Kunstler described Lakewood, where thousands of homes were built quickly across farm fields after World War II, as 'the place where evil dwells,' Waldie said. Waldie spoke last Monday at the 'No Place Like Home' conference in Anaheim, where he described his spiritual connection to the modest Lakewood, California, suburb where he has spent his life. Waldie in his 2005 book, Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir. 'I live where a majority of Americans live: a tract house on a block of other tract houses in a neighborhood of even more,' wrote D.J. They are designed to make the common form of suburbia obsolete. But pay attention to debates over new construction, and look at the requirements for higher densities, small or nonexistent yards, construction around transit and other common building mandates. Given the enormity of suburbia, it's hard to see the impact of this wide-ranging policy change. It's easy to chuckle at them, as they seize on every crisis (housing bubbles, rising gas prices, etc.) to warn about the coming doom, much like those doomsday preachers who are sure that the latest event is a signal that the world is coming to an end.īut while most of us think only about short-term real estate issues, these ideologues have been changing the laws and building codes to mandate their long-term vision. While they make some good aesthetic points, they are elitists who believe we should all live in ways that they prefer.

New Urbanists such as Kunstler push for the recreation of the old city model – people living in high rises and apartment buildings, relying on mass transit to get around and shopping at local stores filled with goods produced in the surrounding area. 'Suburbia represents a compound economic catastrophe, ecological debacle, political nightmare, and spiritual crisis for a nation of people conditioned to spend their lives in places not worth caring about,' wrote James Howard Kunstler, a prominent New Urbanist writer who calls for the wholesale reordering of our built environment. In their view, the kind of homes and neighborhoods we live in are tacky, ugly, unsustainable blights. After the housing bubble burst a few years ago, sending real estate prices to the floor in many places, some influential academics and urban planners celebrated the supposed demise of something they had always hated: the suburbs.

Holy land a suburban memoir