Concealing The Suburban Nightmare

James Howard Kunstler
October 20, 2005

James Howard Kunstler is the author of The Long Emergency and 12 other books. This article originally appeared in the author's website and appears here by permission.

When the Museum of Bad Ideas is built by Steve Wynn in Las Vegas (designed by Frank Gehry), surely one of its remote galleries will contain this week's cover story in The New York Times Sunday Magazine about the suburban homebuilding racket titled "Chasing Ground ." The story focuses on one of the nation's leading large production builders, the Toll Brothers, based in Philadelphia, and "ground" is their own cute phrase for the parcels of meadow and cornfield that they magically convert into suburban housing subdivisions all over the nation.