Trapped in Suburbia

NVDL: I know someone who went from living in their house, to renting the house, moving themselves into a small room, and having to park their own car in the street. I know someone else who is living in the passageway of his son's home. He is too depressed to work or function, so lives - like a beggar - in the passage. Neither here nor there. These are symptoms of a growing trends - as it becomes more expensive to service suburbia, it also becomes harder to find or engineer an alternative. The result? The decay and degradation of suburbia. This process is already well underway around the world.

TheOilDrum: In layman’s terms, if you bought your house for $200,000 but can only sell it today for $50,000, then your sunk cost is $150,000. Even if you didn’t have a mortgage, that would represent a significant disincentive to selling. If your mortgage is $185,000, and you have no savings to make up the difference, you are in an even more inflexible situation. However, from a societal standpoint, the sunk cost in suburbia is even greater than the sum of its home values.

There is a tremendous amount of energy invested in these homes and in the infrastructure to support them. While suburbia may be highly energy-inefficient, at some point in the not too distant future (possibly today) it will no longer be possible to replicate that kind of surplus energy investment to create a sustainable alternative.

clipped from www.theoildrum.com In this first post, I will develop the argument that sunk cost and the current credit crisis prevent the development of any meaningful alternative to suburbia. Specifically, suburbia presents a Catch-22 situation where the theoretical viability of an alternative effectively destroys our ability to either leave suburbia or build that alternative. This is a crucial foundation to this exploration of suburbia: because there is no alternative that is both theoretically viable and realistically implementable, we must instead focus on adapting suburbia to a post-peak oil future.