Stopping the Growth Machine

Alan Rhodes, a Bellingham resident, has lived in Phoenix, Arizona, and Riverside, California, two places ruined by runaway growth.

Recently I flew down to Southern California where I once lived. I landed at Ontario Airport, which is about 50 miles from Los Angeles, but the urban sprawl spreading out from LA and surrounding towns has completely filled in what was once a pastoral landscape of orchards and groves.

Anyone advocating a policy of urban growth should journey down to this part of the country to see the nightmare waiting at the end of their misguided philosophy. Freeways crisscross the land in concrete webs, but traffic is still bad all the time. The San Gabriel mountains hide behind clouds of brown smog.

One day I took a semi-circular drive from Palm Springs down to the beach, then back north to Ontario. I drove over 200 miles that day, and never escaped look-alike housing tracts, mega-stores and shopping malls.

When I arrived back in Bellingham, floating down over forests and farmland, one thought was in my mind: we can’t let the sort of people who destroyed what’s best about Southern California or Phoenix or Denver do the same thing here. And there are people who would do it gleefully.

Some people confuse growth with progress, while others mistakenly think that growth reduces unemployment. And there are developers with no values beyond quick profits who will exploit an area and then move on.

A very instructive moment for me occurred several years ago when I heard someone say “Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.” My ears perked up because it’s a place where I occasionally vacationed. The people talking were two developers, and one of them was so excited he could hardly contain himself.

“Coeur d’Alene,” he exclaimed “is gonna be a gold mine. Beautiful setting, near Spokane, interstate going right by—there’s no end to what we can do there. It can be the next Southern California!”

While I was depressed by the thought that any region could become another growth nightmare like Southern California, these two were oblivious to such concerns as sense of place and quality of life. They were counting dollars. I overheard this conversation about 10 years ago. Since that time, the Coeur d’Alene/Kootenai County area has been growing so fast that it has increased its population by an astonishing 55 percent!

What will rapid growth mean for Bellingham and Whatcom County? According to the city of Bellingham Planning Department, our predicted annual growth rate for Bellingham for the period from 2002 to 2007 is 2.1 percent. While that seems a small number, what would happen if we grew at that rate over time?

To find out, apply what is known as the “doubling formula.” Dividing growth rate into 70 gives you the number of years it will take for a population to double. At 2.1 percent, Bellingham would double every 33 years. Our 2002 population of 69,260 would reach 138,520 by 2035, and by 2068 we would be a city of 277,040.

Whatcom County, with a predicted 2002-07 annual growth rate of 2.3 percent would double every 30 years. The county’s 2002 population of 172,200 would double to 344,400 by 2032, and to 688,800 by 2062.

Small numerical changes can produce dramatic increases in the doubling rate. For example, if Bellingham were to return to its 3.1 percent annual growth rate of the years from 1995-2000, we would be begin doubling every 22 years. If that rate were increased by another 1.9 percent, Bellingham would be a metropolis of a million people by mid-century.

While some members of the real estate, financial, development and building industries will try to convince us that growth will be good, what does rapid growth really mean? We can probably count on the following consequences.

•More traffic. We already have traffic problems in Bellingham. This is clear to anyone who has navigated the Guide Meridian around Bellis Fair Mall, or crawled along Lakeway from Sudden Valley in the morning or tried to get across the bridge at Samish and Lincoln at rush hour.

•More growth means more cars. Even planned growth that tries to minimize auto use cannot completely solve the problem. Growth proponents have a simple answer: widen existing roads and build additional ones.

A recent review of research on this solution noted the irony that emerges from existing studies: “building more highways and widening existing roads...does nothing to reduce traffic. In the long run, in fact, it increases traffic. This revelation is so counterintuitive that it bears repeating: adding lanes makes traffic worse.”1

Basically, increasing capacity lures people to drive more, and spreading cities lead to longer commutes and more frequent trips. This phenomenon was observed as early as the 1940s, and has since been documented by numerous researchers.

One recent study in Cincinnati indicated that up to 43 percent of the traffic in the city could be attributed to one factor: increasing the road network. This paradox is known to the transportation industry as “induced traffic,” and averages 15 percent to 45 percent nationwide.2

There is no escaping it: growth means our traffic frustrations are only going to get worse, no matter how many millions we might spend building more roads.

•Loss of landscape and natural beauty. Whenever I’m on the Guide Meridian, or around Sunset Square, I am reminded of writer James Howard Kuntsler’s lament over what we are doing to our American towns:

“We drive up and down the gruesome, tragic suburban boulevards of commerce, and we’re overwhelmed at the fantastic, awesome, stupefying ugliness of everything in sight—the fry pits, the big-box stores, the office units, the lube joints, the carpet warehouses, the parking lagoons, the jive plastic townhouse clusters, the uproar of signs, the highway itself clogged with cars—as though the whole thing had been designed by some diabolical force bent on making human beings miserable. And naturally this experience can make us feel glum about the nature and future of our civilization.” 3

Research evidence shows that preservation of natural beauty is very important to most people. In one poll, 63 percent of respondents cited preservation of nature’s beauty as one of their reasons for supporting environmental protections.

In another study, when participants were asked to rate slides they viewed as positive or negative, positive ratings went to farmland and woods, while low ratings went to subdivisions and shopping plazas.4

If one remembers, when Albertsons wanted to build a Bellingham grocery store at Fairhaven Parkway and 30th Street, much of the opposition centered around residents not wanting to lose the trees that stood on that spot. Feelings ran so strong that when the store was built over neighborhood objections, people didn’t patronize it, and the store eventually went out of business.

