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“A tour de force”
—New York Times
“Bob Sanchez is a consummate writer.”
—Kaye Trout’s
Book Reviews
A readable and well-told tale filled with color, sensitivity, humor and plenty of research.
—Midwest Book Review
Housing from another angle
CUL-DE-SAC SYNDROME:
Turning Around the Unsustainable American Dream
By John F. Wasik
240 pp. Bloomberg Press $24.95
WELCOME TO THE URBAN REVOLUTION:
How Cities Are Changing the World
By Jeb Brugmann
352 pp. Bloomsbury $27
Reviewed by Marci Andrews
The hot topic of many of today’s news programs is the current meltdown of the housing market and of the economy in general. These two books approach the issue from a novel environmental and socio-economic angle. Cul-de-Sac Syndrome focuses on housing in the US: how the US housing market became what it is today, how it affects the American population and environment, and what can be done moving forward to make housing sustainable. Welcome to the Urban Revolution focuses on cities of the world—the advantages of living in a city, the effects of a city’s design on its population, and ways to revamp and better manage cities around the world.
With only 207 pages, Cul-de-Sac Syndrome packs a lot of punch for such a slim volume. It’s broken into two parts—“A Dream Gone Bad, ” which examines the origin of the classic American-Dream home in the suburbs, and “Reinventing Home and the Community, ” which explores possible ways to change and improve America’s housing (and community).
Even though a great deal has already been said about the mortgage meltdown, it was enlightening, for me at least, to see how the idea of property as a financial investment instead of simply a home rose in popularity. I can’t think of anyone I know in the work force today who has a pension they are counting on using when they retire—most of my contemporaries don’t seem to be counting on Social Security, either. But the idea of building equity in a home, then selling, downsizing, and using the cash to fund retirement, is still prevalent, even in the current market.
Until relatively recently, we have been a country of farmers. That changed over the last century with the rise of first the industrial city, then the suburb, then the car, which provided at-will access between the two. (No waiting for the train, bus, trolley, etc., if these were available at all.) At the turn of the twentieth century cities were almost uniformly dirty places. Most people considered suburbs much healthier and desirable places to live and raise a family.
Americans’ white picket-fenced homes became their new castles. As the century wore on, however, they found that the promise of suburbia didn’t quite live up to the reality. To afford a home, many had to purchase property far from their workplaces, causing commuting time to rise. Extreme commutes and increasingly stressful and sedentary lifestyles at best negated the positive effects of living far from the city’s environ. At worst, they lowered the average American’s quality of life so much that a trend toward moving back into America’s cities and downtown areas is already underway.
Other effects of suburban life aside, the suburban lifestyle devolved into unsustainablilty. Building methods are both inefficient and incredibly wasteful. Infrastructure has not kept up with demand, making resources, particularly water, increasingly difficult to manage. An outdated electrical grid can barely keep up with current power demand, and occasionally fails to do even that, as dramatically demonstrated in the massive 2003 blackout from New York to parts of Canada. Americans’ habit of attempting to “keep up with the Joneses” has only exacerbated the problem—bigger houses, bigger cars, more electronics, all increased debt load and increased pressure on an already pressured environment.
What to do? The second part of Cul-de-Sac Syndrome covers the most compelling ideas found by the author. He focuses mainly on housing materials and housing locations—namely, greener, more efficient housing and retooling America’s cities to create walkable, mixed-use (i.e,, residential and business) and mixed-income neighborhoods. A generation of young adults that has grown up aware of environmental issues is now entering the housing market. They will want to know what their carbon footprint will be if they move into that suburban house v. the condo in the city. Rising fuel costs mean that many people will find the idea of being able to walk or bike to where they need to go, and therefore reduce the amount they spend on gas, very appealing. And as baby boomers retire, many may be ready to move from a high-maintenance single family home to a walkable neighborhood where there’s no grass to mow and the grocery store is only a block or two away.
It’s possible that economic pressures will ultimately lead us Americans by the nose to downsize and be more environmentally friendly. Maybe not. It’s not just the culture that needs to be changed—zoning laws will have to be rewritten to allow for mixed-use buildings. And if the green manufactured housing Wasik described is ever to catch on, Americans will have to rethink some attitudes. Cul-de-Sac Syndrome doesn’t really provide a way forward on these issues, unfortunately.
Cul-de-Sac Syndrome is a good read for anyone interested in the housing crisis, the mortgage meltdown, the environmental impact of housing in America . . . or people thinking about buying their first house. There’s plenty to think about for the conscientious first-time home buyer. Wasik’s writing style is clean and informative. This is not a book the average reader will pick up for fun, but if you’re looking for a serious, concise look at the topic, Cul-de-Sac Syndrome is a winner.
In Welcome to the Urban Revolution, by far the denser of the two books, Jeb Brugmann posits that to address the ills of world today, humanity should focus on better managing growth of the world’s cities, since they are largely the locus of poverty, hunger, pollution, and many other of today’s most serious problems.
I found much of the book difficult to digest. Most compelling of the early parts of the book are Brugmann’s discussions of the advantages of density to city-dwellers. I had never considered the full ramifications myself, but Brugmann argues that living in a well-designed high-population area is the key to everything from a more productive life to ensuring that tyrants never stay in power.
His discussions on how to improve cities are more interesting than his examinations of existing city situations. His language regarding the health of a city has certain similarities to the language used by biologists when discussing biodiversity. He indicates that the greater diversity and greater number of businesses mixed in with residential high-density buildings, the healthier the city. His discussion indicated that to really make a difference for most cities, serious changes will have to be made to zoning laws.
Greener solutions are part of Brugmann’s vision. He wants to close the resource loop, to make sure that resources can be used and reused instead of used and thrown out. The positive end result would be improved quality of life.
Like Cul-de-Sac Syndrome, Welcome to the Urban Revolution extols the values of walkable living and cleaning up inner cities. Despite the greater length of Welcome to the Urban Revolution, it did not offer individual possible solutions to problems. Brugmann’s very premise—that cities are both critical to humanity and highly interconnected—makes the ramifications of changes to any city inherently unpredictable.
As a general reader, I definitely found Welcome to the Urban Revolution to be a bit much. I would recommend it to anyone interested in urban planning without hesitation, but the casual reader may well be overwhelmed.
Right now I live in an apartment complex on the edge of a lake in Cary, NC. I’ve liked living by the lake so much I was only considering buying close to it. But before living here, I lived for a short while in a walkable neighborhood in Raleigh and enjoyed that as well. Reading these books reminded me of how convenient it was to be able to walk to the grocery store for ingredients I didn’t have for a recipe, or over to the cafe for a sandwich if I didn’t feel like making lunch. It also really drove home the value of building ties in a neighborhood—and the positive impacts on the environment, my pocketbook, and my physical and mental health. Because of these books, if I move I’ll open up my search to different neighborhoods, focusing much less on the suburban area I live in now.
Marci Andrews currently lives in the Washington, DC, area, where she works as a Senior Documentation Specialist for a successful software company. She’s a sucker for a good story, even if it’s not true, and has been a bibliophile since before she could read. She keeps track of her extensive To Read list, and her thoughts on her reading material on her blog, Bend the Round, which can be found at http://bendtheround.wordpress.com.
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