Re: Fw: "to" or "from" (fwd)

[Robert Hoffmann <escape@alt-escape.com>]

At 04:10 PM 10/06/1999 -0700, Keith and Margaret Howe wrote:
>Luckily, thanks to growth, there are also more resources and brainpower
>around to solve them.

I am familiar with the paradigm as such:  A major employer moves to town,
bringing lots of jobs.  Developers move in to build houses for the imported
employees.  For weeks, perhaps months, the mayor and newspapers talk about
how wonderful it is that the town is growing.  Developers get rich; the
company benefits from tax abatement or whatever advantages brought it to town.

Then, for ten years, the town struggles with no-longer-sufficient
infrastructure--streets, schools, sewer system, waterworks, fire & rescue,
etc.  The new mayor and city council want to raise taxes to pay for
improvements, but the population balks.  Slowly, over the course of
decades, the town, through incremental improvements, brings the community
closer to the standard of living that it had BEFORE all of that wonderful
growth.

In the mean time, jobs were taken from another city, workers moved away,
housing was abandoned, squalor ensues.  One community's growth was another
community's malaise.

This is certainly the pattern which helped contribute to the decline of
Cleveland, and made Medina County, where I come from, one of the
highest-growth counties in Ohio.  And this pattern visits city after city,
town after town.  This type of sprawl is not growth, it is a program to
shift wealth into the hands of developers and construction companies.

Population increase is not responsible for housing and shopping development
in this country.  For 20 years, the population of Northeast Ohio hardly
grew at all, but housing developments engulfed the countryside, as the
heart of Cleveland rotted.  There is a massive surplus of housing in this
country, and much of it goes unfilled.

While Moscow and Pullman do not have problems of this magnitude, we see a
creep in this direction:  The impending development of the corridor and the
development north of Moscow lure residents and businesses away from the
city centers, leaving houses and shops empty.  In the mean time, the
development creates a demand on infrastructure that the new "growth" cannot
pay for, threatening an overall increase in taxes to make up for a
proportional decline in services.



Bob Hoffmann                         229 East C St., Suite B
Alt-Escape Adventures                Moscow, ID  83843  USA
http://www.alt-escape.com            Phone: (208) 883-0642
                                     Fax: 1-800-683-3799