By: David A. Smith

… is affordability?

Am I up when you’re down?

When the homeownership rate drops, what happens to apartment occupancy?  As illustrated by this Wall Street Journal article, the answer depends on two factors:

1. Why homeownership rates are dropping

2. How long it has been since the homeownership drop began

Start with a fact. 

Start with just the facts, ma’am

Apartment vacancies hit their highest point since 1986, surging in cities from Raleigh, NC, to Tacoma, WA –

While the Journal leaves its choice of cities unremarked, neither of these are primary cities, nor are they at the epicenter of foreclosures – Miami, Phoenix, Las Vegas, or California’s Inland Empire.

During the third quarter, vacancies increased in 42 markets, improved in 26 markets and remained unchanged in 11 markets. Omaha, Neb., saw the largest rise in vacancies, with the rate rising 1.1 percentage points to 7.4%. Other big rises were seen in Memphis, Tenn., Indianapolis, Raleigh and Tacoma.

Here’s a hint: dark red is bad

If apartment vacancies are high in such normal-America cities as Raleigh and Tacoma, the cause is not a glut of supply, but a withering of demand:

– as rising unemployment continued to chip away at demand during the traditionally strong summer rental months.

People tend to forget that housing demand is elastic.

The muscles in my mighty arms

Are as strong as rubber bands

When housing is cheap, people consume more – they move out of the house, lose the roommates, buy a larger home with a media room, a home office, or a game room.  Going the other way, when housing becomes expensive: the total number of households shrinks.

Driving the change is the troubled employment market, which is closely tied to rentals. With unemployment at 9.8% –  a 26-year high – 

“Hey, aren’t you as big as you think?”

Young singles double and triple up in larger roommate combinations.

And with the money we save not washing, we can be solvent!

– more would-be renters are doubling up or moving in with family and friends during periods of job loss.

Young adults move back home (’boomerang kids”).

Even if you charge him rent, household consumption has shrunk

Landlords have been particularly battered because unemployment has been higher among workers under 35 years old, who are more likely to rent.

Families put young children two to a bedroom.

Most of us grew up with bunk beds at one time or another

The result is fewer households, and higher structural vacancy:

The U.S. vacancy rate reached 7.8%, a 23-year high, according to Reis Inc., a New York real-estate research firm that tracks vacancies and rents in the top 79 U.S. markets.

When that happens, some landlords, usually of weaker properties, cut their rents as they seek to prop up occupancy, at least in the short term:

Meanwhile, the air leaving the market is driving rents down, most sharply in markets that had been chugging along until a year ago, when unemployment accelerated, including Tacoma; San Jose, Calif.; and Orange County, Calif.

From the WSJ: higher vacancy squeeze rents down

Nationally, effective rents have fallen by 2.7% over the past year, to around $972.

Only 2.7%.  Could be a lot worse.  Still, with structural weakness embedded in the rental sector, as long as the economy continues to shed jobs, we can expect to see apartment occupancies wobbling, even though new construction has largely dwindled to a stop.

Not so flashy any more

For the next six months, occupancy will also drop cyclically, because housing demand expands in the late spring, when people tend to move house and when we graduate a new crop of collegians.

The [vacancy] rate is expected to climb further in the fall and winter, when rental demand is weaker, pushing vacancies to the highest levels since Reis began its count in 1980.

The weakness has even hit that least-American of marketplaces: Manhattan.

Manhattan has all the drivers of structural rental tightness: pernicious and stubborn rent control, severe land restrictions and barriers to development, and a strong employment base.  Even so, New York City landlords are confronting market forces, some for the first time.

In New York, Jennifer Hyman rented a one-bedroom apartment in July at a monthly rate of $1,950 — down from $2,450 for the previous tenant — when she returned to the city after graduating from Harvard Business School. Her first month’s rent was free — and her landlord painted the apartment, scrubbed the floors and added window coverings.

Painting the apartment?  Scrubbing the floors?  Sprucing the window coverings? 

Half of America of ROTFLMAO right now, since in America (the land of the Kleen Rest Room and the free ice tea refill), all those things are de rigueur for landlords upon new rentals.  It’s called “prepping a turnover vacancy.”

“The experience was night-and-day different from before,” said Ms. Hyman, who had rented other Manhattan apartments between 2002 and 2007, each time paying a brokers’ fee –

Another sign of a formerly hyper-inflated apartment; the commodity was so scarce people paid finders’ fees to secure one:

– and feeling pressured to sign a lease the minute she found an apartment.

