We don't need gold plated highways. We don't need zoning commissions which penalize offices at home and promote car commutes.

The salient fact about the decades ahead is that we are entering a permanent global energy crisis and it will change everything about how we live.

Two decades from now, I doubt that the home building industry, so called, will even exist as we have known it.

When a society is stressed, when it comes up against things that are hard to understand, you get a lot of delusional thinking.

My own opinion is that the suburban project is over. We are done. We don't know it yet. For about five years or so the people who deliver all that crap - developers, realtors, various money people - have kicked back waiting for the system to get going again, to resume all their accustomed behavior. They wait in vain. They just haven't figured out that we face a new disposition of things.

We have to do commerce differently because the WalMart system of big box chain retail will soon die. This means rebuilding local main street economies (networks of local economic interdependency).

Consider how badly-built suburbia is. Many business buildings are not designed to outlast their tax depreciation periods, and the McHouses are made of particle board, vinyl siding, and stapled-on trim. A lot of suburbia will simply become the slums of the future. Most of the rest will be salvage or ruins.