Seven Stages On The Path To Over-Development
Quality-of-life battles are nothing new, yet they still show up in the headlines. Not so long ago the contests were mostly about big scale, public places like forests, high-rises, rivers, lakes, and canyons. Now there are testy disputes closer to home, right in our backyards, for example. Quality of life has become more of a personal matter, less of a political one. People who live and vote in Santa Fe, Jackson Hole, Tahoe City, Ashland, and Friday Harbor are finding that they can't sit back and quietly let SOE (someone else) do it all. SOE can't handle the load. In many communities, the locals have already waited too long. The citizens neglected to get involved, to fix things before they broke, and after they broke it was too late. Like an anchor lost overboard in deep water, quality of life is difficult to retrieve.
In my experience, people who live in special, natural places seem to traverse seven stages on their way to losing their quality of life to over-development. The stages are: Innocence, Creeping Commercialism, Boom-time, Call for Action, Planning Dance, Lawyers' Field Day, and Too Late.
Stage 1. Innocence. The prevailing mind-set during this stage is perhaps akin to that which may have existed in the Garden of Eden. The line of thinking runs: Nothing much can go wrong here in this beautiful place; everyone is a right thinker like me; local government is on guard; folks are reasonable; it won't happen here. Particularly in Western USA, we have long had a sort of blind faith that open spaces will somehow absorb the negatives of population growth with all of its implications. The working assumption has been that our quality of life will continue indefinitely.
Stage 2. Creeping Commercialism. This stage is usually facilitated by elected officials who were elected based on promises of more jobs and lower property taxes. The officials are happily assisted by public servants eager to build larger departments, and the officials are often supported by big-parcel landowners who are open to any chance to cash in on the times. The story line runs: Growth (development, construction) is good; it creates employment and prosperity for all. Bigger is better. Why if we just add a few thousand square feet more of retail space here, a stoplight there, extend our airport's runways a bit, and allow fifteen or twenty condos per an acre in selected, view corridors, soon we will all have smooth sailing. So the incantations go. As part of the commercialism, established Ma & Pa real estate brokers are replaced by big league chains with city-scale advertising budgets. They stoke demand for the bits and pieces of paradise. For locals, things that were once an annoyance a few weekends a year slowly become a fulltime problem. Some people start wondering why SOE doesn't do something. Meanwhile, creeping commercialism makes for good bar and cocktail party chatter.
Stage 3. Boom-time. Sometimes a single event suddenly puts the geographical jewel on the map. Then creeping commercialism accelerates to warp speed. Knowledgeable people I know say that that the boom-time at Lake Tahoe was triggered by the 1960 Winter Olympics held at nearby Squaw Valley. The folks in Jackson Hole saw land prices rise skyward when several movie stars bought into the local scene. In Santa Fe, where BMWs now outnumber pick-up trucks, an enterprising series of smaller, crowd-attracting, annual events (boomlets?) seems to have paved the road for over development. The San Juan Islands made it into the big times in recent years courtesy of National Geographic, Sunset, SEA, and other magazines. During boom-time, by any measure, the overall quality of life (air or water quality, road congestion, crime rate, cost of living, noise level, parking availability, prices, pace, etc.) starts falling perceptively. Almost always, development outruns public services-roads, sewers, schools, police-and the taxpayers are expected to pick up the tab to fill the gap. More than one once-smaller community is currently in a state of political siege over just this item of who is to pay for all the "progress."
Stage 4. Call for (Government) Action. At some point in time the deterioration finally hits home with a critical mass of people in the community at large. Enough farmers, realtors, doctors, plumbers, artists, store owners, mothers and fathers, hermits, teachers, and retirees find they can't get on the ferry any more without a hassle, or that the constant airplane noise is producing headaches, or that it is less and less fun to go into town. Then the backlash starts. Someone who remembers the good old days rallies the troops with a town hall meeting of some kind. A few newcomers or young activists show up at sessions of the public bodies and ask questions that go unanswered. Local newspapers carry heavy words on the editorial and letters-to-the-editor pages. Slowly an attempt to halt the rush to urbanization is mounted, but by now there is great momentum to grow, no matter the consequences.
The record of the past twenty-five years indicates that only a few communities have been successful in regaining control from the bigger-is-better interests and mentality. The common denominator in the successful communities seems to be that the people who live there-young, old, full-, part-, and life-timers-all get involved in a substantive way in protecting their collective quality of life. Otherwise, the better-organized, commercial-interests groups prevail with the governing bodies and paid staffs, and the downward spiral in the quality of life continues.
Stage 5. Planning Dance. This very popular dance is held with live music (public hearings) in a search for one or more tunes everyone can agree to and hum. Planning, seriously undertaken, flushes the commercial interests out into the open where they can be seen, at least. Hired soloists (consultants, attorneys) usually, but not always, end up front-and-center in the process. The presiding, elected officials typically lay back and look for the lowest-stress way to get through and end the debate, so they can head home. Leadership is in short supply when it comes to touchy matters such as land use and density. Water availability and sewer capacity are often the short-term stoppers to development. While this is all going on, the cracks in the usually antiquated government structure (overlapping jurisdictions, duplication of effort, turf wars between county, town, and area officials) become more obvious, if not glaring. Sometimes the dance brings the community together; other times it splinters it irrevocably. During the dance there are enough numbers and projections thrown around to prove anything. The whole event is basically done in waltz-time, and those with the most stamina prevail.
At Lake Tahoe, for example, where the planning dance has turned into a thirty-year marathon, it is interesting to note that even today after years of boom-time, the local counties involved are still in a budget hole. Most people would say the counties are worse off now than before the boom. The promised, economic benefits of growth have simply not materialized. And today congestion is normal, there are periodic lawsuits about the local airport noise and safety, water quality has deteriorated, tourism has degenerated, the cost of social services and seasonal unemployment are up, and so forth.
While the planning dance continues, the finite supply of land, waterfront, parking space, and community spirit shrinks.
Stage 6. Lawyers' Field Day. As the intangibles of quality of life bang up against the tangibles of fictional property rights and development agendas, the scene shifts to the courts. This shift regularly leads to injunctions, moratoriums, and other third-party restrictions. In effect, control passes out of the hands of the locals into, in the best case, neutrals. Once in a while an event like a sewage or oil spill, a broken water line, an airport accident, a high-profile bankruptcy, or big ugly building re-ignites the citizenry for a spell. Occasionally there is even a recall election, or maybe an attempt to actually implement a comprehensive land use plan-created during the Planning Dance. If, in this black hour, some leaders emerge who are able to pull things together, the community may be move off legal dead center and into a quality of life renaissance.
Stage 7. Too Late. If quality of life has not prevailed by this stage, it never will. In the unique communities of the land where a non-superficial ("deliberate" -HDT) lifestyle once dominated, much will have been replaced with standard, suburban substitutes. If tourism is important to the local economy, and it often is, it will have been mostly left to chance during the planning dance. Instead of there being high-quality, efficient, car-less visitor accommodations and programs that attract desired customers, year-round, at a tidy profit, there will be a dispersed, jumble of low-grade commercial and quasi-natural attractions. Traffic jams become the norm. Slowly, in place of a viable community made up of people who love and care for a place, there will be something less, by any thoughtful measure.
It is easy to shrug one's shoulders,
of course, and say that the demise of special places on our planet
Earth is inevitable. It can be blamed on the population explosion,
developers, sun spots, greed, Californians, or.... But, looking
back, as a veteran of a couple of such places, I think I have
to agree with Pogo who said, "I have met the enemy and he
is us."
Copyright © 1978, 1989, 2003 Steven C. Brandt.
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