As the drama of the bursting bubble of Wall St. gives way to a slower, but steady and painful, economic decline, the first and most important question we should ask is "Should we try to blow another bubble, or should we reject bubble culture values for something entirely different?"
If we agree that we need a new culture, this leads to the question "Can we take advantage of the opportunity afforded by this collapse, by the exposure of a failed system, to establish new "rules for the house" (the root meaning of "economy" from the Greek)?"
If the house, metaphorically, is Planet Earth the way we have enjoyed it for millennia, then making the choice now to change to a sustainable economy is the best way to turn the apparent lemon of this economic contraction into the best lemonade in history.
The current economic contraction has been developing for almost 20 years, and for the last four or five has appeared inevitable to anyone not under the spell of the "free market" fantasy. It is the result of an economic system which was able, briefly, to ignore and disregard its natural limits and restraints. Finite resources were seen as infinite entitlements. Politicians, businessmen, and intellectuals of all stripes and ideologies shared a complete failure to understand the material basis for their apparent prosperity, arrogantly claiming to be its controlling agents, rather than understanding a unique and lucky convergence of cheap energy, political alignments, and misunderstood technology as the basis for their dizzying growth. The few economists and others trying to call attention to its faults were drowned out by those focused on the immediate financial gains.
Some of the controversy surrounding the downtown Market East Gallery site Foxwoods is considering for relocation of its project was addressed at a Society Hill Civic Association-sponsored forum Tuesday night. First District Councilman Frank DiCicco told the crowd that the City was committed to an honest, thorough look at the site through a Plan of Development process. Deputy Mayor for Planning Andrew Altman supported this commitment on behalf of Mayor Nutter's administration. He described the motion by Foxwoods to consider this location as "uncharted territory" and an action that set in motion an orderly Plan of Development process, beginning with the zoning designation introduced by DiCicco. The process, he said, will involve meaningful public input and dissemination of information.
DiCicco introduced the Commercial Entertainment District (CED) zoning legislation on behalf of Foxwoods because, he said, he'd learned from the past two years that thwarting their progress, even as part of a process of due diligence, only resulted in the State and the State Supreme Court wresting more control over permitting. "Decisions were being made that effect my constituents and I was not helping because I wasn't in that room," he said, "When I'm not in the room, you're not in the room."
In 14 cases brought before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to challenge gaming and in particular the two Philadelphia projects licensed by the State Gaming Control Board, the Court has ruled in favor of the casinos. All local Philadelphia elected officials support a resiting process, of which this is the first exercise although it puts the proposed site in another densely packed residential area of the city. Governor Ed Rendell has steadfastly supported the casino operators despite sustained opposition by thousands of Philadelphia residents to slots parlors in their neighborhoods. Act 71, passed in 2004, mandated two casinos be built in Philadelphia. The Gaming Control Board issued provisional licenses to SugarHouse and Foxwoods in December 2006, with locations on the waterfront, but intense local opposition has delayed their construction.
No doubt, we are in recession. And our prospects for recovery look grim. Already we've seen nine straight months of jobs losses. And it seems likely that they will continue, and get worse. We are caught in what economists call a liquidity trap. Here, despite the Fed driving interest rates ever closer to rock bottom and the infusion of new blood into the financial system, the recession forces consumers to cut back on spending, forcing businesses to cut back on production, investments and workers perpetuating the cycle. So as the economy continues to freefall, the demand for loans decline and the liquidity pumped into our banks goes unused- ergo the trap.
So the question now is how do we get out of the trap? We can't look to a turn around in the housing industry- as the economy worsens more people are going to move in with family or friends, rent rooms, or move into tent cities. But we can look to a turn around in our thinking as we shift from unsustainable urban sprawl and invest in the development of new cities designed along sustainable lines. So together with investments in renewable energy and infrastructure, they will begin to pull us out of the trap.
The idea of building new cities is not unprecedented. In the late 1960s there was a movement to build hundreds of new cities to counter the inefficiencies of sprawl and its negative impact on the environment. Led by the National Committee on Urban Growth Policy- a private association funded by the Ford Foundation, made up of politicians and civic-minded individuals, sponsored by prestigious organizations such as the National League of Cities, the National Association of Counties, and the US Conference of Mayors- it published a book entitled The New City. Here, as they saw it, "If we allocate one-half of the coming 100 million [increase in population] to existing peripheral growth around existing cities and 10 percent to small towns and farms, the remaining 40 million would require the building of 20 cities of one million each and 200 new towns of 100,000 each."
