The Small Town Project

Nearly two weeks ago I sent the mayors of Mt. Vernon and Lisbon, and all members of the city councils whose email addresses I could find, invitations to share their views on this site. I asked as well that they forward the invitation to members of the two planning and zoning commissions, as their email addresses are not readily available. No official has yet commented on the site.
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This week I attended the League of Women Voters candidates’ nights in both MV and Lisbon. In MV, residential growth quickly emerged (with no prompting from me!) as the central issue of discussion. Our city government has a good deal of progress to make in recognizing the difference between improvement and mere physical expansion. But I see hints of progress. There are a few officials and candidates who are at least thinking about some of the right questions. Ivan Vonk and Carine Klein, for instance, are capable of a degree of independent thought which has been scarce in recent city government decisions. (more…)

Marion has undergone a transition from a classic small town linked to its larger neighbor of Cedar Rapids by interurban railroad to a major urban center in a growing metropolitan area. — From the Introduction to the Marion Comprehensive Development Plan

Image source: City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks

Can you see it? It’s bearing down on us.
We’re lucky in our little corner of the heartland. Many of our smaller towns and rural areas haven’t yet been overrun by residential development. (Some, such as Marion, are the sad exceptions.) We still have time to stop it before we lose the character of our towns and rural areas and vast tracts of our undeveloped land.

One challenge we face is that of helping citizens appreciate the gravity of the situation at a stage when their lives have not yet been seriously affected by it. A kind of inertia until a problem is truly in our collective face seems to be a basic human tendency. (more…)

This weblog is a little more than a month old. For those of you just tuning in, I thought it would be a good time to recap the highlights so far. For those who have been reading all along, I hope this post helps consolidate the picture of all we’ve covered. We don’t want to get lost in the minutia of individual articles. Effecting change requires a constant grasp on the big picture.
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In historic Lisbon — definitely not paid for by newer developments.

In our last installment in this three part series we showed how an assertion heard around here, “The new developments pay for the old ones,” implies an unwitting admission on the part of those in the growth machine, an admission that nearly all our residential development fails to pay for itself. Now that’s something the Small Town Project and the growth machine agree on! Continued residential development costs more to serve than the revenues it generates, and creates a deficit, sucking up the revenues generated by farmland, open land, and commercial property. Ultimately it leads to tax increases for all of us, and diverts money away from beneficial community projects. We covered much of this in the first of our myth-debunking essays.
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Growth is good, they say, reciting like an incantation the prime article of faith of the official American religion: Bigger is better and best is biggest. Growth, they
tell us, means more jobs, more bank accounts, more cars, more people, leading
in turn to the demand for more jobs, more economic expansion, more industrial
development. Where, when, and how is this spiraling process supposed to reach
a rational end — a state of stability, sanity, and equilibrium?

Edward Abbey, One Life At A Time, Please

Abbey made those comments in about 1984, in part in response to growth projections he’d heard for Phoenix and Tucson. I grew up in Phoenix. Scottsdale, really, but it’s all the same now. One day soon I’ll share some stories of growth from a town that, in 1950, was about the same size as Lisbon.

Monday night: Today I received an anonymous email from someone who disagrees with some of my views on the site. Well, probably all of them. First, I want to mention that I’m not much interested in private debate with anonymous emailers as it does nothing to bring information to the citizens of our communities. I have therefore made additions to the “contact the author” form and the comment policy to minimize this sort of thing.

With that in mind, I invite the emailer to comment under this article. Can you support your position with logic or data? Let’s discuss it. (more…)

Stonebrook — They claim this pays for the rest of the town. Hmmm…

So far on the Small Town Project, we’ve debunked two common assertions made by the “growth machine,” showing how they are in fact myths. When you examine the various arguments these folks toss about in their efforts to justify unending residential development, it’s not only the disinformation which shines through; it’s the illogic as well. And as we’ve seen, the two sometimes overlap.

Now we come to a myth which flatly contradicts another. (more…)

In an effort to keep the information here fresh and accurate, I’ve inserted a small update in each of two past articles. It’s essentially the same bit of information in each, resulting from my own ongoing education in these matters. Look for the (temporarily) green now [10-24] back to normal text in “Exploding the Big Myth” and “If Not Subdivisions, Then What?”

I’ve touched on this elsewhere, and a version of the question came up in discussion under the first article on the site. But that’s probably too buried for a lot of people to have seen it. So because I know this will keep coming up, especially if I haven’t thoroughly dispensed with it, I’ll devote this post to it, using a slightly edited version of the same comments I made in discussion:

So you wanna keep people out, eh?
Somehow a “no residential growth” stance is sometimes confused with a “we don’t want anyone moving here” stance. One has little to do with the other.
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