COUNTERTOPS
Shock and Oil
A few years ago, not long after my wife Louise and I began to date, she and her two sisters needed to decide how to split up the estate of their recently deceased mother. Over her lifetime, the woman had accumulated a tidy nest egg though savings and a few wise investments. She also left a small, modest house in the older Philadelphia suburb of Jenkintown. In the late 1950s, my wife’s parents bought the house, despite its pitifully small kitchen, for its close proximity to the train station from which the Reading Railroad would take him directly out to his job in New York City every day.
My wife thus had two options. One, either pool together all the assets and split them three ways, or keep the house and let her sisters have the savings and stock portfolio. To help her decide, she began to shop for other houses in the area, but naturally discovered that the better houses with better kitchens in our neighborhood simply exceeded our ability to pay.
I finally conveyed the following advice to my wife regarding her mother’s house: “It’s not perfect, but it’s an excellent location. You can improve the house a lot easier than you can improve your location.” She agreed. We took the house and began the renovations. We now have a modest, unassuming little colonial with a brand new kitchen, mud room, and a second full bath, all within a five minute walk of the train station, which I now use at least three to four times a week.
In light of recent events, some I believed inevitable, I think we made a wise decision. With oil prices already on the rise, the horrific tragedy in the Gulf Coast region could be that last straw. We now face the specter of four dollar per gallon gas prices. In all likelihood, prices will settle down, but the oft-predicted three-dollar-a-gallon prices could very well become the norm. Folks, as predicted, the next oil shock is here. What do we do about it?
I predict with some regret what will not likely happen. We won't see new sources of funding for public transit. We won't see communities enact tough guidelines promoting sensible development and walkable communities. The Federal government will not raise fuel standards in any meaningful way. In other words, don’t look for our leaders to do the right thing right away.
Instead, look for calls to lower gas taxes. Look for proposals to open up protected land to search for new sources of oil. And worst of all, look for increasing international tensions as the industrialized nations jockey for position for their “fair” share of petroleum. Look for it to get a bit worse before it gets better.
I usually read with great interest and not a little grain of salt the opinions of James Kunstler. I have deep respect for his work sounding the alarm against automobile-dependent commercial development. His books Geography of Nowhere, Home from Nowhere, and others may have tossed a few indiscriminate grenades too many, but reading him focuses your mind on this issue like never before.
Kunstler’s prose can make my worst screeds look like a script from “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood,” but it makes you think. In his first book on the subject of sprawl, I experienced an epiphany. However, I don’t share his pessimism for the future. I don't (yet) see the upheavals he predicts.
His latest journal entry includes a post from a guest columnist deriding the opinions of some experts that rising fuel prices will spark the development of new sources of oil and substitutes for it. Indeed, we have again began to hear about all that shale oil locked up in the rocks in Colorado. I remember hearing that we had more oil there than there exists under the Arabian peninsula, but it costs too much to extract. Some say that the crisis will bring about the hydrogen economy faster. Maybe, but it still won't happen in our lifetimes if ever.
Still, I remain optimistic because if America is anything, it’s dynamic. We are a population of problem solvers. When we put our collective hearts and minds to it, we get things done. I only fear the interference of politics and the unwelcome meddling of greed-heads who would stand to lose from applying the obvious solutions.
I have espoused the “Recipe for an American Renaissance” for at least ten years now. The basic philosophy of this Recipe rests on a foundation that calls for decreased dependence upon automobiles and a greater awareness of environmental sustainability. We need to change some basic attitudes about daily living in America. We do not need a two-ton vehicle to retrieve a week’s groceries or to transport a single child to soccer practice. It should be easy and inviting to walk from our homes to a retail cluster. We need to stop building remote office parks with no access to transit. And we need to end the hegemony of the automobile in the realm of transportation spending. We simply need efficient, clean, and attractive passenger rail systems and we need them now.
No, I do not call for a ban on autos or imposed restrictions on their use in any fashion. The Recipe merely advocates options in our modes of transportation as applied to day-to-day living, and these can only come with a fundamental redesign or restoration of our developed landscape. We used to live this way. It all ended with the advent of unrestricted, “free” use of highways, except that the bill for all that freedom has likely arrived, and in part, we are paying for it in blood.
As most of us already know, most of Europe already lives by the Recipe. Most countries there have a standard of living as high or higher than ours, plus they don’t have as fat a population. While we bitch and moan about gas prices here, most of Europe already pays over six dollars per gallon. When economists speak of problems with Europe’s economic growth, they don’t cite the price of gasoline because people there have other transportation options.
At the moment, a gallon of gas costs more than a ticket on the train for me, so most days, I take the train. My commute lasts fifteen minutes, and it allows me to walk past Ambler’s growing retail environment. We chose our office in downtown Ambler partly because of the transit option, and because now I can walk to a great little place like the Ambler Grill for a tasty, reasonably priced lunch.
Through the predicted economic doom, I see many silver linings. Maybe, just maybe, people will finally take the Recipe to heart. When it starts to cost $100 to fill your tank, you have to start thinking of better ways to spend that money. Maybe towards a house in a walkable community. I look forward to that day. After all, I figure that every time gas goes up a nickel, the value of my house goes up five thousand dollars. For the moment, though, we ain’t movin’.
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