it's still a peculiar place II

there's a laundromat in the town i live in that has the residential quarters for the owner/manager attached to the back of the shop...they live where they work...don't see that much anymore...but that's the way it used to be...industrial capital clustered its operations in urban centers along rail lines and everyone but the elite lived close to work...light rail allowed the managerial class to escape to the "suburbs" but the real change came, as brugman and a multitude of others point out, with the advent of the federal highway system...that was when the real socio-spatial adjustment removing living space from work space came about and all but the very poor became suburban and exurban commuters...everybody gets their own chunk of space ( and i am guilty as anyone of this...my commute is only six miles...but it is still a commute form a bedroom suburb to an industrial center even if it markedly shorter than most...you can tell how close i live to industry be the property values ) and that was where things stood until 2008...the concept of everyone owning their own space may still be valid in the eyes of developers ( witness the signs...even the corn field i have been monitoring all season has been sold [unit 2] but i wonder where the capital is...it has been frozen in corn all summer...wonder what's on tap for 2013 )..it may just be a smaller chunk of space with a bit less of a mcmansion...so arable land acreage will continue to shrink if the conventional wisdom set has its way...that could prove to be regrettable down the road...i would never really have noticed how complicated the relationship between the rural and the urban is if ii hadn't started driving around farm fields and looking to see what's in them...food can take you to odd places.