Home Economics

"Approximately 30 years ago, and it might have been even further back than that, I came across a phrase that has stuck in my mind ever since. In an article about an outcome that was not what people had wanted but that turned out to be unavoidable, the author wrote: 'The economics were in earnest.'

We appear to be at that point in the great contest over whether Americans can go on spreading their homes out into the countryside, moving their jobs to dispersed automobile-dependent locations, and placing their shopping along unwalkable and transit-poor commercial strips. We cannot follow that pattern anymore. The economics of oil are in earnest.

Defenders of sprawl - and they have been legion - failed to see what was coming. Sprawl's defenders insisted that no matter how many flaws might be ascribed to dispersed, low-density development, a large number of Americans like it, so it will just keep on growing. James Howard Kunstler was much more prescient. He repeatedly said and wrote, in his thundering cadence, that it doesn't matter if people like it. If you can't afford it any more, the energy-intensive style of life doesn't have a future."

Thanks to The Intrepid Staff