The Peak

Chuck Marohn, writing for Strong Towns, has a thought provoking post today about the disappearance of the merchant class in which he makes this insightful observation:

I have sometimes been accused of being too nostalgic for the pre-Depression America. While I acknowledge that the good old days weren’t always good, there are some reasons why people’s perceptions of prosperity – when it comes to their place – centers around 1960. For much of America, this was the peak.

This was the point in time where our cities had the best of both worlds. The traditional neighborhoods still existed in a mature state. The momentum for growth and development that is inherent with the traditional design (a resilient high upside, low downside configuration) remained intact. We had not yet begun to dismantle our places in service of the automobile and so we still had the agglomeration of humanity consolidated in and around neighborhood centers.

In 1960 we also had the automobile and all of its upside, but without the inevitable downside that would, in later decades, become accepted as normal. One could now travel between cities on open roads at any time of the day, no longer beholden to railroad routes or schedules (although those still existed for people and freight). The first generation of auto-oriented development was in its infancy, the financial sweet spot in the Ponzi scheme where the growth is producing new revenue for the city but the taxpayer’s long term costs wait – uncalculated and unaccounted for – hidden in the future. There is little wonder why, in Rocky Ford and tens of thousands of other cities across the county, we felt like we could have it all.

While his lament of the missing merchant class is well worth a read, I found this section about the peak of prosperity intriguing. 1960 is about 20 years after what I have typically considered the last of universally good urban development. The early post-war years were extremely detrimental towards the practice of walkable, compact development as there was an increasing focus on building out the infrastructure and development of early suburban sprawl. However, from a broader perspective, 1960 as the peak makes sense. At that point, there had been relatively few years of sprawling development, very little destruction of the traditional compact urban fabric, and the costs of the first lifecycle had yet to appear. The so-called “Urban Renewal” of the 1960’s had yet to destroy vast swathes of compact, walkable districts in favor of towers and parking lots. The exceptional highway expansion of the past 60 years had just begun and, for the most part, had yet to destroy neighborhoods and segment cities. The smog creating, maddening traffic issues of trying to push ever increasing numbers of people through congested corridors had yet to become a problem. As Chuck puts it, it was the best of both worlds and the worst of neither.