Land for Me But Not for Thee 
By Martin Harris

If you’ve ever harbored the dark and nasty suspicion that a "no-growth" objective lies semi-concealed behind the decisions of planning and zoning folks who are specifically so driven by their demanding constituencies, you’ll want to read Robert Bruegmann’s "Sprawl". No need to start at page 1; go directly to the pages around 162.

In a succinctly-designed description and label, suburbanization analyst/author  Bruegmann describes "…families who have recently moved to the suburban periphery are often the most vociferous opponents of exactly the same kind that created their own house…" and how "…stopping or slowing the growth of new development and sprawl often provides great material advantage to existing residents [for example] the preservation of open space bear them without requiring its public purchase and possible higher taxes".  He calls them "the incumbents’ club".  In a clumsier description, we used to call them "lifeboaters", thinking of Titanic survivors, once safely aboard their escape craft, batting late-comer others back into the freezing waters.

This isn’t to denigrate "lifeboaters"; I’ve been reading some histories of the downward urbanization spirals of the NYC regions of northern Manhattan and the Borough of The Bronx, from rural farm country to exurban estates to row housing to apartments to slums, and it’s hard to deny that a little development prevention (which would have meant decentralization of development and sprawl to someplace else) would have been a good idea.

Lifeboaters aren’t entirely no-growthers, as the Pittsford Community Corporation illustrates with its proposal to convert the 14 surviving acres of the Forrest farm, a stone’s throw from Route 7, into the village common Pittsford never had. A good many towns directly on the Route 7 corridor, like Ferrisburgh, are similarly lacking that historically-important design feature and are trying belatedly to fix it; while towns like Orwell, Shoreham, and Bridport adjacent to the Route 22-A corridor are better situated in the 21st century because of some bypass planning –the Military Road"—in the late 18th and early 19th  centuries. They’re beneficially endowed with more in-village green space and less in-village through traffic. Brandon’s and Middlebury’s town fathers might be well advised to read the histories before continuing their decades-long and ever-more-expensive-to-reverse bypass opposition. Here in Tennessee’s own Northeast Kingdom (just as in Vermont, the handful of counties north and east of Washington) the village of Jonesborough has benefitted enormously from a ‘50’s era by-pass, effectively segregating the downtown-destroyers --through traffic and large-lot commercial development--  from the local traffic/small-scale commercial activity the village was built for. But, far more typically, lifeboaters (or the incumbents’ club, if you prefer) are consistently, vigorously, and skillfully pursuing their no-growth agenda. Sometimes, they say so quite clearly.

Consider, for example, the musings on the virtues of no-growth by one Marianne Ward of Burlington, who writes in a 21 May 09 LTE to the Rutland Herald that "Vermont’s population growth is a result of a whopping 3 million people being added to the US population each year…" and so on, citing high fertility rates and illegal immigration. She goes on to cite a 1970 VNRC survey finding that 68% of the locals then wanted zero growth or even better, shrinkage. Actually, Vermont has the lowest fertility rates in the nation, well below replacement levels, and if it weren’t for the in-migration of (mostly, but who knows?) Volvo-driving retirees from New Jersey to raise the population from 390K in 1960 to 621K today, raising average age and income levels, the out-migration of young adults with their children at highest-in-the-nation rates would have shrunk Vermont just as they wish.

Here’s the delicious irony: those who profess to seek no growth and even population reduction are the majority of the over-200K who have flooded in, over the last four decades, boosting the population to nearly twice its former head-count; while it’s the growth and development, capital-investment and opportunity-seeking folks who have fled, leaving behind the opposite of their own objectives. If the Jersey in-migrants had really wanted to keep Vermont "…a place that offers a better quality-of-life…" in Ward’s words, they would have stayed away. They didn’t. As Ms. Ward writes, "There are more out-of-staters living in Vermont now than people who were actually born here". 

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights