Seattle, the USA, and the world have shifted to a post-mass-consumption era. Some are calling this era D2 (The Depression 2.0). That is accurate enough, but a more precise word might be "austerity" rather than "depression". Austerity implies something more deliberate, an era of doing with less, rather than an infinite downward spiral to desperate loss of everything. We still will buy and make things we need, but the days of gorging on buying sprees as a hobby in of itself are over for most.
Our tax revenues will be less in an age of austerity. No matter what political philosophy we prefer, government is permanently on a more restrictive diet. Some of the things government did in the era of mass-consumption and massive tax revenue are simply gone. Already gone. For the next generation at least.
I've laid out the objective truths of our phase in history, now for my opinion. Seattle's local government (and all the USA, really) should spend almost all of its resources on infrastructure, and cease almost all its expenditures on humanitarian aid.
Infrastructure
Government should be spending most of its meager cash flow on infrastructure. An industrial/technological society must have infrastructure, and if it is not maintained or improved with next-generation solutions, the society essentially is bombing itself back to the stone age and unchangeable poverty. This is not a plug for any specifics, in one era we may choose cars and highways, in another it may electric bikes, light rail, and ubiquitous broadband wireless. But we do need infrastructure of some kind, and governments do this better than private enterprises serving stockholders rather than quality.
Humanitarian aid
Seattle has been very different from the rest of the USA, especially since the 1970's. While the USA has grown more suburban, plastic, consumerist, crass commercial, and conservative; Seattle has steadily matured and built upon an alternative vision. Most of this conscious differentiation has been for the better, its made Seattle a beautiful and livable city. But one fetish of liberal identity politics is facing a likely extinction at the hands of the austerity era: housing and feeding the homeless.
Seattle is one of the most secular of American cities. A peculiarity I've noticed within Seattle's secularism is their unawareness of a rampant religiosity. Specifically, its in the valuation of human life, and subsequent sense of what levels of intervention is appropriate for helping those human lives. Valuation of human life is a slippery slope to religious reasoning.
I want Seattle's City Hall to remove religious agendas from its mission. I would like to see all humanitarian aid stop. Most especially the city's assumed responsibility of housing and feeding people based on their hunger or lack of shelter.
Do I hate people? No. Do I want the poor to starve? No. Do I want the homeless to suffer? No. But love, prevention of starvation and suffering are not the domain of secular government. Religions, secular NGO's, and even new age hippy cults have an entirely appropriate role housing, feeding and loving people. Government should stop doing this job poorly, and let the professionals take over. Let me be even more explicitly supportive: I'd like to see us pressure each other to donate 5 to 10 percent of our income to non-profit community efforts, anything from religious-run diners that serve the hungry, to free cellphones and PO boxes for the homeless.
Remember, we are in an austere era, not a depression, which means deliberate and wise spending. That goes for our humanitarian efforts also, we need them to be more deliberate, wise, and personal. We shouldn't become more cruel, which would likely hasten our demise by creating more misery and desperation. Rather, we need to turn to a more intentional and effective caring.
We ♥ Shantytowns
Shantytowns. Encourage them, embrace them, pray to God that we have them, praise them in hip-hop and new country music propaganda mills. The urban poor making miles of crowded slap-dash buildings to live and raise families in would be the greatest innovation for a 21st century Seattle.
A shantytown is a place of the upwardly mobile or at least sustainable
and stable. It is not a place with a majority of drug-addicts who
steal, shoot up, then pee in the alley. It is simply another kind of
residence. For example:
"
[Field researchers for 2003 UN report found: ] All slums households in Bangkok have a colour television. The average number of TV's per household is 1.6... Almost all of them have a CD player, a washing machine, and 1.5 cellphones. Half of them have a home telephone, a video player, and a motorcycle.
" -(Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline)
I envision shantytowns of 2025 having what Main Street did in 1955: a majority of good dependable people. It is not a crazed postmodernist quest for chaos, crime and revolution, it will be an attainment of qualitative sustainability and livability. Some have described Rio's slum residents as " having the aspirations of the bourgeoisie, the perseverance of pioneers, and the values of patriots."
