Just like greed, growth IS good

Well, if that title doesn’t bring you in to read, I don’t know what will.

Eben Fodor brought up a lot of good arguments as I described in my previous post on this subject. Moreover, most of my commentors on Friday’s post have likened what he described to the situation in Salisbury and I can’t say that I disagree. But before I get back to him, there is the matter of the Wicomico County zoning change I addressed in the early part of that post.

To review, the Wicomico County’s Rural Areas Planning Committee wanted to do away with cluster projects in agricultural areas – in essence a 100 acre parcel would have its allowable number of units fall from 33 (one per three acres) to at most 10. Looking at it from an infrastructure standpoint, with 10 units on the parcel you still have to build roads, sewer lines, and water lines to each residence, and there’s still going to be a lot of it necessary to connect all of the houses, in part because they’re spaced further apart. I’ll concede that fewer units would be less of an impact on fire, police, and schools but not appreciably.

Either way, the ordinance as I understand it seems pretty wasteful unless you wanted to build something like a combination golf course and housing development, otherwise that’s a lot of extra infrastructure to be built amongst the more spread-out residences.

Now to Eben Fodor’s remarks. Many of the comments I received and have noticed on other sites regarding his remarks note that what he said is eerily like the situation in Salisbury. On that I agree to an extent, particularly with the $14 million Old Mall project TIF. In that case, growth will cost the taxpayers of Salisbury dearly despite the fact that the project was a redevelopment and at least in theory had much of the necessary infrastructure in place. Moreover, I tend to favor growth go to areas where the required parts are in place or easily extended, such as water, sewer, and roadways. The city of Salisbury has overreached in this aspect as well at times with “pipestem” annexations.

But I found that Fodor’s argument and those who ally themselves behind it seem to favor stopping growth altogether. It may not happen in the short term, but once a precedent is made that becomes the template for future actions. At first they may succeed in restricting growth to the areas slated for growth in the comprehensive plan (in our case, the axis along U.S. 13 from Fruitland to Delmar.) In the next decade or so, it would be a good compromise but after that the choice land becomes more scarce and land values go in two directions – skyrocketing in the small area allowed for growth and plummeting in other areas where growth is not allowed to go.

It is the aim of some on the fringes of the environmental movement to return vast swaths of land to their natural state, without human intervention. Fodor alluded to that thought when he noted during his presentation that we should “give other species more room.” In 2001, the state of Maryland adopted a program intended to create “green infrastructure” but did not renew it in 2006 as far as I can ascertain. (You’ll note the website’s out of date as well.) Program Open Space does continue though with many of the same goals.

Tying in with this effort to some degree are the zero population growth supporters, another group Eben alluded to. The lengthy comments on my first part can be attributed in part to a group called Negative Population Growth, and we just happen to be in one of their target areas. This comes from their 2007 Progress Report:

The Chesapeake Bay is the third largest estuary in the world and it has been ravaged for decades by overdevelopment in its vast watershed. Today, it is more threatened than ever before as dozens of America’s fastest-growing counties lie within its domain. In the coming months, NPG will be looking to our members who live in New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, Delaware, Maryland and Washington, D.C. to pressure their top elected leaders to take steps now to halt the rapid, uncontrolled development that is proving to be so damaging to this national treasure. It makes absolutely no sense to spend billions of taxpayer dollars a year to “clean up” the Chesapeake while simultaneously permitting sprawling developments that will attract hundreds of thousands more people – and greater sources of pollution. Member response to the early stages of this project will determine whether we take it to a larger scale.

It’s quite possible Fodor is part of an anti-growth full court press being placed on our region by those who have other interests in mind.

But I didn’t want to write this sounding like a conspiracy theorist. Most of what Fodor dealt with was on the financial end of growth. Indeed, infrastructure is not cheap, but my main argument is at the basic fundamental level. Under a capitalistic society growth is truly inevitable. The American Dream has generally been to grow up, get a good job, get married, buy a house, have a family, and spoil the grandkids after you retire. Naturally, each generation wants the next to have a better life, which means a better and bigger house in a nice neighborhood.

Our region happens to be a desirable area, and that’s actually good for us. Many complain that our kids grow up here and go to college here but then leave to the Western Shore because there are no good jobs here. Sometimes they come back to raise the family and start the cycle again but closing the door on development also would shut the door on their hopes of returning to find a good, solid job. Yes, we seem to have an imbalance of new residential units now but the cycle is due to catch up because these people have to have their demands for services met.

I also wanted to make another point on jobs. Yes, creating more local jobs attracts people from outside the area – why do you think I’m here? No one locally had the particular knowledge or skills my employer wanted, so they sought my services from Ohio since I was available at the time. Conversely, my skills and knowledge weren’t necessarily needed in Toledo, Ohio because there was too little growth going on at the time. Thus, they lost population because I moved here.

But where do people go if there are no jobs to be had anywhere, and how do they live? If everywhere you turned there were onerous restrictions on growth, the capitalist economy would be strangled and we’d all be living like North Koreans. There was a reason I talked about the “watermelon” crowd – green on the outside but socialist red in the middle.

And with our state government actively doing its part to place a higher and higher burden on landowners through regulation and taking valuable land off the tax rolls (I don’t buy the answer I got to my question regarding property values going up around open space enough to offset the loss of revenue), the NIMBY mindset plays well with their goals.

Do we need good planning and reasonable regulations for growth? Of course. But, despite the best efforts of Eben Fodor, he could not convince me that growth is not good. Future generations are depending on it.

Author: Michael

It's me from my laptop computer. View all posts by Michael