I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got
At What Price Progress?
This is not a blog about the law, at least today. Not sure where to start, so I’ll just start.
A few weeks ago, I think it’s when they announced that the Wholestone Foods meat processing plant was not going to open (maybe at all, and certainly not for awhile) that a recurring theme came to me. In the article in the newspaper talking about it, one of the local politicians said something like “sorry we aren’t going to have those 1,000 high-paying jobs.”
Similar sentiments were used in the lead-up to the vote last November on the future of Wholestone, or any number of projects or ideas that have been presented in the past decade, locally or nationally. They all talk about new jobs, more employees, more this, more that, with no discussion whatsoever about whether “more” is actually a good thing. It has become accepted in our society that we should always want to go from a 1,700-square-foot house to a 3,000 square-foot house, from a Chevy Malibu to a Lexus ES330, from a 16-foot boat to an 18-foot boat. There is very little discussion of the cost of those so-called improvements.
But the costs are high. Americans are awash in debt, and we’re told that to be helpful to the economy, spending is our highest calling. Our entire system of taxation in South Dakota is hinged upon the fact that the more anyone earns, the bigger the home he or she will purchase, as property taxes are a primary revenue source. That’s probably held to be true over time, and how most of us have been programmed to respond to any changes in income. Expenses always rise to meet income. I get proposed budgets in divorces where one side claims to “need” more money than the two of them made together when they were a couple.
We have seen what happens with this rapid growth. Crime increases. The city spreads out in all directions, looking for all the world like every suburban nightmare in any city in America - strip malls, chain restaurants, dollar stores, and the death of mom-and-pop operations. Generic houses built with inferior materials. There are large swaths of this town that could be picked up and dumped in Maple Grove and no one would notice the difference. Housing costs go through the roof to the point where a working person (especially a young working person) cannot have both the credit history and the financial wherewithal to rent an apartment on his or her own, much less buy a house.
Yet folks clamor for a Dave n Busters, or another Chipotle, and line up around the block for Chick-fil-A or Tastee Kreme donuts. Yuck. Let’s say we added 1,000 jobs at a meat-processing plant, as well as a few thousand more at factory distribution stores across the periphery of the town. Where do you suggest we put these people? Our unemployment rate is so low now you have a very hard time finding workers, so wages rise, and the businesses tack on those additional costs to their products, so everything costs more, and the gap between the have’s and have-not’s increases steadily. These workers must come from somewhere else, so we’re not really improving the lives of anyone who lives here now (other than the owners of those new operations, I’ll grant you that).
People gripe when they’re going to put a WalMart in their neighborhood. People gripe when the West Side is so clogged with traffic in the mornings and at night that they want to rip up the middle of the city to make for more traffic lanes plowing right through the middle of the near West side (that didn’t happen, thankfully). You want to live away from a box store? Buy a house in the middle of town. Stop valuing a 30-minute commute for a quarter of an acre and no mature trees.
Saw something again recently that suggested that we’d go from 200,000 to 300,000 in the next decade or decade and a half. Why? Why is it always accepted that growth is good? Why is it assumed that this town being half-again bigger would be, in any measurable way, a better place to live? Why have we accepted the notion that “more” is “more?” To me, more people equals more traffic equals worse roads equals more time to get anywhere. Used to be able to hit the interstate within a few minutes of leaving my house - no more. Going from downtown to hearings in Canton is 10 minutes longer than it used to be, just to get out to Highway 11 and far enough South for traffic to ease. What is coming - other than those 100,000 bodies? What amenities would accompany them, other than broader and broader talons of growth, spreading the same mediocre convenience and mass-consumption that we already have in abundance?
I’m not opposed to progress. Much can be done to improve the quality of lives and the opportunities for people. But there is no bright line between progress and unchecked growth, and we proceed with the assumption that there is. Why is it that we claim to yearn for the simplicity of the past while simultaneously trying to pave it over to make way for an In-and-Out Burger?
There are solutions - this town has done a fair job of making sure we address those solutions in long-term planning, though those task forces are often undermined by political forces who simply want to announce the next new thing. In a future blog, I am going to talk about those solutions. For this town. For a way of looking at things that helps resolve problems before they arise. For a philosophy that takes the word “growth” out of the equation and replaces it with “worth” and “progress” and “improvement.”