…by development?
I can’t say this is happening in Europe. In the UK, France, and Germany you can still find small charming towns, beautiful. In the US, it’s a freaking mess where paradise-like locations, every good location close to any existing development are overwhelmed and utterly ruined by development.
Washington DC is the perfect example. In the early 60s, DC was a smallish beautiful city surrounded by farmland, beautiful Maryland, and incredible Northern Virginia. Outside of DC was Winchester, Va a beautiful area, Now, the place is completely and utterly trashed from a development perspective, Winchester has been absorbed into the Sprawl (a term from Cyberpunk) the Megolopolis where the entire East Cost of the US turns into one developed mass of humanity. It makes me sick. And it‘s just not happening here. Every wonderful small city in the US is being transformed for the worst. Some examples? Austin, Boise, Richmond, Nashville, etc, etc. San Diego was incredible in the 1940-50s (before my time) what a freaking mess now.
Welcome to the unsustainable and inequitable culture of
overconsumption now killing our planet — and also, say hello to the geographic cleansing of structural plurality better known as
gentrification.
The idyllic places you remember as a kid were idyllic because they were built atop a commonwealth which was expropriated from the First peoples, then settled by the white forebears of today who profited immensely from the forced labour of servitude to extract the resources from that former commonwealth. Those places were idyllic because the policies, deed covenants, and even laws of institutionally-embedded segregation (see:
redlining and also
blockbusting) limited who could live where. And these places you remember were idyllic because of an aggravated intent of impoverishment for people who were excluded by the systemic methods of segregation which kept them out.
Even as you saw the idyll then, so many folks were struggling to maintain core city communities whose property tax bases were being depleted — starved — by postwar
white flight (this was, at its root, a flight of incumbent wealth) and saddled with the un-remediated toxic infrastructures of leaded water pipes, future Superfund sites, and asbestos-laden structures left vacant and uninhabitable for decades, as a culture of neoliberal policy from 1982 forward further aided to excise and deplete regional and local tax revenue bases (which otherwise would have paid for capital remediation in the places left behind by that white flight).
Some regions, such as the state of Minnesota in 1971, sought and secured legislation to help curtail that deprivation of city core wealth to the municipal fringes by developing the legalization of
neighbourhood improvement plans (giving neighbourhood councils the direct oversight and budgetary mandate to receive a more equitable share of state-mandated distributed property tax revenue from regionally-governed economies, such as the seven-county cluster in and around the Twin Cities called the Metropolitan Council) somewhat more evenly than with other American cities.
The generational move
away from under-regulated development (
sprawl) since the later 1990s (as the development of online interconnectivity infrastructure favoured pre-existing and nearby rights-of-way corridors already laid in place decades, even centuries earlier) pressed poorer folk still in these centres to the margins of now-older, monoculture-designed postwar development — as those un-remediated city cores became economically desirable by those disposed with the incumbent means to amass even more wealth as they prized premiums on qualities like
proximity and the socially ineffable quality of
clustering which ushered inward that cleansing of gentrification.
And now?
Pricing for housing in those
cleansed city cores remain extremely high as centralized properties have emerged to become bulk investment vehicles (principally, to park money out of sight from wealth and capital gains taxes in the investors’ home localities), as a new generation of white flight, this time a “creative” class of flight in the wake of the pandemic (still an overwhelmingly white-centric — though less so than post-1960s — and well-educated class), has priced out existing properties in those areas of previously under-regulated, low-density and monocultural housing developments, worsening a housing crisis pretty much everywhere for lower-income and “middle”-income people.
Many of these people living with an going lack of security to housing and other core human services remain highly racialized (“beneficiaries” of the chronic policies, deed covenants, laws, and wealth-deprivation measures of the ancestral past) and, increasingly,
non-racialized but chronically under-educated people (a direct intergenerational consequence of the neoliberal policies which strove to underfund — starve — social institutions like an uninterrupted and equitable access to public education at the primary, secondary,
and tertiary levels). They are kept to margins of poorly executed or maintained physical infrastructure where access to any meaningful social support all but
requires the ownership of a privately-owned vehicle (which consumes a carbon-rich liquid and which also must be insured by underwriters which already have a lot of incumbent wealth).
What’s
monoculture? Monoculture is when under-regulated developers set up and build all the lower-density housing to occur in one place (like subdivisions); all the white-collar/creative-class/whatever workplaces to a discretely distal second place (like business parks and central business districts); and
most of the retail goods and services to a distal third place (like shopping malls and big-box centres). A by-product of World War II innovation and social design, monoculture supercharged the postwar economy and the intergenerational culture of overconsumption that persists with every moment of our lives.
And that brings us to here on this particular evening, having a chat about it.
