Are you ready for $10/Gallon gas and long lines at the pump?

The BBQ Pit
221

People can want anything. It’s when they don’t get everything they want, whether or not it’s reasonable (and yes, I think the world is in the process of showing Americans that $2/gallon gas is reasonable, don’t you?), whether or not the rest of the planet gets the same thing, and whine about it to anyone who will listen, that I have a problem.

You think the rest of the world doesn’t work hard and try to give their kids a good life?

I don’t live in the city, either (though I did for most of the past 20 years, until a month ago) - I live in the suburbs. But I live near public transportation. And I wish more people did the same, and am willing to devote a larger proportion of tax dollars, and even more tax dollars in absolute, to make that happen. I’d sure rather spend money on more buses and trains than on blowing up Iraq.

If you’ve earned the ability to do that, sure, you absolutely can. And in return, I can think your lifestyle is a ridiculously nauseating waste of resources.

However, a large part of the whining about high fuel prices has been on the part of people who made conscious choices to live that way, and are now having to make sacrifices because economic conditions changed. Sorry, if your choices had so little financial wiggle room built into them that a $1/gallon increase in one minority component of your budget is leaving you unable to afford groceries, then you were living just a little too close to the edge. And if you made these choices not out of pure economic necessity (the job with the 60-mile RT commute was the only one you could get, or similar), but because you wanted to live in a manner that was, in the end, beyond your means, no, I’m not going to feel sorry for you.

Although that’s also true, it’s far from my only reason - it’s just plain irresponsible, economically and socially, regardless of its effect on the environment. And it’s just plain selfish to think we can expect more for less than the rest of the planet gets.

222

They have a ‘right’ to a higher standard of living because it’s their money. God-given? Well, according to the Constitution, ‘endowed by their creator’. I prefer to think it means that humans are born free, and so long as they don’t harm others and work for their living, they have a right to spend their money on whatever damned fool thing they want to. It’s called the Pursuit of Happiness.

It’s also arrogance to assume that your position occupies the moral high ground. I can make a hell of a case for the goodness of suburban living. Economically, politically, and from the standpoint that many, many people choose to voluntarily live that way.

And yes, yes, they are using more resources, emitting more pollution, yada yada. They are also paying for a good chunk of that cost already. I favor a carbon tax to remove the externality of the added emissions, but other than that, suburbanites owe nothing to you.

223

I think you’re thinking of some other old document. One without status of law, incidentally.

224

There was an interesting article a couple of months ago in the Atlantic Monthly titled “The Next Slum?” in which the author predicts that a combination of the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the demographic and cultural shift back towards the cities “may turn today’s McMansions into tomorrow’s tenements.”

While the post-war shift to the suburbs left poor people in the crumbling and decaying inner cities where people with money didn’t want to live, the shift back is raising the price of living in cities and forcing the poor to the geographic margins. Ultimately, those fringes might suffer the same sort of decay and blight that the inner cities did a few decades ago.

I’m not sure i completely buy his argument, and to be fair he does acknowledge that the dramatic decline of the suburbs is not inevitable, but if he’s right about the trend, it seems to me that the current movement in gas prices is likely to exacerbate it.

225

Preposterous. People with money didn’t leave the cities because they couldn’t afford to live there, and if they leave the suburbs because they can’t afford to live there anymore it’s not going to attract people who have less money than them. Cities have been expensive again for awhile and the only effect seems to be gentrification.

226

Huh? I’m not sure if i explained it poorly in my previous post, or if you just can’t read for comprehension, but what we seem to have here is a failure to get on the same page.

I never said that people with money left the cities because they couldn’t afford to live there. In fact, i suggested precisely the opposite: the people who left the cities for the suburbs in the post-war period were the people who could afford the newer houses in the suburbs, and who could afford a car. Those who got left behind in the crumbling inner cities were those who couldn’t afford to move elsewhere (and, in some cases, blacks who had some money but who were shut out of certain suburbs by restrictive covenants and other prejudiced behavior).

And neither did i suggest that people would now leave the suburbs because they can no longer afford to live there. What i suggested, and what the article said, was that the higher-income people who thirty years ago would have moved from the city to the suburbs are now making the journey in reverse, precisely because the rejuvenated inner city has become more attractive to them (and hence more expensive).

And if the suburbs begin to attract people with less money, it will be precisely because demand for suburban housing drops, prices go down, and people are forced out of the increasingly-expensive cities and into the cheaper suburbs.

