Another one of those unanticipated impacts

One of those weird little ironies about the whole growth management issue (and which no NIMBY seems to notice or admit) is that there is no escape except poverty.

If you implement draconian restrictions on growth to keep out the undesirables you make your city or town all the more attractive...the snob-value/forbidden-fruit syndrome. You get intense competition to be in this rare spot. Housing prices go up and only the wealthy can live there.

And then of course if you plan to accomodate (albeit perhaps grudgingly) a growing population and invest in a  civic infrastructure of parks, transportation facilities of all kinds, schools, museums, etcetera then you do indeed make your area more attractive and, yes, you get growth from that direction.

The only solution is a stagnant economy, led by a small reactionary elite which is unwilling to see change, to share the fruits of a dynamic economy and which is happy to keep its people barefoot and uneducated. So if you are really against growth in every way and can see no way to accommodate it gracefully, vote for poverty. OK, I exaggerate, but you get the idea. Success (e.g. M'Soft, Boeing, Starbucks, Amazon, UW, and many more) bring people here.

So far as I can see, the only choice is how to accommodate growth, not whether to allow it. I think that I am in the popular majority on this one — rare so I cherish the feeling — even though there may be intense debate in the community about the wisest how.

Comments

[Jesse]

Exactly! I'd like to see a 2030 plan for Seattle like the one recently unveiled for NYC.

http://www.nyc.gov/html/planyc2030/html/home/home.shtml

[Jarrett]

Yes, that's the bottom line, but the politics are harder because everyone has a visceral attachment to home. It's a tribute to the success of our community that our sense of home extends beyond our front door to include it, so that we respond to potential changes in the community as though they were happening in our own bedrooms. To be effective, we have to honor these feelings even as we gently insinuate the ironclad logic you adduce.

And of course, it's possible to love prosperity and still hate Microsoft.

Cheers, j