There is also evidence that loss of natural beauty is literally bad for our health. Research conducted at both Texas A & M and the University of Delaware determined that exposure to visual clutter can result in elevated blood pressure, tension, mood swings and lessened job performance.5

Growth will bring more housing tracts, more strip malls, more concrete. Hills will be leveled, trees will fall, habitat will be decimated. In effect, we will be destroying much of what we treasure.

Environmental Degradation, Higher Taxes

•Environmental degradation. This category is so obvious that it hardly needs stating. More cars mean more exhaust emissions spewing into the environment. The air around us will become less healthy to breathe, and greenhouse gases will increase. More housing tracts mean more chemicals being sprayed onto lawns and shrubs, with some residue going into the air, and some into the ground water.

Sprawl threatens wetlands and agricultural areas. Increased development around Lake Whatcom means more runoff from roads and lawns going directly into the lake, the only source of drinking water for the city and much of the county.

•Higher taxes. These things are not pleasant to think about, but they are already happening, and will only get worse with growth and sprawl. To add insult to injury, we will be subsidizing all of this with our tax dollars. We will supply the money to make it easier for developers to ruin the quality of life in Whatcom County.

Local governing bodies here are no different from local governing bodies across the country—they do not assess development impact fees that reflect what growth will really cost in infrastructure and services. The most fraudulent argument advanced by pro-growth forces is that development is economically healthy because it adds to the tax base.

What they don’t tell you is that the infrastructure costs from development far exceed new revenues. Growth requires new schools, roads, fire departments, sewer and power lines and increased police protection. Nationwide research indicates that every average-sized new home costs taxpayers up to $30,000.6

Sprawling growth is the most expensive; on average, “for every dollar of tax revenue collected from sprawl development, municipalities pay $1.34 in services.”7

• Increased unemployment numbers. Another credo of pro-growth proponents is that growth creates jobs and therefore reduces the number of unemployed people. To the contrary, Professor Albert Bartlett has discovered that growth is far more likely to increase the jobless numbers.

As an area grows, new people flood in to take the jobs that are being created. The inflow of potential workers typically exceeds the number of new jobs. The pattern is for communities to stabilize with unemployment figures similar to what they had before. A community that had 5 percent unemployment and that doubles its population, will still have 5 percent unemployment after doubling, but will have twice as many unemployed people.8

• Loss of sense of community and sense of place. While some people like the anonymity of large cities, many other city dwellers dislike the feeling of alienation and isolation within a crowd that are characteristic of urban living. They long for what we already have: a small, friendly city with a distinct character, and a pleasant rural county with farmland and small towns.

People who live in Bellingham or other areas of Whatcom country are often here for the very things that growth would destroy—the sense of being in a community, a place where you know your neighbors, where you value familiar landscapes, where you are not just a face among the multitudes, and where your voice can make a difference in how things happen.

If you share the opinion that runaway growth endangers everything we value about the place we live, a logical question is, “How do we stop it?” A detailed analysis of growth control is beyond the scope of this essay; indeed, entire books have been written on the subject.

A first step might be to review some of the methods for curtailing growth that have worked elsewhere. One of the most readable books on this topic is Eben Fodor’s “Better, Not Bigger.” Here is a very brief sketch of just a few of the many methods Fodor covers.

•Development impact fees. By charging developers for the infrastructure and service costs of development, we stop subsidizing growth. Developers will have less incentive to exploit an area if they have to pay more of the real costs of growth.

•Environmental threshold standards. Standards are set for such things as water quality and air quality. Proposed development must demonstrate that it will not compromise these standards.

•Downzoning. Reducing allowed density is especially important in such areas as the Lake Whatcom watershed, where development threatens water quality, but it can be used more widely to limit development.

•Infrastructure spending restrictions. This approach involves establishing policies in which highest priority is given to maintaining and improving existing infrastructure before any funds can be spent on providing new infrastructure for development.

•Greenbelts. While urban growth boundaries can slow sprawling development, they are always in danger of being expanded. One solution is to establish permanent, protected greenbelts outside the existing boundaries.

•Performance standards. By setting community standards for such aspects of development as affordability, proximity to urban services and open space requirements, the character of growth can be shaped. This method can be used in conjunction with a point system that ultimately awards building permits to those developers most in harmony with the community.9

Fodor discusses these and other methods, and I would encourage people to study them in chapter six of his book. There are also excellent Internet sources for those interested in becoming involved in growth issues. The Web sites for 1000 Friends of Oregon (http://www.friends.org) and for 1000 Friends of Washington (http://www.1000friends. org) are very helpful.

Also highly recommended is the group Alternatives to Growth Oregon (http://www.agoregon. org), whose Web site features solid strategies and inspiring success stories.

After familiarizing ourselves with the problems, various solutions and the methodologies for implementing change, we can contact all members of both the city and county councils, as well as local mayors and the county executive, and tell them that this is a high-priority concern.

We can make growth issues a focus of our neighborhood associations. We should also be writing letters to local newspapers. And we should insist that candidates for public office take clear positions on growth. Indeed, we can make it a litmus test issue in future elections.

Novelist Thomas Wolfe once said, “You can’t go home again.” Many of us who have returned after long absences to places where we grew up or lived many years ago feel the poignancy of Wolfe’s observation. There is a profound sense of loss when one returns to an old home town to see Main Street boarded up, destroyed by the Wal-Mart on the outskirts.

Or one looks for once fertile farmlands, only to realize that they are now under housing tracts and strip malls. It can happen here. It’s already underway. But it’s not inevitable. We have the power to stop this, but we must begin now. §