Djelloul Marbrook

Since the end of World War II it has been gospel in the United States that all development is good. It creates jobs and fuels consumption. It’s never rapine, bad for the environment or corruptive of the public weal.

Farmers sell land to developers, developers lop off the tops of mountains for resorts, concrete spreads, the infrastructure groans—all this is good. That is the gospel according to our political exegetes. But what if their desire to be right outweighs their intellects?

I remember as a young reporter covering rural and semi-rural school districts that were literally under siege from builders and architects to build vast centralized school districts that would require costly and ultimately controversial busing.

It was all the rage in the 1950s. It was said to be good for everybody. It created an industry. The arguments in favor of it were unstoppable. But in retrospect was it good? Was it good to bus to hell-and-gone, to warehouse students in ways that were difficult to administer and police?

Wasn’t there an argument for the local school house, for the intimacy, the convenience, the tradition? Sure there was, but that argument was swamped by the builders, their architects, and everybody else who had something to gain from creating a new industry.

Today it’s the prison industry. The New York Times recently called us Prison Nation because one in one hundred or one in one hundred and thirty Americans, depending on how you measure it, are imprisoned. This is the highest rate of imprisonment in the world. Are we the most criminal nation? Of course not. But building and running prisons is big business, and nothing gets in the way of big business.

Has this grand compulsion to imprison reduced our crime rate? It depends on how you look at it. Some say yes, but others say the falling crime rate has more to do with demographics. The truth is we don’t know conclusively, but we do know we’re imprisoning people with more frequency than other nations.

Again and again I have seen developers corrupt local government with the siren song of jobs, an enhanced economy, a bolstered tax base. But more often than not what has happened is that precious land needed for the health of the ecosystem has been paved over and poisoned, taxes have risen to support expanded services, and the developers have moved on to fresh fields, leaving young and elderly taxpayers unable to keep up with escalating property assessments and tax rates, to say nothing of the cost of building reservoirs, sewer and storm systems, and providing other services.

Just as we need to discuss what government is for in America, so we need to ask whether all development is good. We need to ask ourselves whether the answer to all our ills is to continue to smother the land with cement and macadam. We need to stop caving in every time somebody with a plan to enrich himself promises us the moon. Of course he’s going to promise the moon.

But is the moon what we got for school consolidation? Is the moon what we got for abandoning our cities to the poor and building vast suburbs whose only answer to problems was to raise taxes? Is the moon what we got for allowing our own government in concert with private industry to savage the unions? Is the moon what we got for allowing the oil industry to sucker us into abandoning railroads and trolleys in favor of cars and trucks. No, what we got is $4 a gallon fuel prices and dependence on nations that wish us ill.

Not every scheme to make a buck is good. Not every new house, every new road, every new school is good. We have to stop kissing up to developers and to pay attention to where their hands are. Whatever happened to stewardship? Good stewards don’t get suckered by siren songs. The solution to a community’s challenges isn’t always build more homes.—DM