The other day while doing a Google search I ran across a comment in the Grand Rapids section of the Urban Planet forum where a couple of denizens of our fair city harrumphed that your executive director is "anti-growth". Exhibit A for their argument is this website. Apparently they disagree with my lack of enthusiasm for taxpayer-financed boondoggles and white elephants.
I would respond directly in the Urban Planet forum to the gentlemen who think my criticism of so-called public-private partnerships is "anti-growth". Alas, I was banned from the Urban Planet by one its hosts when I did not share his enthusiasm for a Ku Klux Klan rally held last spring in Spring Lake. So I'll put my answer here.
I suspect my Urban Planet critics have bought too deeply into the fashionable idea that manufacturing is dead and therefore think the importance I place upon retaining industry in the urban core of metropolitan areas like Grand Rapids is antiquated and reactionary. I also suspect that they do not understand that a metropolis consisting only of lawyers, doctors, accountants, teachers, bartenders, restauranteurs, professional athletes, actors, and scientists does not create the wealth needed to support itself. If an urban economy is not founded upon people who make, grow, or mine things -- i.e., the creators of wealth, then to survive it has to subsidized from regions where this wealth creation occurs. Of course, such a transfer of wealth is not politically sustainable, and to the extent that it endures, it is corrupting for the city receiving the hand-outs. My Exhibit A: Detroit.
If I'm wrong about what my critics think, then they should understand that wanting to preserve the wealth-creation engine of a city is pro-growth. It is an organic part of a city without which it begins to die, even with transfusions of wealth from elsewhere. And once you understand that a city is like a living, breathing organism, you begin to see that you cannot plan and control its growth. Its development should be unforced. At best you can only guide it. You learn that you cannot make it "cool" by political fiat. You become skeptical of grand designs like the Life Science Corridor that can only exist with taxpayer dollars. And you certainly don't see the sense in giving a billionaire government subsidies for a hotel project that wouldn't otherwise work.
If opposing this sort of forced development, which does more to line the pockets of insiders than benefit the public, makes me "anti-growth", I'll happily wear that Orwellian label.
[Click here for the latest the Executive Director has to say about the Urban Planeteers. - The Editor]
I'll give you a thumbs up on this one. It's funny how opposing growth paid for with tax dollars, or post-Kelo with the seizure of private property, is anti-growth.
Andy Postema
Posted by: Andy | Aug 16, 2005 at 03:17 PM