Third sign: haste in closing, because if you don’t take it, there is someone right behind you.

Now, she says, “Renters are the ones with the power.”

Not all the power, but certainly more than the zero they had before.

“When job losses stop, rents will firm and occupancies will firm,” said Richard Campo, chief executive of Camden Property Trust, a Houston-based real-estate company.

“Living inexpensive?”

Well, yes.

The deteriorating rental market comes amid some signs of stabilization in the housing sales market.

Normally, home ownership and rental are countercyclical, so as the demand gradually rises, we can expect apartment occupancy to tick up before home prices do. 

But then there’s our Federal government putting its thumb on the rent-buy scales:

Need rebalancing?

An $8,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers and investor demand helped to boost sales of low- and moderately priced homes this summer.

But some analysts warn demand could fall with the expiration of the tax credit and supply could increase with more foreclosed homes hitting the market.

Both are true: housing will fall again, and supply will probably rise, particularly when one looks at the interest rate resets still before us:

We’re not through the rate resets by any means

While a housing recovery could lead the best quality renters to move out and purchase homes, the move-out rate [into homes – Ed.] isn’t expected to surpass levels seen during the housing boom earlier this decade.

In other words, we have a very long hill to climb.

Mortgage credit standards have tightened considerably since then, which should keep more renters in place.

Can’t support that much, can I?

In the intermediate term, that should be good for rental.

Apartment owners ultimately could gain from the housing bust because the U.S. home-ownership rate has fallen as foreclosures rise. But the housing bust has also flooded some of the most overbuilt housing markets with new apartment inventory as developers have converted unsold condominium developments into rentals.

Reis projects that the vacancy rate will peak at well above 8% in mid-2010.

Folks, this recession is a long way from over.

SIGNS advertise apartments for rent in San Francisco in July. Rents declined during the third quarter, usually a strong period for rentals

Send post as PDF to

Yesterday we saw that Youngstown, Ohio, whose population now is half what it was forty years ago, has made an enormous break with its past.

More than 1,000 structures have been demolished so far.

It’s for the greater good

Choosing to cull wasn’t easy.  First, Youngstown tried everything else:

For a while, Youngstown, with its population at just over 80,000, hoped to return to its boomtown roots, when 165,000 residents called it home.

“We long pursued a policy of growth,” said the city’s energetic young mayor [Jay Williams].  “We went after all these things that would make Youngstown a city of 150,000 again.”

Jay Williams, not clinging to the past

There were some harebrained schemes.

“A blimp factory was going to put the city back on the map,” Williams said.

Powered by political promises?

“That represents a whole lot of the promises made and broken. They sound ridiculous now. President Clinton promised a defense facility employing 5,000. We were waiting for a savior.”

When I’m elected, I’ll do all the things I’ve promised – honest!

For a brief period, the city also relied on nostalgia:

Growth never came, and that makes for some strange city streetscapes today. There are few occupied homes and unkempt woodlands have taken over. There’s at least one 10-acre farm and many other large fields.

Today, a new spirit seems to have taken hold. Phil Kidd started the Web site Defend Youngstown, and said he hears from tons of former residents who would like to return.

“They call and email from all over the United States with suggestions on how to help,” he said.

They call with suggestions … but they don’t move back, do they?  Memory is romantic; economics is practical.

Now, in a radical move, the city – which has suffered since the steel industry left town and jobs dried up – is bulldozing abandoned buildings, tearing up blighted streets and converting entire blocks into open green spaces.

From derelict to green?

Remarkably enough, occasionally we find land that is worth more vacant than with the current structure on it.  The euphemism is ‘remediation,’ and while it is normally applied to hazardous materials in the soil, it can also reflect the cost of removing an incredibly well-built but economically obsolescent and hence empty structure.

Yet it’s extraordinarily disturbing:

“I’m very nervous to have all that space,” said Elsa Higby, the founder of Grow Youngstown, which promotes produce gardening and farmers markets.

So embedded is expansion into the American psyche that even though this group’s goal is managed shrinkage, it has cleverly inverted the meaning of ‘grow’, from people to crops.

How did they get the people to move? 

When a particular house needs to go somewhere to die, the solution, as with so many things, is to offer choice and money:

When only one or two occupied homes remain, the city offers incentives – up to $50,000 in grants – for those home owners to move, so that the entire area can be razed. The city will save by cutting back on services like garbage pick-ups and street lighting in deserted areas.

Would $50,000 get you to move?

As with many hard-choice innovations, the observant political herd is waiting for a maverick to take a chance. 

