This article from
http://www.kunstler.com/ is a very comprehensive take on the problems American suburbia faces.
He argues the banks which have loaned money to generate economic growth are collapsing, at the very time that the real fundamental wealth, food, energy and mineral resources are nearing exhaustion. Meanwhile communities, which are the only system in times of trouble that in the past has saved soceity from complete meltdown, has been practically abolished, replaced by low density car dependent suburbs.
He conculudes with suggestions about the re-localisation of the economy, but points out his suggestions are unpopular even among the "environmental" elites, who are too busy being entranced by new-and-groovy ways to keep all the cars running.
Similar to the Tories and Labour's ideas for mitigating Peak Oil through a programme of encouraging people to buy (extremely inefficient) electric cars??? Which is basically saying, "ok we've run out of oil, so lets burn all the coal until it runs out too, and just hope that the environment does not spiral out of control."
After all Car Culture is worth keeping at any cost, isn't it?
Worse Than Grandma's Depression
What's happening is that American society is sliding into a greater depression than the one Grandma lived through. Food and gasoline prices are rising faster than the rivers of Iowa. But the prices of assets, like houses, stocks, jet-skis, GMC Yukons and pre-owned Hummel figurines are cratering as America turns into Yard Sale Nation.
We're a very different country than we were in 1932. In that earlier crisis of capital, few people had any money but our society still possessed fantastic resources. We had plenty of everything that our land could provide: a treasure trove of mineral ores and the equipment to refine it all, a wealth of oil and gas still in the ground, and all the rigs needed to get at it, manpower galore (and of a highly disciplined, regimented kind), with fine-tuned factories waiting for orders. We had a railroad system that was the envy of the world and millions of family farms (even despite the dust bowl) owned by people who retained age-old skills not yet degraded by agribusiness. We had fully-functional cities with operating waterfronts and ten thousand small towns with local economies, local newspapers, and local culture.
We had a crisis of capital in the 1930s... My own guess is a combination of a bad debt workout that sucked "money" into a black hole (since money is loaned into existence, but vanishes if the loans are not systematically paid back) plus a gross saturation of markets.
Our debt problems today are of a magnitude so extreme that... By any rational measure our society is comprehensively bankrupt. From the federal treasury down to the suburban cul-de-sacs so much loaned money is either not being paid back, or is at risk of never being paid back, that the suckage of presumed wealth... This would seem to be the very essence of monetary deflation -- money defaulted out-of-existence.
...the upshot will be something at least twice as bad as the Great Depression of the 1930s: people with no money in a land with no resources (with manpower that has no discipline), hardly any family farms left, cities that are basket-cases of bottomless need, comatose small towns stripped of their assets and social capital, an aviation industry on the verge of death, and a railroad system that is the laughingstock of the world. Not to mention the mind-boggling liabilities of suburbia and the motoring infrastructure that services it.
The banks have been doing their death dance for an entire year now, pretending that their problems are those of mere "liquidity" (i.e. cash-on-hand) rather than insolvency... But the destruction of money (resulting from loans not paid back) is now so intense that the game of pretend has reached its terminal point. The question for the moment is exactly who and what will be crushed as these institutions roll over and die.
Complicating matters is a global oil predicament. There are only a few elements of it you need to know. 1.) that demand has now permanently outstripped supply; 2.) that new discoveries are too meager to offset consumption; 3.) That under the circumstances, the systems we rely on for daily life are crumbling. I've called this situation The Long Emergency.
Our chances of mitigating this, and of continuing our current way-of-life is about zero. I've tried to promote the idea that rather than waste remaining resources in the futile attempt to sustain the unsustainable (i.e. come up with "solutions" to keep suburbia running), that we should begin immediately making other arrangements for daily life -- mainly by downscaling and re-scaling everything from farming to commerce to the way we inhabit the landscape -- but my suggestions have proven unpopular even among the "environmental" elites, who are too busy being entranced by new-and-groovy ways to keep all the cars running.
Come to think of it, perhaps they were coming from the suburbs 
