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From the West Coast

Tract homes after peak oil

By Vivid writers: Brittany Henderson and Lino T. Molina

Just as the Soviet-style apartment block is a feature of urban Romania, tract homes are a feature of modern America.

Posted: 04/01/2010

As Romania has suffered architecturally with its communist block housing, and what to do with it post-communism, America has suffered with the housing tract.

The idea behind tract homes was innocent enough: as metropolitan areas grew in the US throughout the twentieth century and the inner city became more and more derelict, the wealthy and then the middle classes started moving further and further outside the city. The suburbs began as an escape from less desirable minorities and the poor of the city, and then became more and more an escape from reality, an Eden-like paradise with lawns and palm trees. Then, when soldiers returned home after the second world war and a massive population boom ensued (the ‘baby boomers' generation that was born in the 1950s), there was a need for more and more housing. Vast tracts of land were carved up to quickly become housing developments. That is the speed with which the housing tract started and continues to be built. Now these same ‘paradises' are the disease of urban planning and a drain on our oil resources. It takes massive amounts of petrol to keep the suburbanites going because everyone that lives there drives. So there are highway systems to feed them, and stores such as Home Depot, Costco, Lowes, and Wal-Mart that all feed off them. That is why the US consumes the highest per capita of the world's oil supply.

The ubiquitous housing tract has become a poster child for bad design and a lack of city planning. Rather than growth that is sustainable or rational, the growth of the housing tract followed fast food trends in the US: large, extra large, super-size, and larger than super-size. Rather than looking at how a family could better use the former standard 800-950 square foot house (79 sq. m.), in came the new standard 2,000 square foot house, and then the 3,500, the 4,500, the 5,000 and 6,000 square foot (557 sq. m.) McMansions. Space, or the wasting of it, became the norm and now a family of four with a dog were the only occupants of this mini-mansion. Why? Land was cheap, and oil was even cheaper. It was cheaper to drive to and from work than to invest in a regional transit system; it was cheap to manufacture petrochemical building products and their transport to these expanding areas of housing tracts was economically viable.

This recession has revealed the unsustainability of this practice. In the case of the suburbs of Antelope Valley, 65 miles NE of Los Angeles, one housing tract in the middle of construction at the onset of the recession ended up in foreclosure, and the bank - seeing the selling price of the homes drop from a median price of $325,000 to $160,000 - decided it was a complete money-losing proposition and deconstructed the entire tract back to bare earth. Finally, the boundaries of the Never Ending City began to assert themselves. The unsustainability of that area has been further reinforced by people abandoning those homes in droves to move back into the city.

Prominent environmental writer/researcher Lester Brown, director of the Earth Policy Institute, recently published Plan B 3.0, Mobilizing to Save Civilization, and writes about the future unsustainability of the suburbs:

Shopping malls and huge discount stores, symbolized in the public mind by Wal-Mart, were all subsidized by artificially cheap oil. Isolated by high oil prices, sprawling suburbs may prove to be ecologically and economically unsustainable. Thomas Wheeler observes, "There will eventually be a great scramble to get out of the suburbs as the world oil crisis deepens and the property values of suburban homes plummet."

The only way for this to change is for people in suburban regions to become producers rather than consumers. They will have to plough their lawns and grow vegetables, raise chickens, and create businesses rather than working for the local corporations. In effect, for a suburb to become livable in an age past peak oil and into deepening global warming, these suburbs will have to turn into villages - the historical kind.

By contrast, in urban areas that have made commitments to making their cities more livable -such as San Francisco, London, Amsterdam, and Paris, and many others - you see urban gardens where people grow vegetables, networks of transit systems, lessening of the dependence on the car and oil, and in many places where the dependence on the car is lessened, the air quality improves.

Design was wrong for suburbs from the beginning. They were designed alongside freeways as the number one means of moving goods and people in and out of areas, and they were designed and grew as ‘bedroom communities'. This means they were designed as areas only devoted to houses, which leads to many different problems. The entire space exists for sleeping needs - psychologically. As such these communities are without any business, without the energy investments into improving the land and environment, and even lacking the adult presence that creates a nurturing environment for children. The suburbs are therefore home to a large number of children without supervision, sometimes called ‘latch-key' kids, and are often characterised by higher pregnancy rates, drug use, and crime due to the fact that both parents are at work in a distant city. Besides the neglected children, the parents are also over-stressed due to excessively long commutes. Some of the workers in Los Angeles that built in places as distant as the Antelope Valley, Inland Empire and Riverside, face two hour commutes each way to work. That is an extra 20 hours per week taken away from the family - which was the reason they moved to the suburbs to begin with. Where are their children for these additional hours?