“We’re one of the first cities of significant size in the United States to embrace shrinkage,” said Williams.

When the maverick is not vilified but applauded, the others mosey on over to take a look. 

But now, Youngstown’s infrastructure-paring strategy may yet become a model for other Rust-Belt cities that must recreate themselves after years of decline.

Already, delegations from smaller, post-industrial cities like Flint, Mich.; Wheeling, W.Va.; and Dayton, Ohio, have come to Youngstown to study the plan.

Wheeling’s peak was in its past, too

Like Youngstown, all these cities are in America’s industrial heartland, all of them suffering with legacy industrial buildings and declining population.

They have found that in Youngstown, cutting the Gordian Knot by thinking the unthinkable – an American city that not only isn’t growing, it’s managing its reduction! – is actually liberating.  As the Youngstown 2010 site puts as its first principle:

Accepting that Youngstown is a smaller city.
The dramatic collapse of the steel industry led to the loss of tens of thousands of jobs and a precipitous decline in population. Having lost more than half its population and almost its entire industrial base in the last 30 years, the city is now left with an oversized urban structure. (It has been described as a size 40 man wearing a size 60 suit.)

Maybe you need to take in your boundaries

There are too many abandoned properties and too many underutilized sites. Many difficult choices will have to be made as Youngstown recreates itself as a sustainable mid-sized city. A strategic program is required to rationalize and consolidate the urban infrastructure in a socially responsible and financially sustainable manner.

The psychological principle is that shrinking is not failure; shrinking is adaptation.

Ideally, all this energy surrounding Youngstown 2010 will help turn the city around. It does have a lot going for it, including Youngstown State University, which attracts creative-class types like artists and writers and other intellectuals, as well as museums and an excellent public library.

Richard Florida’s done a wonderful job of promoting the thesis that ‘creative types’ are the fertilizing yeast that turn middle-class hops into spirited knowledge workers.  Though his thesis is unproven, what’s far less uncertain is the valuable role played by universities.  They bring in young people (cheap, mobile, risk-taking labor), and they are platforms for innovation (reducing the cost of being wrong and increasing the chance of stumbling on something right).

Youngstown State: more students, more ideas, more jobs

Similarly, clearing away rubbled lots and replacing them with green space makes the remaining property more attractive as a site to build a new vision:

The cheap residential and commercial real estate can be a draw. Start-up companies thrive on low overhead, and employees can easily find housing just minutes from work.

3,300 square feet for under $100,000: North Heights in Youngstown

At the very least, the 2010 plan has changed residents’ perspective, said Hunter Morrison. “It’s getting us to think about where we’re going into the future, rather than where we’ve been in the past.” 

Part of transitioning is letting go of the old self.  Youngstown had an old self predicated on a municipal revenue model that will not return..

When a tree has dead limbs, you cut them down lest they jeopardize the trunk.  By plowing under its no-longer-sustainable neighborhoods, Youngstown is making a move to bring its civic economics back in balance, and creating a pruned city that can once again grow.

To save the city’s living parts, we had to destroy its dead parts

Send post as PDF to

A town is a business that sells quality of life and competes with other towns to attract real estate tax payers.  It spends its revenue on infrastructure that enhances quality of life and enables it to attract more workers and real estate tax payers.  Some towns are so attractive, relative to their rural competition, that they attract millions of newcomers without even trying, and these towns become megacities by growing vast economically rational but unplanned spontaneous communities called slums, where the housing demand has overrun the infrastructure capacity – and the problem of fixing slums’ overrun capacity is, I believe, the greatest demographic challenge of the 21st century, the century of cities.

Because towns compete, some lose.  This is less of a problem when a region or nation’s population is rising, because even losing market share (like Galveston did after the 1900 hurricane and Old New Orleans had been doing even before hurricane Katrina) can be absorbed in people terms through population growth.

A setback for the employment base?

When it cannot – when the town’s population falls and falls, despite all efforts – the town is economically ill.  That in turn makes it unattractive to its residents, and it keeps losing them.  Then its over-extended infrastructure becomes a millstone (pun) around its neck, dragging down the municipal budget and diluting its ability to serve any of its citizens well.

Some infrastructure is no longer functional

Such is the fate of Youngstown, Ohio, a town with too many houses, as revealed in this story from CNN Money:

The last holdout: Two minutes from Youngstown’s downtown sit empty lots and abandoned houses where families of mill workers once thrived.