As true fighter for this solution I know my political enemies are on the Left and Right. Big property owners are going to balk at the threat of shacks depressing their investment value. Liberals are going to decry the lack of creature comforts ( compared to a normal apartment ). Most especially our current zoning laws and building codes prescribe certain engineering qualifications for buildings. Activists and current laws will be the main threat to shantytowns.
Lassiez faire. aka deregulation. Its all about where/when/how much to apply. I contend that we have it in the wrong places. We should deregulate survival, with the law specifically stating that city/county/states cannot be held liable for injuries and deaths by faulty structures unless there was an explicit legal document that stated some ISO code compliance. Safety would be an optional feature you pay extra for ( and when you do pay for it, and it fails, then yes you can sue the pants off everyone that made the promises), but not a default.
There historical precedent for this.From the Code of Hammurabi (legal code of ancient Babylon, 1790 B.C.):
- 229. If a builder builds a house for someone, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built falls in and kills its owner, then that builder shall be put to death.
- 230. If it kills the son of the owner, the son of that builder shall be put to death.
- 231. If it kills a slave of the owner, then he shall pay, slave for slave, to the owner of the house.
- 232. If it ruins goods, he shall make compensation for all that has been ruined, and inasmuch as he did not construct properly this house which he built and it fell, he shall re-erect the house from his own means.
- 233. If a builder builds a house for someone, even though he has not yet completed it; if then the walls seem toppling, the builder must make the walls solid from his own means.
Notice how the rule applies to someone who builds a house for someone else. There's no restriction on what you can build for yourself and your household. This principle could apply to a shantytown: you may not sell a house that is not built to code in a shantytown.
Am I saying people should be able to build homes made of, for example, gasoline drenched newspaper? No. And we don't need laws to prevent that. Shantytowns don't need laws or county inspectors, they will enforce common sense and best practices for free. The buildings run up against one another. The locals will not allow a problem to go unfixed, if it poses a danger to them. I anticipate in shantytowns things will be built "good enough" or fixed, and faster than wealthier neighborhoods do it.
I will close by saying I am not a wealthy academic communist envisioning and forcing my designs onto "others", onto the poor, while I continue a life of luxury in an ivory tower. Our family income puts us at the lower side of middle class for inner-city Seattle. We are employed, but I know that could change if our employer goes down. If a little more austerity is in our fate, I'd love it if we were in a shipping container home, stacked on other containers, using an array of solar-car-battery chargers to power a few lights and recharge two iPhones, growing corn and fishing for protein, right in Seattle. I've got a few other friends already working on the stacked shipping containers and solar rechargers. Change, its always a-comin. Might as well build it ourselves.
-Lance Miller
(the author and his family)
Quotes from Whole Earth Discipline regarding urban slums as innovative force of the 21st century.
City air makes you free, and preference for urban slums over subsistence farming:
Many of my contemporaries in the developed world regard subsistence farming as soulful and organic, but it is a poverty trap and an environmental disaster.
Civilization is what happens in cities, and the return of great Asian cities:
The trend is pretty clear. The "rise of the West" is over. The world looks the way it did a thousand years ago, when the ten largest cities were Cordoba, in Spain; Kaifeng, in China; Constantinople; Angkor, in Cambodia; Kyoto; Cairo; Baghdad; Nishapur, in Iran; Al-Hasa, in Saudi Arabia; and Patan, in India. As Swedish statistician Hans Rosling says, "The world will be normal again; it will be an Asian world, as it always was except for the last thousand years. They are working like hell to make that happen, whereas we are consuming like hell."
The Challenge of the Slums, 2003 UN-HABITAT report:
"Cities are much more successful in promoting new forms of income generation, and it is much cheaper to provide services in urban areas, that some experts have actually suggested the only realistic poverty reduction strategy is to get as many people as possible to move to the city."
Unleashing the potential for Urban Growth, UN Populations Fund 2007 report:
"Cities concentrate poverty, but they also represent the best hope of escaping it. ... the half of the world's population living in cities occupies only 2.8 percent of the world's land area. ... In cities, concentration and density make it easier to provide social services. Education, health, sanitation, water, electrical power -everything is so much easier and cheaper on a per capita basis. "
Kebler's Law -organism's become more metabolically efficient as they scale up :
" ...not only do cities increase their creativity with increasing size, but the relation is superlinear: when a city doubles in size, it more than doubles its rate of innovation. ... City growth creates problems, and then innovation speeds up to solve them. ... We have shown that growth driven by innovation implies, in principle, no limit to the size of a city, providing a quantitative argument against classical ideas in urban economics. ... Cities can go on growing forever. Look at the invention of the steam engine, the car, the digital revolution. What these advances all have in common is that they allowed cities to continue growing. ... the secret to creating a more environmentally sustainable society is making our cities bigger. We need more metropolises."
