Mediocre R US

It came to me as I was walking Charlie this afternoon what's wrong with America. That's a big statement, but it's a very simple concept, really: we have embraced mediocrity at all levels of our society. It's so pervasive that I can say with all sincerity that we've institutionalized and enshrined it.

That sounds too abstract, and it is. I will provide concrete examples.

Two Saturdays ago, I convinced Matt that we had to drive to the boonies to take a gander at the Denver area's newest retail center. As many of you know, I've been fascinated with retail since a very young age (at ten years old I used to beg my mother to take me to Cinderella City). This new retail center is a full 18 miles north of downtown Denver, on Washington Street between 160th and 168th Avenues. It's outside the new northern reaches of the 470 beltway that encircles 5/6 of the metro area (the final 1/6 is the Flatiron to Golden segment, which I hope will never be built). It's almost in Weld County.

Larkridge, the incredibly generic-sounding name for this new center, is envisioned as a new mega-node for retail, designed to attract everyone from Lafayette to Greeley, as well as residents of Thornton, Westminster, Broomfield, and even Northglenn (which has its own mega center, the Northglenn Marketplace, built about ten years ago on the site of the old Northglenn Mall). It's anchored by Home Depot, Circuit City, and Sears Grand, which is a kind of Wal-Mart-ish version of Sears (registers are grocery-store style at the front, but the prices aren't Wal-Martish at all). Undoubtedly, what will be its claim to fame, however, will be an anchor that hasn't yet opened: Daveco Liquors. This will be Colorado's largest liquor store, at 102,000 square feet (for comparison, this is approximately the size of three Barnes & Noble stores, or 1.75 large grocery stores, or slightly smaller than an old-style (non-Super) Wal-Mart. It's also slightly smaller than the Lord & Taylor that closed this year at Cherry Creek. Of course, the north metro area desperately needs this giant alcohol emporium--nearby Weld County has one of the highest traffic fatality rates in the nation, and his home to thousands of drunk drivers every day. Gotta feed the machine.

But why is Larkridge mediocre? Let me count the ways: one: it takes up nearly a full square mile of land. This is not a mixed-use (the current vogue in city planning, mixed-use combines retail, residential, office, and institutional uses in the same area, much the way towns were planned a century ago). It's 100% retail (national chain restaurants count as retail--this will have a Gunther Toody's and a Village Inn, boy oh boy). When you stand at the entrance to Office Max, you can barely make out human figures entering Home Depot. It's just an absolutely awful, terrible waste of what was once unharmful open space. Two: every single retailer here offers mediocre goods and a mediocre shopping experience that is easily replicated much closer to Denver's actual center of population. Three: it has a dumb name. Four: the crowd here doesn't know any better. You should have seen the folks we saw perusing the aisles of Sears Grand--people who actually think, even now, that George W. Bush is an honest and decent and wise man (to read more about Larkridge, go to westword.com; they did an article a few weeks ago on the new north metro retail scene).

The whole experience gave me the creeps. It got even creepier as we traveled back to civilization, because I decided to take Washington Street the whole way. We traveled through, in the following order: empty farmland zoned for residential use; stuccoed-and-Kentucky-bluegrassed subdivisions less than ten years old; more empty farmland, zoned for commercial use (very near my workplace); 1960s downscale suburb (Northglenn) with half-vacant strip malls lined with cigarette stores, check cashing rip-off places, and generic cell phone stores; another downscale 1960s suburb (the southern half of Thornton) with tacky old cedar-shake-shingled apartment complexes, tacky newish stucco-and-Spanish-tiled apartment complexes, and vacant grocery stores; a mish-mash of old truck farms and industrial buildings (including the Rocky Mountain News printing plant); Interstate highways (270 and 76); and Globeville (Denver's version of the Third World, with charmless century-old shacks sitting on soil contaminated with who knows how many carcinogens from the smelting plants and other industrial activities that have always taken place here, downstream from the wealthier parts of Denver). After Globeville, Washington hits the diagonal part of Denver's street grid, and disappears (only to reappear at Park Avenue east of downtown).

That long, long drive made me think. I recently read a fairly good (but slightly flawed) history of American land-use planning in the age of the automobile, Twentieth Century Sprawl by Owen Gutfreund. He shows how, from the earliest days of the automobile, Americans have allocated resources to the auto-industrial-road complex all out of proportion to those industries' benefit to our society. He looks at three case studies: a small town (Middlebury, VT); a rural area (the no longer rural Smyrna, TN, thanks to Nissan and Saturn); and a large city (Denver). What I most got out of his book was (and here he's saying exactly what James Howard Kunstler was saying in his earlier books before he got carried away with oil-bust apocalyptic scenarios--see my post of 8/14/05) that we have so prioritized roads, roadbuilding, free parking, and easy automobile access--in a way that no other country has--that we have, in essence, greatly compromised the American way of life.

Of course, you can argue that the American way of life is all about ease of movement, freedom to go wherever you want to go, etc. (and you will, if you're an individualism-at-all-costs pure Libertarian or conservative). And maybe there is something to that--I love to be able to drive wherever I want to go, on roads that are relatively smooth (think of trying to drive in Siberia or sub-Saharan Africa). Guilty pleasures.

But there has been a tremendous social cost to a century of prioritizing autos over people, and we see it everywhere, and we accept it as normal. We have sprawling Thorntons and Larkridges because land's cheaper out there--and the teenagers turn into Eric Harrises and Dylan Klebolds. We have health problems derived from too much sitting--there isn't enough time in the day to exercise when you commute an hour each way. We have disrupted families and underfunded social programs and dysfunctional schools (buy my sister's book--see two posts ago). And on and on.

The biggest social, cost, however (I argue) is: we accept mediocrity willingly, even enthusiastically. The sprawl which we have built has so neutered us, so deadened our senses, so conditioned us to "accept the inevitable" (see the piece on "Five Little Words" ["it is what it is"] in the December Vanity Fair) that we have compromised what made this a great country.

Why? One little word: money. The powers that be (and I'm no conspiracy theorist, but there are "powers that be") want it this way because mediocrity is more profitable than its opposite. Its opposite is fairly hard to define--but think of being able to buy things from local retailers at fairly reasonable prices that you can expect to last 20 years, and think of not being able to hear your neighbor's stereo through your bedroom wall at midnight because the walls are built flimsily, and think of the calm that comes from reading a good book in a comfortable, well-built chair in a room that has good lighting.

Yes, mediocrity is profitable: the concept of "planned obsolescence" as embraced by Detroit automakers many decades ago doesn't apply just to car design. Look at the synthetic stucco that has been such a popular building material for about 15 years--it's liberally applied over chipboard, on mega-mansions filled with cheap, ugly furniture and badly-designed rooms with unusable corners and ceilings that are so high that wearing down jackets indoors becomes necessary all winter long. Look too at (it's hard not to) Wal-Mart. They've done such a good job at farming everything out to the lowest bidder that most of what they import from Myanmar and Liberia to sell to thing-hungry Americans will end up in landfills in five years or less--but it's Always Low Prices, Always.

All of this has filtered into our collective psyches (mindsets, worldviews, whatever term you want to use) in insidious and innumerable ways.

The cure: I'm not sure there is one. But start by thinking about whether what you're buying or doing is for a valid, non-mediocre reason. If it is mediocre, think: is there another way? There isn't always--mediocrity is pervasive--but sometimes there is. It's up to every one of us to improve our society.