Youngstown, Ohio, has long been on the decline and now is being hit by the foreclosure crisis. Its answer: Razing abandoned buildings and tearing up streets.

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio (CNNMoney.com) — Youngstown, Ohio, has seen its population shrink by more than half over the past 40 years, leaving behind huge swaths of empty homes, streets and neighborhoods.

Like many cities in America’s Midwest – and Britain’s Midlands – Youngstown boomed on manufacturing, its proximity to the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence Seaway representing an enormous competitive advantage:

“When I grew up in the 1950s, the city was at its peak,” said Father Ed Noga, who heads St. Patrick’s on Youngstown’s South Side. “There were kids everywhere and everyone converged on downtown. You went to eat, to shop and to go to the movies.”

Fast-forward fifty years, as jobs migrate.

Today, downtown is positively sleepy and even somewhat derelict.  Residents have to drive out of town to shop for clothes or housewares.

In cities that have made the shift from manufacturing to information, downtown exists to create a higher concentration of people within a few minutes’ walk (sideways or up-and-down) of face-to-face contact.  For information-oriented downtowns to flourish, they need people there twenty-four hours a day: which means both working (daylight), living (night-time), and socializing (evening). 

When Youngstown was hopping: the 1930’s

For that, in the modern world you need verticality – buildings that go up. 

Density, in other words, isn’t an urban problem, it’s an urban solution. 

Youngstown at night – that was then

Lack of density is the problem.

When you have homes isolated amidst rubble-strewn lots, service costs greatly outweigh tax benefits.  In fact, the costs rise – as New New Orleans is finding out – because your best defenders are the home’s owners.  Vacant houses must be defended by patrols, and you cannot patrol every street all the time.

Although dwindling demand hits the most marginal neighborhoods first (subprime risk!), no neighborhood is immune:

Even wealthy neighborhoods, like the North Side historic district, where mill owners and upper management once congregated, have eyesores.

On one corner, there sits a beautifully maintained seven-bedroom Tudor, yet down a side street, a wood-framed colonial is boarded up. Next door, an empty Victorian sits moldering, the wood of its window frames scorched. Lines of old hedges mark lot boundaries where once-proud homes stood.

In addition to reducing demand for infrastructure (saving the city money), returning land to greenery also creates a more pleasant environment, especially for kids. 

Recycling Youngstown: Empty houses, once magnets for drugs and prostitution, have been reclaimed as playgrounds.

As I discussed in the two posts regarding the Ultimate Future City – the Caves of Steel and the Naked Sun – we all want more elbow room, yet our cities succeed when we have a little less.  Call that the density paradox.

When the jobs go, the people follow.  When the people are gone, the houses must go.  Yet houses are built to endure.  They stay behind, and wither.

“Abandoned houses here are like rainfall in the spring,” said Mayor Jay Williams, “That has gone on for decades.”

In declining-population cities, recessions bring foreclosures like autumn chills bring falling leaves. 

And while foreclosures have long been a scourge in this city, they have recently skyrocketed along with the rest of the country, up 178% in February from a year ago.

The foreclosures, though, are merely the visible manifestation.  The cause was job flight:

Youngstown used to be the nation’s third-largest steel producer; its mill workers earned among the highest factory wages in America. Demand for their services was strong.

Coaling station, Youngstown Sheet and Tube

“You could graduate from high school one day and start work in the mills the next,” said Noga.

William Gropper, Strike and Youngstown Sheet and Tube, 1916

That changed on Sept. 19, 1977 – Black Monday – when Youngstown Sheet and Tube abruptly closed its doors.

“Five thousand people showed up for work one day and were turned away,” said Phil Kidd, Downtown Director of Events and Special Projects for the city.

“The city lost its heart and soul,” said Mayor Williams.

Within years, all the mills vanished. Noga recalls seeing idled workers watching as one of the oldest blast furnaces in the valley was dynamited. “I saw these hard men, shot-and-a-beer guys, standing there crying,” he said.

Grown men cried when the blast furnace was dynamited

The advantages to tearing down empty houses are numerous. 

Tearing down the Youngstown textile mill

Empty houses attract clandestine occupancy, and can become houses of crime.  The results are all too visible:

Some dead-end streets are already uninhabited and torn up, their outlets blocked with concrete barriers. Many roads are pitted and potholed; drivers have to slalom slowly through or face axle-busting jolts. Lonely water hydrants look woefully out of place sitting on the sides of rural-looking roads.

Since houses don’t unbuild themselves, they must be unbuilt. 

