Showing posts with label Big Box Swindle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Big Box Swindle. Show all posts
The Shape of the City
One thing that a consumerist society requires is a lot of space devoted to consumption. Just how much space? Joe the Planner has written an excellent article on just this topic. The growth of the consumer economy can be seen in the amount of space devoted to consumption.
To get some idea of just how disproportionate this is, we can compare it with other developed nations:
The disparity in these numbers is stunning, and go a long way to explaining at least a portion of the real estate boom. But this is not sustainable. Soon, most of this space will be unoccupied, a wasting asset with no immediate use.
This situation was not really created by "market forces," but by government policies and subsidies. The shape of our cities, or perhaps their shapelessness, was dictated by the way government favored the car over public transportation, the suburb over the city, the homeowner over the renter.
Distributism has been accused of being an "agrarian" movement, a nostalgic "back to the land" ideology. This is only partially true. It is "agrarian," but this is not so much about getting back to the land as it is about establishing the proper relationship between town and country. You might say that the Distributist is concerned with how far your tomato travels before it reaches your salad. Ideally, it would travel from your own backyard garden. But failing that, it would come from a nearby field.
But the fields are no longer nearby, as urban sprawl has chased the farm farther from the city. Moreover, the vast transportation subsidies have made him compete with the farmer in distant corners of the nation and the world; the humble tomato is now a national and international tomato.
The result is that everybody has forgotten what a tomato tastes like; they are picked green and turn red on the truck or in the warehouse as it winds its long way to your table. But turning red is not the same as ripening; the former can happen in the truck, the latter only happens on the vine. The closer that vine is to your table, the better the tomato tastes. And the greater effect it has on the local economy.
The rather artificial economic system that makes this rather artificial national and international tomato possible is coming to an end. We can no longer afford the network of subsidies that make the 2,000 mile tomato profitable. And with the collapse of the tomato will come the collapse of the suburb, at least on its current scale.
Our current "recovery" plans--whether Democrat or Republican--focus on getting things back to the way they were. They are "reactionary" in the truest sense of that word. But they are not viable. Returning to the conditions that gave us the current condition ensure that the current condition will not end. Or rather, will end in collapse. And the more money we spend on going backward, the fewer resources we will have for going forwards.
We don't need to re-create the past, but to restructure the future. That future, I am convinced, is neither in globalization nor suburbanization. It is in rebuilding the regional and local economies. The good news about this is that it does not require more gov't, but less. Not more spending at the top, but more revenues at the local level. It does not require "rescuing" failed institutions, but rebuilding older and more stable ones.
By the way, Joe, since you work as a planner in Buffalo, check out Médaille College. I am sure that I am one of the few bloggers whose family name graces a college.
The Big Empty Box (Store)
Stacey Mitchell of The Institute for Local Self-Reliance reports that empty big-box stores are about to join the foreclosed homestead as a defining feature of the American economic landscape:
Within a few months, more than one-eighth of the country's retail space will be sitting vacant, according to some estimates. That's about 1.4 billion square feet, or 50 square miles, of empty store space, ringed by roughly 150 square miles of useless parking lot.
It will be tempting to blame the weak economy for all of this wreckage. But the recession has merely been the trigger. This avalanche of vacant retail, much like the mortgage crisis, has been a long time in the making.
Since the early 1990s, the pace of retail development has far outstripped growth in spending. Between 1990 and 2005, the amount of store space in the United States doubled, ballooning from 19 to 38 square feet per person. Meanwhile, real consumer spending rose just 14 percent.
Stacey Mitchell is the author of Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America's Independent Businesses. which we reviewed here.
AIBA
The Blog of the American Chesterton Society is always chock full of information. In a recent post, author Nancy Brown links to AIBA or American Independent Business Alliance.
Interested in starting your own local business but concerned you don't have the backing of a solid, informative, business network? AIBA is all about supporting local business, and providing tools for companies with "soup to nuts" start-up materials.
Stacy Mitchell, author of the book "Big Box Swindle" (published by The Institute for Self-Reliance) is one of the board members for AIBA.
One of the concerns our families have in regard to ownership, is the lack of support systems needed to jump from wage slavery to self-ownership. Local business networking is a good step towards acheiving this goal. Check AIBA's website for more details.
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