Growth Mgmt and Sustainability

The Camera Editorial Board’s Sunday, August 27 editorial misses on several levels.

The editorial, paraphrased, essentially argues that things have been great here for years, but Boulder needs to get with the times and “change its ways.”

Exactly how much of what people hold unique, beautiful and sustainable about Boulder will be left, after the Camera Editorial Board’s commandment to change? Change into what?

It’s jarring to read, in our formerly independent newspaper that’s now owned by Wall Street hedge fund Alden Global Capital, “…our city has blossomed with apartments and business centers popping up across the map.”

Blossomed? In nature, the blossoms of trees and flowers are their most beautiful part. It’s disturbing to see Boulder’s newspaper assign that descriptor to business centers.

Ironically, trees, flowers and their blossoms are cut down and removed to make way for growth and development which, if continued at the current pace, could soon preclude adequate water in our semi-arid climate to experience real blossoms — i.e., nature’s.

Fortunately, wise resource managers elsewhere aren’t prone to “change (their) ways,” as defined by a Wall Street hedge fund-owned newspaper. 

The National Park Service (NPS) limits visitor numbers in our most sensitive, popular national parks because it understands the fundamental biological and ecological principle that every bioregion has a finite carrying capacity. 

Living within a carrying capacity is actually the ultimate expression of sustainability. That NPS does so isn’t elitist, selfish or unwelcoming. Nor is it “staying the same.” In fact, modern overcrowding is exactly why NPS recently began limiting human populations in parks.

Would the Camera Editorial Board tell NPS to “change its ways,” and allow tens of thousands of boaters to gleefully raft the Grand Canyon, every day, until the Canyon and the Colorado River become so overwhelmed that they collapse under the weight of sheer numbers, impacts and damage?

Christopher Ketcham, author of “This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West,” recently wrote in Corner Post (published for the Southwest’s Four Corners region), “Congress began crafting legislation to limit visitors to national parks and spare people the immiseration that comes with overcrowding.” (Immiseration means “to make miserable.”)

Boulder isn’t a national park. But it is a sensitive, unique natural environment. The most obvious manifestations are our mountain parks and open space — home to fragile, and in some cases endangered, flora and fauna. There’s also a finite carrying capacity to city infrastructure — our water resources, streets, traffic capacity, recreation facilities and our ability to house the homeless. 

I don’t believe Boulder should abandon the forward-thinking growth management that made our town the great place it is. I don’t advocate slamming the door shut. But neither do I condone the Camera Editorial Board’s false equivalency of business centers and boxy apartments as “blossoms.”

The Camera Editorial Board’s editorial referenced the numbers of Boulder in-commuters, and the associated problems. However, it’s precisely the oversupply of business centers (celebrated by the Camera Editorial Board) that created the in-commuter problem.

There’s a healthy jobs-population balance for every city. But the Camera Editorial Board and the Boulder Chamber of Commerce have for years relentlessly advocated for more and more Boulder business centers — so many, in fact, that Boulder vastly over-shot a healthy balance and now has far more jobs than workforce-age residents. 

This gross imbalance created in-commuting problems, excessive demand for housing in Boulder, and the resultant high housing prices — far more than any City policies or conservation-minded residents. The Camera Editorial Board blames the wrong culprit. 

If the Camera Editorial Board seeks change that would assuage nearly every stress issue Boulder faces, it might, for example, recommend we stop accelerating commercial growth, and allow excess jobs to go to surrounding communities. That would allow Longmont, Louisville and Lafayette residents to work where they live. This would reduce in-commuters to Boulder.

Most U.S. newspapers promote business and residential growth for obvious reasons: newspaper revenue increases with more advertisers and subscribers. Quality of life for residents factors little. So it’s ironic that the Camera Editorial Board bemoans the very problem it encouraged.

The Camera Editorial Board’s apparent solution? Solve the problems created by growth with … more growth. 

Fortunately, our National Parks don’t agree. People will be able to enjoy them, years from now. That may not be true for Boulder.