William Blake - "Without contraries there is no progression", Multitude of contrasts begets progress:
"...it could be surmised that the city is simply made up of contrasts; it is the sum of its differences. What drives a cities innovation engine, then-and thus its wealth engine-is its multitude of contrasts. The more and greater the contrasts, and the more they are marbled together, the better. The most productive city is one with many cultures, many languages, many neighborhoods, and and more kinds of urban experience available than any citizen can keep track of. In this formulation, it is the throwing together of great wealth and great poverty in the urban stew that is part of the cure for poverty. "
Rome:
"Rural economies, including agricultural work are directly built upon city economies and city work. Most farming innovations, for example, are city-based. When Rome collapsed, European agriculture collapsed. "
Slums are innovation:
"
Peasants who leave the land take rural skills and values to the city slums with them. Building their own shelter is what they've always done, at a miniscule fraction of the cost of city-provided housing. Collaborating with extended family and neighbors in close proximity is nothing new to them, and neither is doing without elaborate infrastructure. Those are all the abilities they need to build the most creative urban phenomenon of our time, the squatter cities-the teeming slums of the uninvited that house a billion people now, two billion soon.
...
squatter cities are vibrant/ Their narrow lanes are bustling markets, with food stalls, bars, cafes, hair salons, dentists, churches, schools, health clubs, and mini-shops trading in cellphones, tools, trinkets, clothes, electronic gadgets, and bootleg videos and music. This is urban life at its most intense. It is social capital at its richest...What you see up close is not a despondent populace crushed by poverty but a lot of people busy getting out of poverty as fast as they can.
"
"The sad fact is that when governments and idealistic architects try to help by providing public housing, those buildings invariably turn into the worst part of the slum. The people who build the shanties take pride in them and are always working to improve them. The issues for the squatters, Neuwirth found, are location -they want to be close to work -and what the UN calls security of tenure: They need to know that their homes and community won't be suddenly bulldozed out of existence. "
" Over time, the walls get solider and higher, the materials more durable. The magic of squatter cities is that they are improved steadily and gradually, increment by increment, by the people living there. Each home is built that way, and so is the whole community. To a planner's eye, squatter cities look chaotic. To my biologist's eye, they look organic. "
" According to urban researchers, squatters are now the predominant builders of cities in the world."
" [Field researchers for 2003 UN report found: ] All slums households in Bangkok have a colour television. The average number of TV's per household is 1.6... Almost all of them have a CD player, a washing machine, and 1.5 cellphones. Half of them have a home telephone, a video player, and a motorcycle. "
" [ favelados, slum residents of Rio ] have the aspirations of the bourgeoisie, the perseverance of pioneers, and the values of patriots. "
The massive trend of migration to slums is defusing the population bomb:
" In the [subsistence farming] village, every additional child is an asset, but in the slum, every additional child is a liability, so the newly liberated women in town focus on education and opportunity -on fewer, higher quality children. That's how urbanization defused the population bomb. "
" Massive numbers of people are making massive changes. Having just experienced the first doubling of world population within a single lifetime (3.3 billion in 1962, 6.6 billion in 2007), we are discovering that it was the last doubling. Birthrates worldwide are dropping not only faster than expected, but much further. "
"
The takeoff of cities is the dominant economic event of the first half of this century ... People in vast numbers are climbing the energy ladder from smoky firewood and dung cooking fires to diesel-driven generators for charging batteries, then 24/7 grid electricity. They are also climbing the food ladder -from subsistence farms to cash crops of staples like rice, corn, wheat, and soy to the high protein of meat -and doing so in a global marketplace. Environmentalists who try to talk people out of such aspirations will find the effort works about as well as trying to convince people to stay in their villages did.
Peasant life is over unless catastrophic climate change drives us back to it.
"
