It's time to rethink the single-family home as the American dream, author says

[Hortensis]

114. Well, that doesn't really fit my observations.

Last edited Sun Dec 27, 2020, 12:38 AM - Edit history (1)

Lots of nice neighborhoods get better and houses are remodeled and replaced, typically with better. Which of course is both very desirable and part of one of our serious urban problems.

But, of course banks didn’t force people to live in ways of the pre-industrial age, even pre-age of reason ways, developed by kings, aristocracies, powerful churches on the other side of the ocean.

For better and worse, on this side of the water, almost all new towns and cities were built arising out of application principles born in the enlightenment, with emphasis on the rights of the individual.

Individuals expected to own their own land. They came to the new world for it! Whereas old world towns and villages were developed on land owned/controlled by the ruling classes.

In our world or that, though, it simply has never been the business of business to tell people how to live. Only to make sure that they could recover their money by lending it for properties that were sellable, in other words that other people would want. Not other banks.

And before the automobile, the largest cities tended to grow to a size that people could walk into the center of and out again in a day. By the time our nation was a lousy 150 years old and most cities mere towns, that dynamic was forever obsolete.

I think it’s downright odd to imagine that our urban growth patterns and problems are overwhelmingly the creation of irresponsible and uncaring lenders instead of giant dynamics of individual choices and possibilities completely unknown before. They could no more have controlled what happened than they could’ve reversed the tides. Again, not that they had the slightest right to, beyond directing their own investments by deciding to lend or not to lend.

I get the impression sometimes that some people on the left almost resent that a ruling class is not taking better care of us, or at least that they believe there is one controlling all and that it needs to be replaced with a system that controls better with a new mandate.

An ingrained need to be relieved of the responsibilities of democracy by elites who'll take care of them is actually a huge part of what’s happening on the conservative authoritarian right.

My notion is that we ourselves should do a better job, and in a lot of places and ways some people have always been showing others the way.