re:sprawl and conservatism
[Frederica Mathewes-Green  03/13 07:45 PM]

Kevin, I know what you mean by "rural sprawl" — I see it when I visit my son and his family north of Atlanta. Those who haven't seen such landscapes can hardly guess how peculiarly depressing they are, as you travel twenty or thirty miles and keep seeing the same elaborate brick gateways framing the same clusters of faux-elegant houses, each with a buzz-word-generated name that involves "Oak" or "Brook" or "Orchard" or some other landscape feature that was destroyed to make way for construction. In between nothing but upscale shopping, kudzu, and the rare straggling farm. It could be on a windshield video loop, and it's curiously oppressive: no matter how fast you drive, you'll never escape.

But in answer to your first question, somebody *does* think this is beautiful. They *do* want to live here. They don't want to live in old Charleston (where I grew up, btw) because the neighbors are too close. They don't care about building for durability, because they're going to be moving on in five years anyway. When they move, they'll want the latest windows, the latest counters, and any house more than 20 years old is embarrassingly out of fashion. Old Charleston looks nice on a postcard but they don't want to live there. They'll take planned obsolescence any day over the upkeep headaches of a quirky older place. (For example, I wrestle with clunky old aluminum storm windows every season, because that's the price of keeping the wonderful, wavery original windows. The next owner will certainly rip it all out for something "efficient"). Sad but true: today's sprawl is exactly what a great many Americans yearn for.

Rod's quote from Kunstler makes a great point, that this unlovely, throwaway landscape is not one that anyone would become attached to. "It's the *land*, Katie Scarlett O'Hara" makes no sense here.

Still, as much as I love living in an old home in an old neighborhood, I don't think that this in itself creates a love of the land, much less a community. Most of these houses have front porches, but we don't really visit with each other. We have our own lives, our own friends. The center of community is no longer geographic, but based in common interests. And public life feels so overexposed that when people get home from the day they want isolation. Look at how popular pay-at-the-pump and ATM's are; people are looking for ways to *not* engage with others. They want a massive shield of a home and no front porch. I don't know how you get around this.