As I mentioned previously, I don’t post a lot on my personal blog about national politics. Even though there’s been a lot in the news the past week that has had me fired up, I’ve refrained from turning my personal blog into just one more place for a dude to rant about the candidates. Instead, I’m saving my few posts for the items that speak the most strongly to my personal interests, and things that I think most people who read this blog can relate to.
Which leads me to point to a story that was published Sunday in the Boston Globe, and will mostly likely be looked over in favor of juicier content. It’s a story of a small American town gone wrong. Suburban sprawl has spread like wildfire, and a quaint main street has been displaced by the unchecked development of big box stores and chain fast food. The wilderness is slowly getting paved over, and the town is losing it’s local identity and being replaced with the bland sameness that has been consuming similar cities across our country.
This is what happens when development goes unplanned. We wind up with an unsustainable environment where we can’t go anywhere without our cars, our streets don’t have sidewalks, and entrepreneurialism is a forgotten concept. High gas prices really hurt systems like this. Culture and community identity are really hurt by systems like this. Ultimately, the only winners are the corporations and developers who turn farmland to pavement and take their money away from the cities they set up in.
Ok, was that enough nay-saying for you? Here’s the article:
Anti-zoning key to Palin’s early record
WASILLA, Alaska – Days after Sarah Palin became Mayor John Stein’s only serious challenger in 1996, the 32-year-old city councilwoman stood and cast a proud, dissenting vote against one of Stein’s greatest achievements: the first zoning plan in Wasilla’s history.
Over the next two months, Palin surprised and excited many in Wasilla by introducing social issues such as abortion and guns to the city’s nonpartisan elections on the way to defeating the incumbent. But the centerpiece of her campaign was opposition to Stein’s effort to bring zoning to the community.
Wasilla today reflects the results of her free-market approach to development. Running for a second mayoral term in 1999, Palin cited as one of her greatest successes luring a Fred Meyer mega-supermarket to Wasilla. The zoning plan, adopted over then-councilwoman Palin’s opposition, proved no impediment for the store, which went up just a few feet from the banks of bucolic Lake Wasilla, with a parking lot that contains Kentucky Fried Chicken, Blockbuster Video, and Carl’s Jr.
They are among the dominant landmarks in a city that councilwoman Dianne Woodruff says “looks like a big ugly strip mall from one end to the other.”
As a vice presidential candidate, Palin has suggested that a similar attitude toward growth would prevail nationally if she were elected. “We will get out of the way of private-sector progress,” Palin said last week at a Colorado rally. “It’s the small business, the mom-and-pops, that are the cornerstone of America.”
The municipality Palin repeatedly heralded as a classic “small town” in her convention speech has no discernible center and a Main Street in name only. To its critics, Wasilla has become a famously bad example of suburban growth even by the standards of Alaska, a place where city planners have long noted a dangerous combination of too much land and too few rules about how to build on it.