Have a read of Timothy Egan’s Slumurbia, and tell me if it don’t sound just a tad too close to home.
And then wonder if our civic leaders shouldn’t do a little soul searching before jumping into more carpet-bombing development as soon as they smell an end to the Great Recession:
A few lessons about urban planning can be picked from the stucco pile.
One is that, at least here in California, the outlying cities themselves encouraged the boom, spurred by the state’s broken tax system. Hemmed in by property tax limitations, cities were compelled to increase revenue by the easiest route: expanding urban boundaries. They let developers plow up walnut groves and vineyards and places that were supposed to be strawberry fields forever to pay for services demanded by new school parents and park users.
Second, look at the cities with stable and recovering home markets. On this coast, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and San Diego come to mind. All of these cities have fairly strict development codes, trying to hem in their excess sprawl. Developers, many of them, hate these restrictions. They said the coastal cities would eventually price the middle class out, and start to empty.
It hasn’t happened. Just the opposite. The developers’ favorite role models, the laissez faire free-for-alls — Las Vegas, the Phoenix metro area, South Florida, this valley — are the most troubled, the suburban slums.
Come see: this is what happens when money and market, alone, guide the way we live. (NYT)
This is absolutely the case in Nor’town. When development pressure finally pushed homebuilders into North Las Vegas a decade ago, the previous City Council had an opportunity to build a much better city that what we got. Unfortunately, this opportunity was squandered on cheap housing in mostly cookie-cutter subdivisions. The developers got pretty much whatever breaks they asked for, and NLV ended up as a very mediocre community at best. Sadly, businesses primarily look for attractive, balanced, and well-managed cities when they are making decisions about where to locate, and North Las Vegas gets low marks in all of these categories in comparison with most other communities. The previous council never seemed to ‘get it’ that fast, easy development with little or no emphasis on quality of life was not the way to long-term stability.