Cows on the hillside
VT
sprawl is largely due to the opportunism of town governments as they
transformed farm fields into shopping plazas within sight of the
interstate--St. Albans, So. Burlington, Williston, perhaps now even the
land around exit 4. Few if any of these shopping plazas included
mixed-use and thus housing and historic Main Streets were ignored.
Suburban housing developments within driving distance occurred
simultaneously as speculators exploited people's desire to live in
proximity to stores with free parking. To some degree this is a cultural
problem--confusing a lawn with "being in the country", measuring social
status in square feet of lot size. And it is baked into the law, as
with the tax deduction on home mortgage interest that discriminates
against renters and hence cities, something Tony has pointed out, as
well as the bias of federal transportation funding for highways and not
mass transit. The result of this self-re-enforcing loop has been a free
for all with bulldozers ripping up farm land and Act 250 having little
or no deterrent effect.
Developers and realtors and,
sadly, our city planners think in terms of "adding to the housing stock"
rather than building viable communities. Case in point, the demolition
of 100 homes and blighting of another 100 around the airport in a
cavalier manner--potentially many thousands with the arrival of the
F-35.
What has revived other cities--Boston for
example--is in part a cultural shift. Children that grew up in suburbia
fled to the more exciting and diverse city as soon as their adult status
and incomes permitted. Housing costs there also shaped the drop in
fertility. That was good and bad, the bad being gentrification that took
place in the absence of programs to adequately provide subsidized
scatter-site housing or sufficient Section 8s. And Boston continued to
benefit from the 100 year old mass transit system that gets many (if too
few) off the roads. At the same time historic preservation prevented a
complete conversion to office and apartment towers and thus kept the
city attractive and "authentic", as with Beacon Hill, Quincy Market,
etc. And the "draw" of population continued to be a strong and
multi-faceted economy--health care, finance, insurance,
education/culture--even as manufacturing was forced off-shore by federal
policy.
There were shortfalls and injustices aplenty
in this process--displacement, congestion, racism, rent gouging--but in
American terms, Boston works. Burlington? It isn't bringing in new
people to take advantage of expanding economic sectors. If anything, it
is the state's small farm economy and food processing boom that requires
a rural base that takes up a bit of the economic slack. Here, beginning
with urban renewal and after a pause, continuing via market forces,
property speculators working with government have pushed out the lower
income segment of the existing population from adequate housing options
and there is a beggar they neighbor competition going on. Downtown
property owners want a bigger share of a static (for now) population and
are buying into the "street vitality" schmooze and tourism we see in
Plan BTV opportunistically because they can't offer much in the way of
new productive jobs.Hence the fixation on "students" as a new renter
demographic in the city center. But higher ed is static in a state that
refuses to pay for it with tax money; the health care industry here
grows only by absorbing regional health entities and markets. Winter
sports hit the cliff of climate change and even the lake with its "snot
algae" seems in decline, water quality issues and over-developed marina
facilities making it less and less attractive.
What's
the answer? While I don't know, experience tells us that we must look
at solutions from technical "experts" with skepticism as they are
usually the minions of economic opportunists. We must value our own
experience as city residents, defending and expand what we know works as
a shared environment while being open to new possibilities.
The
towns in Chittenden County have an immense task in preserving the rump
end of open space, reconstituting their town centers, and enhancing mass
transit. I don't think what we do in Burlington about Burlington will
affect that one way or the other, though we can certainly trade ideas.
-Charles Simpson
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