Kunstler: No Direction Home

October 17, 2005
When the Museum of Bad Ideas is built by Steve Wynn in Las Vegas (designed by Frank Gehry), surely one of its remote galleries will contain this week's cover story in the New York Times Sunday Magazine about the suburban homebuilding racket titled "Chasing Ground." The story focuses on one of the nation's leading large production builders, the Toll Brothers, based in Philadelphia, and "ground" is their own cute phrase for the parcels of meadow and cornfield that they magically convert into suburban housing subdivisions all over the nation.

The Times brings its usual magesterial lack of critical thinking to the subject. Among the conclusions: that the suburban sprawl housing bubble will continue indefinitely into the future, and that the price of houses will continue to rise, probably forever, too.

"Indeed , Toll seemed certain that firms like his -- with an expertise at finding and developing land -- would become increasingly successful. The company expects to grow by 20 percent for the next two years and 15 percent annually after that."

Philosophically, the story is grounded in Times columnist David Brooks's concept that suburbia is a good thing because people seem to like it. But it's the Times's ignorance of practical matters that's really breathtaking. The nation's oil predicament is barely mentioned (and obviously only as an editorial afterthought, since the story was no doubt filed before Katrina and Rita shredded production in the Gulf of Mexico). Anyway, the issue is cavalierly dismissed. Missing altogether is America's even more dire predicament over natural gas, which is used to heat half the houses in America and 99 percent of the brand new ones. Since the story focuses on large luxury houses over 3500 square feet, featuring cathedral ceilings and yawning lawyer foyers, you'd think the question of heating these behemoths might arise, but no. The price of natural gas has quadrupled since 2002 and is still going up.

But it's the story's willingness to embrace uncritically the Toll Brothers' credo of reckless and destructive greed that is most amazing

"What happens when New Jersey reaches build-out? 'We've been trying to build it out, but we can't get our hands on it,' [Toll] said. 'We could sell every square foot that we could build on. I mean, anything within 15 minutes of Interstate 78 could be built and sold. Allentown, Bethlehem, Easton, all the way to New York City. And it's all sitting there."

The assumption, clearly, is that America will be a happily car-crazed society forever and that nothing might interfere with that. The interstates will keep humming along. The consumer sector will keep generating high-paying management jobs. The "boomburbs" of Arizona and Nevada, in particular, will continue to expand and thrive.

Here's the real dope on the situation. The big corporate production home builders, including the Toll Brothers, are selling their own stock like mad lately because they realize that the game is over, that they are in a twilight industry. (The Times left this out.) Home heating costs are going to crush the public this winter, and even the supposedly well-off in big new houses are going to feel the pain, because the truth is that many of them are leveraged up to their eyeballs to be where they are, and supernatural utility bills will push them over the edge just when the national bankruptcy laws have been revised to make wiggling out of debt much more difficult and punative. The price of gasoline will keep ratcheting upward from where it is now like a medieval torture device, and will combine with home heating costs to make the public's collective head pop like a winter melon.

Meanwhile, the mortgage industry, a mutant monster organism of lapsed lending standards and arrant grift on the grand scale, is going to implode like a death star under the weight of these non-performing loans and drag every tradable instrument known to man into the quantum vacuum of finance that it creates.

And is there anything to be said on behalf of the mutilated American rural landscape itself? Such as: might we actually need it to feed ourselves when the great Cheez Doodle sector of the economy craps out from a shortage of cheap fossil fuel "inputs?"

It's sad to see a once-great newspaper go through motions of pretending to be intelligent.