In 1978, I visited the State of New York on family business : although this was a vacation I did not spend much time in the tourist areas. Upstate New York was very beautiful and the traffic moved sedately on the freeway because strict speeds limits were in place to conserve energy. Remember the 1970s Oil Crisis ! Meanwhile, the City of New York teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, but was saved, by amongst other things, its new Mayor. Elsewhere, in the cities of eastern USA, news bulletins showed spates of burnt-out apartment buildings which had either been abandoned by their inhabitants, and/or used for insurance claims because property values were plummeting. Nevertheless, in the midst of all this new shopping malls were springing up in so-called "Edge Cities", accessible only to cars consuming energy the country was trying to save.
I visited the United States again in 1991, this time travelling to California to visit a friend, and my last visit to date. Most of my vacation was spent around the San Francisco Bay area, but I also went to Yosemite and Santa Cruz. On this occasion, I was again struck by some wonderful scenery, but also by overdevelopment, and by the disparities between "good" and "bad" areas. However, the situation seemed much better, for California anyway, than in 1978.
The US economy was in recession during both my visits, so perhaps I'm due another, but this "downturn" (a current euphemism, I feel) seems to be different from previous ones. "The Good Places" seem just as vulnerable as "The Bad", as revealed in the last weekend's business section of The Observer newspaper. This contains a feature on the State of California and home of one the world's largest economies, whose government currently has budgetory problems.... ?on a par with those of New York City in 1978. The State's Standard and Poor Credit Rating has been downgraded because of its so-called "bubble economy" ie one overly vulnerable to a plummeting property market. The Observer article highlights the plight of the Stockton, a commuter city to the north of San Francisco and also now scene of abandoned neighbourhoods.
This sorry story makes for stark reading, but am I in the least surprised ? Nope, not at all. The US City-States have never been models of sustainable development, and nor has the country's wider economy. Let's not forget that North American capitalism is precarious, not so precarious as the capitalism of much of the so-called emerging economies - of South America, India, China etc - but precarious nonetheless. History shows this. UK Government please take note !
PS "A Man in Full" by Tom Wolfe, which I felt was even better than "The Bonfire of the Vanities", deals with the propensity for US property "bubbles", this time in Atlanta.
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