Regentrification and the Suburban Doughnut
Posted by Sonja Ebron
With the price of oil going through the roof, it’s been interesting to catalog the links to transportation, consumer goods and food. With the credit crunch in full swing, we see there are also links to housing patterns. From blackEnergy’s archives, April 2005:
I had an interesting conversation this morning with a brotha in St. Louis. He’s concerned about the regentrification of our inner cities and sees it happening all over the country. Upper middle-class White people are buying up depressed properties neighborhood by neighborhood, investing tons of money in them, and moving in. Property values rise and Black folks can’t hang on.
High Gas Prices Do NOT Make Effective Energy Policy
Posted by Sonja Ebron
Economists define market “demand” as the desire for goods or services by those who can pay for them. Demand for goods and services does not include the needs of those who can’t afford them. Gasoline at $4 a gallon has resulted in less driving, what economists call “demand destruction.” The polite explanation is that high oil prices send the economy into recession, and an economy in recession needs less oil. In private, though, most analysts assume people are foregoing summer road trips and other types of discretionary driving.
But some of that destroyed demand is from people who must drive to work or to the day care center or to the grocery store to make their lives work. The biggest reason people drive instead of using mass transit, which has always been far less costly than driving, is that it generally takes less time to get from Point A to Point B in your car, and you’re on your own schedule. (You leave when you need to, and you break traffic laws when necessary.) If you work three jobs, or are self-employed and meet customers at their locations, or are a single parent with just too much to do each day, you simply cannot use mass transit. So when your demand is destroyed, you take a big hit.
We Have To Make Other Arrangements
Posted by Sonja Ebron
James Howard Kunstler is a pessimist on the effects of peak oil, no doubt about it. But he’s mostly right about the changes needed to survive the next few decades. For many years, Kunstler has served as the leading doomsday forecaster on the American economy and way of life, due to our unwillingness - perhaps inability - to grapple with the facts of declining access to cheap oil. He is certainly not alone in predicting the current crisis and the economic sand castles we’ve built on cheap energy, but his straight talk has only recently been welcome in mainstream media.
