This is a response to teacherken's diary here on slumburbia. I recommend it.
This diary is not going to be substantive. It's just one view of one surface of one parallel plane on the polyhedron of the unbridled expansion of our American landscape that is a sea of empty homes. I'm not a writer, so this won't wow anyone.
We traded our best agricultural land for homes.
Work disappeared, new spec homes didn't sell, mortgage payments fell behind, rents couldn't be paid, people let go of second homes, people let go of investment homes when rents couldn't be paid, whole sections of rentals went into foreclosures and you get the picture, it's old news still fresh for those still dealing with it.
But people still had to eat so and with a few bucks you fed your family, yourself. Food stamps, charity or the food bank got you by.
Farmers have to eat too.
How's the ecomomy in farm country? Every state has farm country. But zeroing in on just one that grows some of the nation's wheat among other crops here is a snapshot from flyover country, Tulsa, OK:
Layed off 124 cops. Law enforcement will no longer respond to calls where a crime is not in progress.
Unanimous decision by city commissioners to drill for oil and gas in the city -- to be more precise to allow drilling at the Mohawk Park Oxley Nature Center. (That's my friend Donna in the pic at the Oxley link, head biologist at Oxley.)
Mohawk Park is in North Tulsa. North Tulsahas been for six decades economically drepressed.
Over time more of the commercial buildings went away and what was left was a vast undeveloped tract.
In this "vast undeveloped tract" are over 200 houses available for purchase under $50,000. Not new homes. At least ten or so are priced under $10,000.
Where are the jobs to sustain this community?
No one in particular is wanting to drill for oil there but if any one should like to now the door's open.
And what's available to eat? Corporate agri-biz plays a role in all this -- THIS -- this whole slumburbia, mcmansion, fast food, big box, food desert, empty cheap houses, low wageness of it all.
I'm not a nativist, protectionist, and brainless neo-Ludditite. There are no capitalist hobgoblins for me.
I'm not anti-corporate. The food system is broken and we have the resources and intelligence to fix it. We should be responding critically to this because it does have to do with all these "tomorrow" communities.
This administration has responded in part:
The challenges facing rural communities for decades have grown more acute.
Rural Americans earn less than their urban counterparts, and are more likely to live in poverty.
At least so says Secretary Tom Vilsack in his Statement on how the FY2011 Budget will be aimed at helping rural farmers and ranchers.
Because some have become desperate.
A 99 cent burger does not cost 99 cents. You might like paying 99 cents but it comes at a cost to the rancher who took a loss on the beef, over and over again.
I'm not going to mention the real cost of the lettuce or tomato. Some other day maybe.
On the flip side is urban America like North Tulsa with only fast food and overpriced convenience store food and "vast undeveloped tracts."
Where's the enterprise to feed ourselves and build economies?
North Tulsa got a grocery store a few weeks ago -- selling factory foods hauled in from factories and agri-biz giant merchant middlemen from all over the nation and world after it was first harvested here while local farming families struggle to pay bills and seek out alternative markets, a future for their kids, and drive for miles just to find their own food sources -- because we've made it illegal to do a variety of things that made food available to communities.
To oversimplify something, rural America prospers when a farmer in rural America can feed his or her family as well as have access to affordable healthy food, as well as access to health care, not just affordable healthcare there has to be actual place to get it.
Why so many Americans bought into the mcmansion, or gentrification, or suburbia, or home-as-investment, or second home, or vacation home, or exurb, or urban exit whatever -- and food being so damn cheap making an otherwise unaffordable home attractive -- gave very little thought to a philosophy behind what they were doing Douglas Rushkoff put it into words in Life, Inc.
A lot of those mortgages would not have been so attractive if we paid for food what it really costs to grow it as opposed to what we actually have, an illusion that cheap food is necessary to feed all of the us. It's only part of the story.
If cheap food feeds us why is Oklahoma, a rural state exporting food to every state and the world, well subsidized food (I don't advocate ending subsidies) unable to feed its own people? This study outlines the problems of food insecurity in Oklahoma.
Speaking of best ag lands converted to housing, farmer foreclosures are a quiet reality:
No one sector of the economic system in the United States
has felt the disastrous affects of corporate concentration, power
and control more than the nation’s family farmers.
(pdf)
We still have "vast underveloped tracts" in Tulsa city limits where city leaders strapped for cash suddenly vote to change an ordinance to allow drilling for oil for whoever might be out there looking, and because cake is damn cheap drilling for oil is their no brainer solution because changing an ordinance to allow urban farms, or markets for surrounding farms to sell product, or food processing and manufacturing shouldn't compete with cheap cake.