Along with the problem of bedroom communities and suburbs, is the placelessness of them. In modern Deleuzian philosopher Ian Buchanan's essay, Practical Deleuzism and Postmodern Space, he describes the way these postmodern spaces lack any connection to our fundamental human nature or to their actual place:

‘We pay a heavy price for capitalising on our basic animal mobility' writes Edward Casey and that price is ‘the loss of places that can serve as lasting scenes of experience and reflection and memory' (Casey 1993). This loss is usually blamed on the proliferation of generic spaces - or ‘non-places' ... like malls, airports, freeways, office parks, and so forth, which prioritize cost and function over look and feel. (135)

Housing tracts all follow a simple formula of one or two main roads and a series of cul-de-sacs, essentially dead-end streets. This dead-end street also limits any visitors and people coming by to only neighbours and those invited to come, killing any sort of street life and interaction with the larger community.

The real problem with the tract home is its fundamental nature, its design and the way it is anathema to human existence in that it takes away our ability to have a space to dream. According to Gaston Bachelard in his seminal work, The Poetics of Space,

"... if I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. Thought and experience are not the only things that sanction human values. The values that belong to daydreaming mark humanity in its depths." By making space and human dwelling places that cease to have individual character, and are separated from their neighbour by only a row of ornamental plants and a paint-job we have alienated ourselves from not only the environment, but from our own fundamental imaginative humanity.

Dreaming is essential for what makes us human. The tract home is little better than the prison - both flatten life into one dimension. The objects around us that remind us of the beauty of life, the innate beauty in things, the feel of the creator's hand on the object, have all been denuded and life in the tract home takes a one-dimensional quality. The surfaces are all manufactured in factories by machines, the people that live in them shop at major chain grocery stores, come home and prepare the simplest dinners for the family, throw away their trash, mow their lawns and sit down for television again. It happens this way night after night. On their special nights, the kids are in soccer or they have some school event, and the parents go to another game or school event and then do nothing more in terms of creating or living. Life is reduced to a single dimension, devoid of the colours of spring, the smells of fall, the rocks from the beach, the feel of the pines, and the mystery from which we all came. The house you live in is just a xerox copy of your neighbours, and your entire surrounding landscape has been manicured. Aesthetically houses tend to have "earthy" colours or tones, not giving off a vibrant experimental look to them but instead one that gives off a more relaxed look appearance. They come off to be "easy on the eyes," so to say. Nature is no longer allowed to shape you or to make you consider the infinite, but instead it is paved over with asphalt to drive on, concrete to ride bikes on, and grass to provide a carpeting for your front and backyard. Your plants are not allowed to feed you, as a country garden, but must instead provide for the ‘look' of the neighbourhood.

Within the reality of the tract home there is a standard of facade for the sake of amusement. Nature is presented with its qualities for amusement. The depth of the home, the substance of its walls, its being, is only skin deep. Much like the streets of Disneyland that have all of these different themed spaces that have elaborate facades, if you go to the sides of one of these buildings you discover that all you were enchanted with at street level was about two inches of the building face. There are palm trees in some so that you feel like you are on vacation in an exotic place - like Mexico, Palm Beach, or Tahiti. But it is just a cheap trick at ornamental planting. Also, there are the things they put into the homes that are ‘selling points' or ‘amenities', such as master suites with Jacuzzi tubs, bay windows, walk-in closets, and granite counters. Even the word, ‘amenities', implies a kind of superficial amusement that you will receive from the place.

Once the newness of this house wears off or even before the ‘new house smell' goes away, consumption to fill the void of contentment comes back in. Everyone is in a race to buy more and have more. You no longer can just have the 35-inch television, you must have the 52-inch wide screen hi-def television with the surround sound speakers. Ever notice that the things that get continually upgraded are not the inventions or technologies that make work better and our destruction of the planet less - they are the things that allow us to have a more realistic experience in watching life or cyber-interacting with life. Its the webcams with the internet dating sites, or the television experience, or the social networking sites, or the video and photo technology that allows us to live a more sensory version of someone else's experience. No longer is life meant to be lived first hand - but enjoyed on hi-def while someone else lives it first hand. That is why global warming hasn't gotten the amount of attention and concerted action from America.

Real life does not fit in one dimension. Nor does it truly allow for boredom - because it refuses to be put into a single box or way of living it. An organic house, made by human hands, takes on life as it grows and happens within it. It is a living organism of sorts, fashioned by all of the hands it regularly needs to grow and change as its occupants grow and change.

Brittany Henderson lives and studies in San Francisco, and interned at Vivid in 2005. Lino T. Molina is a graduate student in philosophy at San Francisco State University.

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