It’s better if you disappear

But finding the political commitment to reach that conclusion wasn’t easy –

It’s an odd way to pioneer. “The American narrative always includes growth,” said Hunter Morrison, Director of the Center for Urban and Regional Studies at Youngstown State University, which works closely with the city on plan 2010’s implementation. “No one wants to talk about shrinkage. That’s too threatening to politicians, civic boosters and Chambers of Commerce.”

“That’s a hard choice to make”

[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]

Send post as PDF to

As highlighted in this article from The Economist, America’s northern center – the Mississippi and Missouri drainage basins – is slowly or rapidly depopulating, except for a few nodes called capital cities and major regional business hubs. 

In eastern Colorado, the human tide ebbs. Cheyenne county, which had 3,700 inhabitants in 1930, now has just 1,900. And the drift away from the area seems to be speeding up. In the old county jail, which is now a museum, a photograph from 1910 shows a three-storey schoolhouse towering over the town of Cheyenne Wells. The new school is one storey high—yet it already seems too big.

Cheyenne County, where the dots are bigger than the towns

The impact on homeownership patterns – and the implications for property values and policy choices – will be huge. 

America as a whole is growing briskly. Between 2000 and 2006 its population swelled by 6.4%, according to the Census Bureau.

Driving American urbanization are the twin forces driving it globally:

1. Better agricultural technology.
2. Movement toward information-based employment.

As people move off the farms and into the coastal cities, what happens to the towns they leave behind?  They evaporate of people, if not of property:

Yet the expansion has passed many areas by.  Two-fifths of all counties are shrinking (see map).

Draining out the middle: where it’s white or red, the population’s growing slowly if at all.

In general, people are moving to places that are warm, mountainous or suburban.

We’ve known this for some time, as I’ve previously posted in Where will people move?  They’re moving to warmer, wetter, more varied places.  The Upper Midwest is none of these.

They are leaving many rural areas, with the most relentless decline in a broad band stretching from western Texas to North Dakota. In parts, the Great Plains are more sparsely populated now than they were in the late 19th century, when the government declared them to be deserted.

You realize that this means fewer people in those areas than a hundred years ago.  During that same interval, America’s population increased nearly fourfold, from 76 million in 1900 to 303 million in 2008. 

For every 1 in 1900, 4 in 2008 – and all three new ones moved to the cities

At 2.5 people per household, that means we have created 90 million new households in a century plus, all in the cities.

Yet America is growing more crops than ever, with ecologically cleaner farming.  Why?

A big reason is improvements in farming technology. Tractors in eastern Colorado do not resemble the vehicles that trundle around farms on the east coast and in Europe. They are many-wheeled monsters, sometimes driven by global positioning systems.

It could be a Terminator except it’s painted in John Deere colors

Toby Johnson says his 40,000-acre (16,200-hectare) ranch in Cheyenne county –

We have to stop for just a moment.  Mr. Johnson’s ranch, 60 square miles, a square eight miles on a side, is just about the size of the District of Columbia.

Cheyenne, Colorado, wheat squares broken only by a highway

When the West was being settled, a standard section was 40 acres, one-quarter mile on a side. 

Now the farms are 1,000 times bigger.

– employed between eight and ten workers in the 1950s.

Even half a century ago, American agriculture was among the world’s most productive, and technology has made it even more so:

It now has two, including him.

Thus, while productivity has risen, the job base has shrunk by a factor of four.  Farming has not only become technological, it has replaced people with capital, because that’s what the farm equipment represents – capital expenditure.

When old farmers retire, their plots tend to be swallowed up by larger, more efficient operators.

A farmer in the Thirties

A farmer in the Oughties

This is economically rational and, at least in a macro sense, good for everybody.  Larger operators have better capitalization; they can run those enormous machines over more acres for a much smaller incremental cost.  Technology implies scale in both acreage and capital.

Fewer jobs, fewer people.  Fewer people, fewer homes.

And fewer jobs

The population of the Great Plains teeters on this shrinking agricultural base. While much of Colorado grew, Cheyenne county shrank every year between 2000 and 2006, when it lost more than 300 people. Children are disappearing even more quickly. Ten years ago 495 pupils enrolled in the county’s public schools; this year 320 did.  

As we saw in Demographic Shakers, when you stop having young people, fairly soon you stop having people.

In Kit Carson, the second-biggest settlement, the school enrolled just four teenagers in the tenth grade. Shops and houses nearby are already boarded up. If the school were to close, there would be little reason for the town to exist at all.

Presumably, twenty years from now, it won’t exist – as a town, that is.  Some towns die.

