The Growing No-Growth Movement

I asked him what he did for a living and he mumbled into his shoe tops.

Sorry, I said, I didn’t catch that.

He looked both ways to see if anybody could hear. “Builder,” he said. “I build houses.”

Is it a secret? I asked.

He snorted. “You try building houses for a living,” he said, “and see how many people you tell.”

He told me what had happened to him the previous week. He is not some big-time developer who builds huge projects and gets his picture in the paper cutting ribbons. He is a young guy trying to make a living. So he and his partner buy this patch of land in Virginia to build some townhouses on. They follow all the rules, get all the approvals, zoning, whatever.

And then he is summoned to a community meeting. The people around the project don’t like the project. And they scream names at him for an hour.

“Land rapist,” he said. “That’s what they called me. A land rapist.”

You’re not making this up, I said.

“I wish I was,” he said. “They don’t want me to cut down the trees to build the homes. I say: ‘You’ve got to cut down some trees.’ But they say no, I’m supposed to leave all the trees. It was like a lynch mob.”

Wait a second, I said. These people must live in homes. And trees must have been cut down to build their homes. So aren’t they being a little unfair?

“People don’t think that way,” he said. “You’re being logical. This has nothing to do with logic.”

I love trees. I have the city boy’s viewpoint that they are holy objects. (Country boys are used to cutting down trees.) But I also feel sorry for this builder.

People want homes. These homes have to be built somewhere. And some trees may have to be sacrificed in the future, just like they were sacrificed in the past. (I am not talking about giant redwoods or other irreplaceable trees.)

Builders used to be popular in this country. In the post-World War II era they were darn near heroes: They built affordable homes where returning GIs could start families. And the children of those families (the baby-boomers) have now grown up (yuppies) and bought their homes.

And now they want the building to stop.

There is an old joke: “A developer is somebody who wants to build a house in the woods. An environmentalist is somebody who already owns a house in the woods.”

Whole parts of the nation have entered into conspiracies to keep people from building there. This is the only explanation possible. Have you ever heard how much it rains in Seattle? Every time you talk to someone from Seattle, he tells you about the precipitation. “Rain, snow, sleet, hail, something nearly every day,” they say. “Yep, you sure wouldn’t want to live here.”

So you’d expect them to be all gray-skinned and wrinkly-looking, right? But instead, most of them have these great tans and look very outdoorsy and fit. And every time I have been to Seattle, the weather has been terrific. Ditto with Portland, another city where people tell you how horrible things are.

What is the explanation for this? Simple. These people are lying. They want you to think where they live is horrible, because they don’t want you or anyone else moving there.

They figure they already know everybody who is there and so why spoil things with strangers.

And it is not just the Pacific Northwest. This is going on all over the nation. All sorts of communities are banning growth. Building permits are being refused. People who already own homes don’t see why anybody else should be allowed to build new homes.

They always defend this in the name of the environment. (Never mind about the trees that had to be cut down to build their homes. That is ancient history.)

But the yuppies who support this end to growth are among the biggest environmental polluters in the nation.

It’s true! Last week I was watching “USA Today,” the TV show (this show is specifically designed for people who, like me, find “Entertainment Tonight” too intellectually challenging). And the extremely lifelike anchor people did a report on the environmental impact of disposable diapers.

They said disposable diapers will sit in landfills for 400 to 500 years before decomposing. Four hundred to 500 years. And since the average child, from birth to toilet training, uses up about a zillion disposable diapers (this is an estimate), think what all those yuppies and their kids are doing to the environment!

It is not development we have to worry about, it’s diapers.

Instead of America filling up with people, it’s soon going to be full of . . . well, exactly what these no-growth yuppies are full of.