At long last I’ll be shooting our first segment in Detroit this June 17th - 24th. I’ll be speaking with faculty at the Taubman College in Ann Arbor, docents at Detroit’s museums, and everyday people in neighborhoods throughout the metro.

I live on the Westside of Los Angeles where the average home price is over $1,000,000. There are neighborhoods in Detroit with average home values of $20,000. I can’t help but wonder whether an ambitious fixer-upper wouldn’t be making a solid investment by buying an entire neighborhood in Detroit and fixing it up a bit - testing some broken windows theory. It would only cost as much as buying a house in Los Angeles.

The satellite image below is near central “urban” Detroit.

So, here it is. In the 1950’s we changed the way we built and lived to accommodate an unprecedented demographic shift: The Baby Boom. Our entire population suddenly centered around young couples with their now even younger children. We built entire new cities form-fit to this historic aberration. Parks and playgrounds were needed at first - and then lots and lots of schools.

And then a lot of those playgrounds and schools weren’t needed anymore.

The babies grew up.

Now, the babies are aging. Some of them can’t drive anymore. Many of them need living assistance.

But, strangely, the world we built 60 years ago is still the world that most of these aged baby-boomers live in today. It was a golden and idyllic age for many - remembered so fondly that we continue to build communities inspired by it today. But there hasn’t been another baby boom. Demographics of today do not resemble the population of American in the 50’s. Economic realities are different.

It’s as though our culture encountered a phenomenon so unusual and long-lasting, we forgot that it was just that - a phenomenon. We haven’t yet caught up with the realities of a world without a dominant middle class and with a large contingent of the elderly. The challenges we’ll face in the next few decades will produce profound change in the places we live, as certainly as the baby boom caused change when it began.

We’re still aiming to begin production in February.  Our Red camera is slated for delivery at that time.

In the first weeks, we’ll focus on Greater Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay Area, Las Vegas Metro, and Phoenix Metro, interviewing local planners, academics, and historians.  With several sequences edited, we’ll attempt to raise money to travel to  other metropolitan areas.

As I talked about months ago, the film will be primarily a history of suburban growth in the United States - stepping out of history-mode occasionally to view case studies of specific metro regions like those mentioned above.

With research on the history part of things pretty well wrapped up, I’ve been creating a dossier on each particular region, scouring the archives of Planetizen, and every other planning news aggregator.  It’s been really enlightening - finding patterns in the local battles that each region has faced over the years.  The human scale and the wide range of experience different people share really do help anchor the themes we’re exploring.

Firstly, there’s nothing insensitive I’m going to say about veterans or their needs, nor the altruistic ambitions of any individuals who support them. It’s just that we have this legend about suburbia - that we built it for all the men returning home from the war, ready to start families. They got back, and had no where to live - they had to sleep in their parents living rooms, etc, etc… To some extent, there was assuredly a shortage of housing. We hadn’t been building houses since the stock market crash 16 years earlier.

Stepping back into that era, lest we forget,

“By 1926 activity had peaked nearly everywhere and the long and steep descent into bankruptcy, foreclosure, default, and “frozen assets” was commencing. The capstone event was the collapse of the notorious and highly publicized Florida land boom, in which enough land (some of it underwater) had been subdivided to house the entire US population. Florida’s boom began faltering in the fall of 1925 and by the fall of 1926 was in full-scale decline, sending shock waves through the nation’s financial and real estate markets.” - Marc A. Weiss, Rise of the Community Builders

The era of the depression led the men who’d chartered great wealth in real estate and house construction into what Dolores Hayden describes thusly:

“Backroom politics of the 1920’s, 1930’s, and early 1940’s had shaped postwar housing and urban design. There was no haste at all in the twenty years of lobbying for federal support of private-market, single-family housing development.” - Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia

Or, as Marc A. Weiss puts it,

“FHA had cast the die. All of the elements that constituted what many have referred to as “postwar suburbanization” were firmly in place by prewar 1940. The real estate industry, particularly in the sectors of finance and development, had undergone a remarkable transformation. While the first Levittown was not built until after World War II, the Levitt family firm was already engaging in large-scale FHA-financed subdivision and building operations by the early 1940s.” - Marc A. Weiss, Rise of the Community Builders

So, why then, all the hyperbole surrounding the need for housing after the war? Was it a coincidence that we had prepared the housing boom on a silver platter, ready to eat when the war ended? Or was the pride and industrial might of the era enough to compel propagandists to send us into self-righteous home-building overdrive?