Optimists point to two likely developments that may slow the decline. Assuming a power line is built, wind farms will probably appear in the area in the next few years, as they have in western Texas. That will generate construction jobs and tax revenues.

The construction jobs will be transitory; the tax revenues, while welcome, with still hav little profitable in which to invest.

A more ambitious proposal involves building a “super-highway” between Mexico and Canada, which would pass through eastern Colorado. Backers say it would almost double traffic through Cheyenne county, leading to an increase in jobs and perhaps even in people.

Somehow I doubt that a truck stop will really attract all that many people

I can’t say that I’m a prairie truck stop cowboy, but I’ve driven enough of those undulating grassy interstates to know that simply having one is no particular job attractor; it just migrates the few jobs that remain to the off-ramp areas.

Yet the road is many years from being built.

If the people won’t come to our wheatfields of dreams, whom can we attract?

There is a somewhat drastic alternative. In the 1980s two academics from Rutgers University suggested turning the plains into a “buffalo commons”, where the animals that grazed the area before white immigration would be encouraged to return. The idea was so unpopular that its authors occasionally had to be protected by police.

Frank J. Popper has seen the future, and it’s a herd

Some prickly people might feel insulted when you suggest that a hairy, dumb, four-legged animal is more suited to their towns than they are.

I and my fellow buffalo snort at this notion

But it is nonetheless coming to pass.

Neighborhoods and housing are land used to grow people.  When they cease growing people, it’s time to start growing something else.

Buffalo meat is leaner than beef, and thus well suited to contemporary health worries.

Perhaps, like Arthur C. Clarke’s Ambrosia Plus, it tastes like chicken?

Partly as a result, the buffalo are coming back: some 62,000 were slaughtered between January and November last year, a 17% rise over a year earlier.  Of the plains states, only North Dakota has openly mulled turning over large tracts of land to the furry megafauna.  

No indoor plumbing required, and low maintenance costs

But other areas, including eastern Colorado, have preserved grasslands and are touting their natural resources and history—a vivid one of brutal treks and Indian massacres.

Jo Downey of the [Priaire] Development Corporation reckons nothing can stop the drift away from places like Cheyenne county, and others agree. The challenge for the future is not to stem the tide, but to keep life as pleasant as possible for those who remain.

Four counties in search of a future?

Curiously, it’s possible that the same technological forces slowly depopulating the Great Plains will lead to their stabilization in a virtually connected, physically isolated world somewhat like the original Australian stations that Arthur Upfield so vividly evoked,

Even in the widest open spaces, there can be crime

or Isaac Asimov’s Solaria, one of the possible ultimate future cities about which I previously posted:

‘We have no police force on Solaria.  …  No crime, you see.  Our population is tiny and widely scattered.  There is no occasion for crime, therefore no occasion for police.’

The same serenity has developed in Cheyenne County:

Rayetta Palmer, a councilwoman in Cheyenne Wells, can nonetheless cite a list of local strengths. The few children get lots of attention: Kit Carson’s schools have a pupil-to-teacher ratio of seven to one, compared with 18 to one in Denver, the state capital. As a result, they do well in tests. Crime is rare. The community is strikingly cohesive: at the petrol stations that double as cafés, locals do not take empty tables but sit together, as in a school dining room.

Just like Cheyenne County, Solaria’s few people were surrounded by machines:

‘The human-robot ratio in any economy that has accepted robot labor tends continuously to increase despite any laws that are passed to prevent it.  The increase is slowed, but never stopped.  At first the human population increases, but the robot population increases much more quickly.  Then, after a certain critical point is reached the human population begins to decline.  A planet approaches a true social stability.’

With all this distance comes a curious cultural retreat:

‘Why is it the Solarians object to seeing one another [in person]?’

‘It follows inevitably.  We have huge estates.  An estate ten thousand square miles in area is not uncommon, although the largest ones contain considerable unproductive land … In any case, it is the size of an estate, more than anything else, that determines a man’s position in society.  And one property of a large estate is this: You can wander about in it almost aimlessly with little or no danger of entering a neighbor’s territory and thus encountering your neighbor. … In short, a Solarian takes pride in not meeting his neighbor.  The desire not to do so led to the development of ever more perfect viewing equipment, and as the viewing equipment grew better there was less and less need ever to see one’s neighbor.  It was a reinforcing cycle, a kind of feedback.’  Page 104

Can someone say, Second Life?

Who needs a real city when you can meet anybody in a virtual one?

Send post as PDF to