Well, this is an interesting take on the future of the American suburb. Brought to you by Strong Towns, I think the essay contains a lot of value that can inform the average Howard Countian as we examine our status as a community of suburbs, including one of the supposed pinnacles of the form. The essay (which may or may not include some rather fuzzy math) calls the suburban construct a “Ponzi scheme,” predicated on constant growth for survival. The only way to maintain its widespread infrastructure, this thinking goes, is to keep building, go deeper into debt, or both.
This is mostly true.
It is also, of course, mostly true for everything from Social Security to maintaining employment numbers. Capitalism, particularly in an ever-expanding society, needs to keep growing to maintain itself, particularly as it’s become practiced in the modern era. If you have a 401k, you’re assuming growth of some type between now and when you retire. Instead of relying on caretaker children in our dotage, we depend on spread-loading it across everyone.
The essay (and site) is a bit hysterical, just south of a shy-is-falling mentality, but I love a lot of its points- especially this one:
“We need to wring more value out of our places and that is only going to happen if we understand how to create value in the first place. This is a monumental task because for two generations we have built our places without bothering to consider how they would be sustained (or whether they would even be worth sustaining). None of our public officials has ever asked the question: Will this public project generate enough tax revenue to sustain its maintenance over multiple life cycles? Try asking that — you will be amazed.
So a rational response is to start insisting that our places show a positive financial return. That will require a completely different approach to building our cities along with a completely different understanding of growth.”
Strong Towns makes much of our reliance, as auto-dependent people, on cheap energy, a input unlikely to continue ad infinitum, as well as making independently financially viable communities. HoCo gets to cheat on this a bit because of our proximity to Fort Meade and the ever-expanding cyber mission; this is unlikely to end until SkyNet takes over. Therefore, we need to make our area more attractive for a) living in for supporting personnel (including “transient” MILITARY MEMBERS, for those of you who malign renters) and b) as a place to locate supporting contractors. A beautiful, vibrant community that acts as a little mini-urban area goes a long way towards attracting the highly educated types who’ll be supporting this mission. Heck, even though BaltCo has the tech incubator, those little eggs could hatch into something…located in HoCo. Boom!
This kind of skirts the Strong Town hope that overreliance on federal spending ends on a local level, but hey, play the cards your dealt. Further, it’s not as if HoCo is going to become a manufacturing center anytime soon. By building that type of business using Meade as a springboard, perhaps the East Coast Silicon Valley could become more than a political talking point and into a reality. That’s my dream, anyway.
Go. Explore. Discuss.
Thanks for the post. I think I’ll do a brief blog post on this, but in case I don’t, a couple of quick comments:
First, the line of thinking in the “strong towns” essay, particularly the quotes “We built places that financially sustained themselves [in the past]” and “We need to wring more value out of our places”, dovetails nicely with some recent research on the productivity of cities — basically that cities grow relatively more productive the larger they get. (See for example this New York Times article.)
Second, on the possibility of this area becoming an “East Coast Silicon Valley”, the problem is that Fort Meade is like Las Vegas: what happens there stays there. In other words, security classification means that intel-related technology innovation spreads only slowly if at all. I wrote a whole series of blog posts on the “Howard County as Silicon Valley of cybersecurity” idea; my prognosis was not positive.
Frank,
Thanks for the comment. I’ll certainly read your posts (I’m certain they’re informative) but a couple quick things:
Even if the military members, civilians, and support contractors can’t talk about the work they do, they still need to live somewhere, and not all of them will make secret squirral stuff a career- but they’ll have roots here, and unlikely to leave. Googlers can’t talk about a lot of their work, but Silicon Valley thrives in startups and so on just from proximity. Boeing chose to locate a corporate cyber hub near NSA because of proximity factors. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/25/us-boeing-cyber-idUSTRE79O8TR20111025
National Business Park in Arundel County has absurd amounts of contractors, most of whom support NSA or other cyber missions. All of that entails a large “logistics tail”- HR, corporate level, business development- all outside the Fort gates. Imagine if something of that magnitude was located just a little further away, in dear old HoCo?
The cyber business is far more than NSA, and much of it is unclassified, particularly a lot of the CYBERCOM mission. Moreover, while NSA-specific technology might be slow to enter the private sector, the expertise surrounding the enterprise has many applications.
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