ETA:

And i think that city gentrification is as much the cause of higher prices as it is the effect.

227

I was disagreeing with the author of the article, not you, but maybe you just can’t read for comprehension :rolleyes:.

228

But the author of the article didn’t say what you said he said. Your post is arguing against a set of points that he never made.

229

In the article you talked about, the author predicts that today’s suburbanites will move back to the cities and the urban poor will move to the suburbs in a reverse migration. In this scenario, the poor would be leaving the cities because, once everybody moved back, they could no longer afford it. Since this is not why the (comparitively) wealthy originally left, his analogy falls apart. Why would the poor flee to the suburbs if the rich are leaving because they can’t afford to live there (mortgage crisis + “cultural shift” presumably brought about by everything being too expensive as a result of the rising cost of transportation and shipping)? Hence, preposterous.

230

Wrong. On just about all counts. Both in your understanding of his argument, and in your “analysis” of what you think you do understand.

Maybe you should read the thing .

231

Whatever. Maybe you should’ve linked to it in the first place if you wanted to debate the damn thing. Look, you’re obviously just spoiling for a fight so look elsewhere, ok? I’m done arguing about this.

232

That’s sort of happening in Atlanta right now. Suburbanites are moving into the city. Particularly young people. And many of the urban poor are moving into places like Clayton County, a suburb on the south side.

Bus lines connect some of the suburban counties to the city.

233

I believe I am.

234

But fuel costs are not simply one minority component of one’s living expenses. I do not own a car, nor do I drive. However I’ve seen the cost for most of my food items go up any where from 15%-33% on base staple food items. Heavily processed foods actually are holding price pretty well. In a large part because, while they’re also affected by fuel costs, they have higher profit margins built in, and thus are cushioned. For a time. But pastas, grains, beans, eggs, milk, and all sorts of other base foods and meal building blocks are going up. And, sooner rather than later, those costs will be transmitted through to the processed foods, too.

For someone on a fixed income, this trend is more than merely worrisome. There are a lot of people who are feeling the fuel crunch who already live in urban areas.

I understand that you’re not trying to criticize the people whom I’m talking about, now - but I do want to make explicit that fuel costs are not simply one isolated, take-it-or-leave-it aspect of the economy.

235

I agree with you. However, although as individuals we don’t have a huge amount of individual choice regarding the cost of staple food items, most of us do have a fair amount of individual choice regarding where we choose to live. That’s why I’m not criticizing the people you are talking about.

236

What bothers me, almost more than the ecological effects, about the wasteful standard of living we are describing in this thread is the sense of entitlement. Nobody has an inalienable right to a perpetual life of cheap access to scarce finite resources, and nobody has the right to expect that economic conditions will never change, no matter how hard they as individuals work. Sorry, but that’s not a realistic thing to expect from any society. And responsible people make provisions for the prospect that things might not always be as good as they are at any given moment - like having some wiggle room built into their budgets. The vast majority of the people we are talking about aren’t the super-rich, who a) don’t necessarily have to worry about a daily commute, and b) if they do, have the option of changing their living arrangements without bankrupting themselves in the process.

Go right ahead - I’m curious to see what you come up with.

BTW I am not arguing that suburbs are evil, per se; I was raised in one, and I live there now. I’m arguing that the way most modern American suburbs are arranged leads to an unnecessary waste of scarce resources. And that needs to change.

As I mentioned before, at the moment I am a suburbanite. But don’t kid yourself that economic costs that are currently quantifiable are the only costs we have to worry about.

237

I’m ready for $10/gallon gas in terms of my own personal consumption. I live 9 miles from work, but I’m only a mile from the Metro and I get free fare from work. My wife ferries kids around, etc., but that might only amount to 10-20 miles on some days, almost none on others. We’ll have to take fuel prices into consideration as far as travel plans go, but if we’re not spending much in the first place, it’s no biggie.

What we as a whole aren’t ready for is the price of everything skyrocketing due to increased transport costs. Until we work out a more efficient system, we’re going to be screwed for a while, and of course this sort of thing is hardest on the working poor.

238

But there is already social planning going on in the form of subsidies to road and other infrastructure that supports suburban development. Don’t forget that.

239

Well, since they are harming others, worldwide, I guess it’s OK to stop them now, then?

240

But i didn’t want to debate it. I just didn’t expect some asshole to march in, misrepresent the argument, and make dismissive comments based on virtually no information and even less understanding.

Fuck you very much.