There\u2019s an interesting article in the March Atlantic Magazine which speculates that in 20 years, a lot of today\u2019s posh suburban developments in the exurban fringes could become low-income slum communities (\u201cThe Next Slum?\u201d by Christopher Leinberger). The subprime mortgage crisis may have set in motion a process powered by a series of underlying demographic and economic factors, a process that may leave the cities and inner suburbs better off and the exurbs and their McMansions much worse. It would be hard today to imagine gangs, drug dealing, and vinyl-clad estate houses split up into tenements out along the Interstates and outer-beltways, but perhaps in 20 years the suburban-fringe paradises of today will become tomorrow\u2019s nightmares. Stranger things have happened within the context of decades.<\/p>\n
This made me thing of a song that I just bought and downloaded from the new Amazon MP3 site. I\u2019m not getting paid to plug for Amazon, but I will give them credit for not requiring that you download their special software to buy their music. All of the other major digital music sites seem to require that, and personally I don\u2019t like it. Who knows what their software is doing that you\u2019re not aware of. My computer and its registry are cluttered enough as it is without needing a special application for every site that I do business with. <\/p>\n
Anyway, the song I\u2019m referring to is Cashman & West\u2019s \u201cAmerican City Suite\u201d, from 1972. It\u2019s a lament about the decline and decay of urban neighborhood life in New York City that took place back in the 60\u2019s. American City Suite is actually a rather touching and underrated tune; there\u2019s some real emotion in it. It got some airplay for a few months after it was released, but has gone entirely unnoticed since then. Nice that Amazon decided to list it (I think that MSN also has it). Here we are, about 40 years later, and maybe those urban neighborhoods are coming back. And perhaps the suburbs (the outer ones, anyway) are going to experience the social decline that they previously caused in the cities, what Cashman & West sang about. It makes you wonder if Terry Cashman is thinking about writing a new version lamenting the end of the McMansion \/ SUV dream.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There\u2019s an interesting article in the March Atlantic Magazine which speculates that in 20 years, a lot of today\u2019s posh suburban developments in the exurban fringes could become low-income slum communities (\u201cThe Next Slum?\u201d by Christopher Leinberger). The subprime mortgage crisis may have set in motion a process powered by a series of underlying demographic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=302"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5246,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302\/revisions\/5246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}