Satoshi's Sidewalk #7: The Suburban Experiment
How cities are arranged today isn't how they were arranged in the past, nor how they will be in the future.
A main driver for the creation of this newsletter was a simple question: why do old neighborhoods in US cities constructed just after the turn of the 20th look nearly identical but the areas this author grew up in look totally different?
The question plagued me for years. Why does the neighborhood I grew up next to look so much different from the old-timey Phoenix photos? The old photos showed a grid of streets with narrow but deep two and three story brick buildings. A few mid-rise stone buildings scattered about. But no cul de sacs. No monument signs for master planned communities. The streets aren’t narrow, but they aren’t six lanes wide either.
What the hell happened?
When did everything change?
Why did it change?
These questions were the admission price to the rabbit hole I fell into.
I was familiar with Austrian economics yet rarely read more than the daily articles sent from Mises.org. Bitcoin came into view for me in early 2017 but was not in focus until reading The Bitcoin Standard in July 2018. Earlier in 2018 I came across the Growth Ponzi Scheme series on StrongTowns.org.
Questions combined with the puzzle pieces is where the brain melting began…
The development patterns in those old neighbors were traditional development patterns. Traditional development is just that - the way cities developed under the gold standard (and the bi/tri-metals standards before that). Cities were built one block at a time, moving outward incrementally with fewer services on the edges than the center. People occupying the developments on the edges only received services they could afford. No building codes. No zoning. No design boards. No federal highway subsidies. Only cities bootstrapping their way to wealth.
Today, the story is much different. Today the Suburban Experiment reigns supreme and the traditional development pattern has been regulated out of existence.
A few historical events had to occur for the Suburban Experiment to take hold:
The Federal Reserve formation, 1913
World War I, 1914-1917
The Great Depression, 1929-1933
The events of the early 20th century have since snowballed into Nth-order effects which still drive the bus today. Gold’s failure as hard money, namely its physicality which begets centralization, led to the substitution of specie for paper money. Paper money became the main lever for central bank manipulation and still is today. The game changed in 2009 with Bitcoin. Our understanding of bitcoin as a hard, sound money has compounded since then.
If traditional development patterns are how cities grew in the past and present is the result of the Suburban Experiment, what does growth look like under a bitcoin standard?
More importantly, what happens to the thousands upon thousands of square miles of suburban neighborhoods?
Stay tuned…
"No zoning. No design boards. No federal highway subsidies. Only cities bootstrapping their way to wealth."
Great way of putting it.