Suburbia, Movies, and Downtown

There was a showing at the University of the film The End of Suburbia--I've wanted to see it ever since it came out. It was mostly information that I was pretty familiar with (the suburban way of life is completely dependent on cheap oil; peak oil will put a damper on that; there is a huge amount of infrastructure invested in the suburbs; New Urbanism as an alternative). But it did a pretty nice job of presenting all of that information succinctly and understandably, with a fair amount of entertainment. It featured talking heads that included James Howard Kunstler, author of Home from Nowhere, Matthew Simmons (Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy), and Steve Andrews (an energy consultant in Colorado that I've worked with before--nice guy). If any of you want a primer in the current train of thought on peak oil and development, it's definitely worthwhile. It might be an extreme viewpoint, but I don't think it can be completely dismissed.

My advisor takes a slightly contrarian view: sure, fuel prices will rise as we pass peak oil. But there won't be some calamitous loss of available energy: economics will pull other sources forward. The larger problem that he sees, however, is that the rise in energy prices will be used as an excuse to use some of the most polluting forms of energy without restraint (e.g., coal). As another example of how oil prices might not affect everyday living, he pointed out that the cost of crude oil makes up only a portion of the price of gasoline (less than half, according to this Energy Information Administration website).

But still, the movie definitely makes me want to buy a place in a walkable/public transit available downtown city area sometime soon. And maybe pull a bunch of my money out of the stock market, just in case.

Speaking of downtown cities, this graph was in The Atlantic Monthly's Primary Sources section, originally based on this study:



U.S. downtowns—roughly, the central section of a city—started regaining inhabitants only fifteen years ago, but they’ve been getting younger and better educated for a generation, according to a Brookings Institution study of forty-four cities. The share of downtowners with a bachelor’s degree climbed from 15 to 45 percent between 1970 and 2000, and the proportion of those aged twenty-five to thirty-four rose from 13 to nearly 25 percent. ... These trends vary wildly from city to city, however: for example, nearly 65 percent in Boston’s “fully-developed downtown” boast a bachelor’s degree, but in Phoenix’s “slow-growing downtown” just 15 percent have one. And for every “emerging downtown” like Denver’s, where the home ­ownership rate in 2000 was over 35 percent, there’s a “declining downtown” like Cincinnati’s, where only 1 percent of residents own their homes.

First, it's cool that "more people like me" are moving towards downtown cores. Second, I think that I have read that educated people are often the belweather in trends--so maybe more people will be shifting in this direction. Here's hoping.