Basement Office

Wherein I channel my inner Kunstler

Let’s not be surprised by the decline in the construction industry. We’ve gone great guns into a single way of building the places where we work, live, and shop — namely the single-use, suburban model — and have built up an excess amount of space that we can neither use nor afford. Take a drive through any typical suburban strip or half-built housing development and witness the “For Lease”, “Lots Available”, and “Foreclosure” signs that abound. We should stop looking wistfully at recent history as something that we’ll return to again, and instead figure out how we’re going to manage the contraction brought on by rising energy prices and the massive unraveling of the financial quackery that we’ve invented in order to help promulgate the lie that what we’re doing is completely normal. Like the hapless Coyote in pursuit of the Road Runner, we’ve run off the cliff and are trying not to look down.

Pessimism is a hard outlook to shake.