Living With Centralization

Kevin Carson posts about the Interstate Highway System http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2006/05/cost-of-addiction.html and how subsidizing highways artificially leads to centralization.

I grew up on my grandfather’s farm in Georgia. When I was fairly young, the property was cut in half by I-75, and some of the best land was taken by eminent domain. Some lands, including a fine peach and apple orchard and strawberry fields were left on the other side of the highway and inaccessible unless you drove a couple of miles to the nearest overpass and back up. As a kid, I would walk through a snake infested culvert under the road. The road itself was protected by a fence topped with barbed wire and was dangerous to cross.

Grandpa sold the land across the highway, and this is now a commercial area. He took his eminent domain money and retired from farming, although he kept livestock and maintained a garden of many acres for family consumption. Most of the fields lay fallow, and my uncles became wage earners in town some 6 miles north. The construction of I-75 represents the end of an era for me and the destruction of what seems now to have been an idyllic way of life on the family farm.

Centralization is as significant to me now as ever. It governs most of my life. New York City and its nearer suburbs contain the bulk of the sources of revenue, and the transportation infrastructure of highways, railroads and what have you all lead to and from the center. The city is for me unlivable. I keep big playful dogs and like to garden. I need air that is cleaner than the city has. I can’t abide the noise and light and the absence of stars. I don’t much like New Yorkers, to tell the truth.

For years, we lived in Yonkers, one of the decaying inner suburbs, in a dense working class neighborhood. Our commutes were easy, and there were some parks we could use for dog walking if we ignored the no dog rule (as everybody did). It was not all beer and skittles, what with the close proximity of loud, nosy neighbors and the noise and trash and pollution. Moreover, when it came time to buy a home, we could not, with two professional incomes and no kids, afford to live in our less than desirable neighborhood. Houses, even crappy ones, so convenient to the transportation infrastructure were high priced, and taxes were as high as potential mortgage payments in some cases.

The whole county was out of reach for us, as was even the next county north. To make a long story short, we live 60 miles from my wife’s office in midtown and 40 miles from my office in Westchester County. Mrs Vache Folle drives 20 minutes to the train, and rides a train for over an hour to work. I car pool with a co-worker on the Taconic, usually an hour’s drive each way, sometimes more, rarely less. We have a house we enjoy with a few acres of land on a quiet road, and we endure our commutes for the sake of the lifestyle we are building. Our carbon footprint is pretty big, and we miss out on community life because we are away from home so much working and commuting.

There are a lot of people in our situation, it seems. Every week it seems I see a new development of McMansions filling up with commuters who pay $750K and up for 3,000 plus square foot homes on quarter acre to half acre lots. It’s not exactly country living, and it is destroying the rural character of the county, but it what it takes for these families to have the houses they seem to prefer. Actually, land prices dictate that builders construct all McMansions all the time as there is no profit in more affordable housing. We bought a much smaller, older house for a lot less money, and we would have been hard pressed to find new construction that was not of the McMansion variety.

None of us made the centralized world that we live in, and we are all trying to build satisfying lives while we confront the reality of our situation. I have been thinking hard lately about what it might take to work closer to home, to spend more time in my community and play a more active part in it.

One development, which involved the destruction of a vast swath of forest and some wetlands, is designed as a “new traditional community”. It has a “meeting house” and a “village square”. The lots are smaller, and the houses are more traditional looking, but I doubt that a “community” will spring up there. Everyone will be too busy working and commuting to pay his mortgage and taxes to spend much time with his neighbors.

Our church is our biggest connection to community, and our amiable neighbors are a boon. Still, I find myself too fatigued to socialize much of the time, and I just want to putter in my garden and play with my dogs in the limited time that I have for leisure. One of the things that keeps me from acting on plans to develop closer ties to the community, to go into business here, is the sense that the community is fast becoming undesirable. Centralization is turning Dutchess County into Westchester County North as more commuters move in. At some point if I am to put down roots, I am liable to want to skedaddle up to Columbia County to stay ahead of the suburban wave.