As most know, Detroit has become the poster city for urban blight and the decline of American manufacturing. Its population has dropped from 1.85 million in 1950 to less than 900,000, with the result being that much of the city is vacant and even returning to feral conditions. The area of the city has simply become too large for the remaining inhabitants, and the tax base just can't support the sprawling infrastructure that was once the pride of American industrial achievement. So Mayor Bing is proposing to downsize the city and relocate residents to a more compact set of neighborhoods, where services can be consolidated and delivered to citizens. How this would happen is still up in the air, but it will likely involved creative (critics say draconian and illegal) use of eminent domain. 

I doubt that an ambitious plan like this will ever happen. Even if it does make sense logistically and financially, the moneyed powers that actually control the land that would be seized and developed would probably tie things up in court for years. Unless, that is, as some critics of Bing claim, the whole thing is actually a back door sweet deal between the mayor and business interests, designed to reap profits from the development itself. Then it might have a chance, but would still suffer from the usual development problems: over-reliance on luxury condos, upscale retailing, fickle sports financing, and the like. 

But the simple fact that the mayor of a major American city is talking about shrinking things down to a manageable size is a good indicator of just how fast the business-as-usual ideas about 'progress' are fading into impossibility. As Jim Kunstler continually predicts, large centralized systems of all kinds will not fare well in the future, due to the overall entropic effects of Peak Oil. Top-down megaschemes that require trillions of dollars of federal funding and massive bureaucratic administration will just not be possible, especially as the economy stays in a high unemployment situation. The ratios of work to pay to consumption will just not support a tax structure robust enough to resurrect the past lives of full employment, hyperconsumption, and maximum growth. Those ships have sailed (and sunk).

So considering that schemes like Bing's Detroit contraction might become more common in the years ahead, what does that mean for our overall lifestyle? How might we be living in the next five, ten, or twenty years? 

Obviously, the overriding issue of the immediate future is the economy. If unemployment stubbornly pivots around the 10% mark for the next year and a half or so, as most experts are predicting, we're looking at major realignments in the psyches of American workers. Long-term unemployment for people who are willing to work is devastating. Men especially are raised to peg their identities to career and achievement. If the job market continues to stay 'soft,' expect depression, rage, and violence to rise. The Democratic regime in power seems determined to hoist itself on the petard of health care reform. But if the current Rube Goldberg boondoggle of corporate giveaways and oppressive personal mandates gets passed, it will serve as the Lexington and Concord of the Tea Partiers, and a conservative revolution will be fully afoot. Of course, the GOP has no real plan to actually accomplish any of the things that its angry rhetoric promises, so after a few years they will probably be booted out again (see this post for more). This is a dangerous situation that the major parties are courting, one that could very easily slide over into the rise of a homegrown strongman who will push all-in on the mobilizing power of hate speech, scapegoating, minority persecution, and military governance. Think it can't happen here? Think again. You can't dump a trillion bucks a year into the military, while allowing the rest of the country's infrastructure to go to pot, and not expect some kind of extremist demagogue to grab the machinery of war and turn it against parts of the domestic population. Without real leaders in Washington who are willing to tell us the truth about certain things, we'll be in trouble.

On the practical side, the actual arrangements of the American Algorithm will likely totter and fail. There were more than two million home foreclosures in 2009, a record year. So far, 2010 is shaping up to be even worse, as many foreclosures delayed by procedural requirements finally go through, and long-term unemployment continues its assault on personal income streams. Families that are already leveraged to the hilt in personal debt are just not able to find any relief from cratering property values and the general glut of available housing units. We can't forget that the real estate bubble was about drastic overbuilding of housing stock, so the country is awash in empty cul-de-sac houses and cookie-cutter crap condos. As people continue to get tossed out of their homes (figures suggest one out of every 418 housing units received a foreclosure notice in February -- see previous link), while no one is around who can actually afford to move in to the vacated units, expect vast increases in squatting, as people cross the mental Rubicon of not giving a fuck about legality versus necessity. 

At some point, the long-term decline in economic activity, combined with the severe indebtedness of the government and the populace, will spawn new living arrangements. More cities will likely contract, like Detroit, as tax bases continue to erode and sprawled-out service areas prove no longer operable. Similarly, the vast tracts of suburban strip malls and their surrounding housing developments will become half empty and dangerous. Oil pushed above $80 a barrel again this week, so families that are already pounded by unemployment and income strangulation are ill-poised to afford to double their expenditures on gas. Credit cards are going to max out, and many people will be looking at their last full tanks before the end. I don't see a big future for a way of life that depends on hundreds of miles of driving per day, for every conceivable function. Expect the retail strip suburbs to give way to urban and small town clustering.

We keep hearing jobs, jobs, jobs from our pundit class. Dems are getting beat to shit for fudging around on health care for the last year and a half, instead of really getting in there and creating jobs. Republicans, who will likely sweep into full power in the next two cycles, promise to turn loose the power of the economy by cutting taxes, shrinking the federal bloat, and making America a glorious and proud place for heroic entrepreneurs again. Of course, it's all hogwash. The GOP did nothing of the sort the last time they had full control, and they won't do these things if they ascend again.

After all, the problem is not lack of growth. The American economy has been hugely productive over the last few decades, no matter who is in power. Despite some temporary downturns, we have had steady economic growth for a long time. Lack of growth is not a real issue. In fact, growth itself may be the problem, both ecologically and socially. We don't need jobs, jobs, jobs -- per se. What is really needed is a different spreading of the productive fruits of the overall economy. Let's remember that crucial graph from Les Leopold's The Looting of America: 

This is where we can see how in the early 1970s, wages for regular workers became unhitched from what their productivity dictated they should be paid. The divergence of what people are paid vs. what they should be paid based on their productivity is the basic source of all of our economic woes today. All of that surplus value, real value created by workers, has been funneled upwards and captured by a small elite of investors, corporate chieftains, and financial wizards. This is what has created the highest levels of income and wealth inequality since the 1920s. This is why people have virtually no savings and no means of support to fall back on in hard times. This is why cities like Detroit are turning into urban wastelands. The economic value of the last four decades has been secreted away to private and corporate coffers, never to be seen again. 

Net time, we'll look at just what this inequality has done to America, and what might happen if we leveled the playing field.