality is for all to pay their fair
share of location variable costs. More on this
in our next column.
Threshold
Guidelines
With
Fundamental Change on the horizon and the
options limited by the cumulative impact of past
mistakes, what can individuals and their
governments do?
The
Town of Warrenton is a Beta Village-scale urban
agglomeration. It is acknowledged that the Town
and the surrounding territory in Fauquier County
that make up Greater Warrenton needs a new plan
– more on that later.
But
what can the Town do right now? Here is the
advice we gave the Council at the workshop:
In
other words, if a “project” does not
contribute to functional urban fabric, send it
back to the drawing boards.
For
most of the northern part of Virginia and West
Virginia that falls within the National Capital
Subregion, the county is the existing unit of
“municipal” governance. The governance
structure needs to evolve but that is another
story for another time.
Depending
on which county one is examining, the county
borders may include:
Within
the Clear Edge around the Core of the National
Capital Subregion, Loudoun County includes four
Beta Communities – two of which it shares with
Fairfax County. Prince William has two Beta
Communities. Fairfax County has nine or ten Beta
Communities, depending on how the boundaries
evolve. Fairfax County shares two Beta
Communities with Loudoun County and it shares
two Beta Communities with Arlington County.
For
these places the “Threshold Guidelines” are
more complex but just as necessary. Here are
some possibilities to get the discussion going:
-
If
a proposed new/expanded roadway or new/
extended shared-vehicle system does not
reduce Vehicle Miles Traveled (public or
private) by a significant amount, thus
supporting functional settlement patterns,
send it back. The idea that adding more
transport facilities which generates more
vehicle travel is a benefit is just denying
the existence of the whale on the beach,
continues the pipedream and makes mobility
and access worse.
-
If
someone proposes a new “mixed use
center” or a new “town center,” demand
to see how this project contributes to
functional settlement patterns at the Alpha
Neighborhood, Alpha Village and Alpha
Community scales. This is the “Next Higher
Component Strategy” outlined in "The
Shape of the Future."
Of
course, the Guidelines listed above for Towns
and other small urban agglomerations also apply
for every small “project” in any
jurisdiction. These Guidelines at the town
level and at the county level will accelerate
the demand for truly “Comprehensive and
Balanced” Regional, Subregional, Community,
Village and Neighborhood scale plans. This is
where Regional Metrics and the role of the Clear
Edge a balanced of J/H/S/R/A come into play.
The
New Plan
At
the Town of Warrenton workshop we outlined ideas
for a fundamentally new plan for Greater
Warrenton. This involved ideas for evolving five
neighborhoods each with a balance of
J/H/S/R/A that would meld into a Greater
Warrenton that has Balance at the Alpha Village
scale. Of course, Greater Warrenton
will only function within a Balanced Greater
Warrenton/Fauquier Alpha Community. Such a
community must evolve to become a Balanced But
Disaggregated Community outside the Clear Edge
around the Core of the National Capital
Subregion. Any discussion of these future plans
requires an understanding of the New Urban
Region Conceptual Framework and the Vocabulary
to discuss that Framework. Quantification via
Regional Metrics will also be key.
Two
Spheres
We
closed the workshop with a reminder that when
considering the future there are two distinct
spheres of concern:
There
is a need for new and better ideas but there is
also the need for citizen education and support
for new ideas and intelligent actions without
regard to the specifics of such plans and
programs. Only with such understandings and
support will jurisdictions avoid
dog-in-the-manger opposition to positive change.
That is the challenge that PROPERTY DYNAMICS has
staked out.
To
paraphrase Will Rogers: It is not what you do
not know that hurts you, it is what you know
that ain't so.
The
biggest “Aint So” is that “We Can Continue
To Do What We Have Been Doing,” aka Business
As Usual. This is where those who fear
that change will undermine their economic
well-being come forward to rant about their
rights. The
forces of Business-As-Usual are trying to sell
the American Delusion and call it The America
Dream.
Where
to From Here?
The
future of evolving Balanced Communities and
functional human settlement patterns depends on
citizen understanding of three basic sets of
relationships:
This
Backgrounder introduces Quantification in the
context of preservation of open land both inside
and outside the Clear Edge. We will be expanding
these themes in the next two columns at Bacon’s
Rebellion.
--
August 28, 2006
|
