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The Burbs Are Doomed
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10708 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1993 |
1,871 Words |
| Author
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Anthony Downs
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PENTURBIA
Where Real Estate Will Boom after the Crash of Suburbia
Jack Lessinger
Seattle: Socioeconomics, Inc., 1991
324 pp., $29.95
If boldness of conception, daring simplification of complex historical periods, flashes of brilliant insight, imaginative use of date, and sheer intellectual guts were the criteria of success in writing about social and population trends, Jack Lessinger's Penturbia would be a great book. However, I believe it lacks two rather important qualities: credibility of analysis and reliability of predictions. Of course, I cannot prove its predictions are unreliable; they just disagree with my own. But in spite of these drawbacks, the books is still a remarkable attempt to create a sweeping and population migration spanning several centuries of American history.
Penturbia refers to the U.S. counties that Lessinger regards, as key destination points in what he says will be the fifth major migration of people in American history. The migration has now begun; it will feature mass movement of the population out of existing metropolitan areas, especially the suburbs, into continues beyond commuting range. Consequently, says Lessinger suburban property values will collapse as demand there drops sharply and no one comes along to pick up the slack.
However, the really interesting aspect of Penturbia is the cosmic dialectical theory of American history that Lessinger invents in order to explain past population movements. He divides American history from 1730 to 2010 into four major cyclical periods. Each period was dominated by a specific mindset or intellectual perspective within the population, which gave rise to a particular social order he refers to as a "socio-economy." Each socio-economy generated a large-scale migration into some new leading region. A new socio-economy would emerge in reaction to the excesses of its predecessor, achieve dominance in society through partially integrating its own elements, but eventually generate unpreventable excesses of its own that would lead to its downfall. It would then be replaced by the next emerging socio-economy, spawned in response to its excesses.
The first socio-economy, which lasted from 1735 to 1846, was based upon centralization, big business, the rule of law, and great social inequality; it had the mindset of a mercantile aristocrat. It achieved its peak period just before 1800
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