From films like The Best Years of Our Lives to Norman Rockwell’s painting, The Homecoming, there is evidence of grief for the returning soldiers. Perhaps the pretty house in the suburbs was an all-to-ready way for society to deal with that grief. A present to ourselves with a mythology that leans towards a nearly religious can-do spirit.

I made a note to myself a week ago that simply said “Idea of ghosts from the past.” This is my shorthand for a principle or concept (or meme…) that may help connect dots or tell a story in developing the documentary. I wasn’t quite sure what this one meant, but I remembered writing when I chanced upon this article in The Next American City.

Dr. Natalia Molina discusses the East Los Angeles freeway interchange which was built in Boyle Heights 40 years ago, displacing 10,000 people and destroying 29,000 homes.

I came across a petition the neighbors had circulated to protest the freeway system. I decided to look for the people who had signed, hoping to interview them. I walked down streets, reading the house numbers as I went. Just as I would near the address I was looking for, the street would end, bumping up against the freeway. The homes of all the petitioners had been razed to build it.

I don’t know what to say or think about this: http://www.levittandsons.com. Levitt and Sons has filed for bankruptcy…

…a few days after this news from Planetizen and Yahoo:

Levittown, Long Island held a 60th birthday bash for itself on Sept. 30, complete with parades, to celebrate its creation from a potato field for GIs returning from World War II. It would go on to become America’s iconic suburb.

“It was October 1947 when developer William Jaird Levitt opened the first of what became 17,544 Cape Cod and ranch houses rising from blighted potato fields 40 miles east of New York City, handing post-World War II GIs the keys to their American Dream.

It was an instant success, a prototype widely chronicled and duplicated nationwide.”

Many building firms are filing for bankruptcy right now. History repeats itself, but never in the same way. The “Baby Echo” generation isn’t proving to be quite the cohesive economic catalyst that the “baby boom” was.

I finished watching Adam Curtis’s documentary, The Power of Nightmares, a few nights ago. I’d seen his The Century of the Self years ago, and it was an inspiring project in terms of documentary form for this project. I can’t recommend either highly enough, and magnificently, they’re both available to watch online, for free. (Search for them on Google Video or Archive.org.)

Adam Curtis makes use of his own voice as narration which is interesting. It allows him as documentary filmmaker to be more storyteller than journalist which is often useful - yet sometimes calls the information being presented into question. He finds excellent interview subjects and archival footage which most of the time assuages the latter situation.

As a matter of speaking on behalf of history, which Country Mice and City Mice will do, I found this conversation between Errol Morris and Adam Curtis compelling.

Here is the first part of The Power of Nightmares: (The mesmerizing music in the first 5 minutes is the theme from a John Carpenter movie and Brian Eno’s Another Green World.)

Back in April, I was working on a film shooting near Agua Dulce, CA - halfway between Santa Clarita and Lancaster. To get to the set by 6:00 AM, I had to leave home in Santa Monica at 5:00 AM. Driving that direction, out of the city, I was faced with little traffic. But, coming into the city, in the darkness of that early hour there was what I can only describe as a slow-moving river of headlights. Four to Six lanes of cars, all crawling towards central Los Angeles, like molasses. Every day.

These are the “extreme commuters,” those who travel ninety minutes or more each way, as discussed in the brilliant New Yorker article by Nick Paumgarten.

When the film shoot switched to nights, I drove out to the area early to avoid being caught in the evening exodus traffic. I took some pictures around the area called Canyon Country, which is where movies and TV shows go when they need a location that looks like Iraq.

I stumbled upon this brand spanking new development way up Sand Canyon Rd.

It was a strange and quiet place to be during the day. This fellow was the only sign of life other than the staff at the model home by the entrance.

This area was once nothing more than trailer parks, quarries, and auto salvage yards. Many of the new developments in the area are consciously built as communities. This particular development felt as though the pervasive quietness simply foreshadows years of culturally fallow existence for a handful of families, with the doors locked up tight.

The half-abandoned trailer park down the road, with rows and rows of empty spots once occupied, served as a haunting reminder that any place can be abandoned if it isn’t working for the inhabitants, be it a city, a trailer park, or a lonely residential development in the middle of what might as well be Iraq.

I finally had the chance to watch Dean Terry’s excellent documentary “Subdivided.” Check it out.

His is a personal story of moving to the newer outlying suburbs around Dallas and finding an absence of community. We meet the folks in the older nearby community who share life’s experiences in the way we all seem to remember from our youths. The homogeneity of the new subdivisions attenuates and dilutes humanity to the point that community ceases to exist.

It did beg the question - who likes these new places? The most positive explanation for living in a new subdivision usually seems to incorporate the idea of compromise - “It’s far away from everything, but at least it’s safe…”