Seeing What Develops

A few years ago, I had a seat on a Harrisonburg City Council and an unnecessary level of power, because the council was divided between two stubborn factions separated not by any policy differences but mostly by the idea that they were two factions and they had to defend their positions, although it was never clear what they were. During that time I often took a verify-but-trust approach toward government: I trusted people on the School Board and the Planning Commission. It took a lot of reading and interviewing and research to trust them, but before I read reams of paper and scratched my head over badly photocopied maps and talked to various city officials, I began with the assumption that the other officials were probably right in what they had decided.

Part of this I considered common sense. Much of the electoral effort for many years had been put into the idea that you don’t join city government to get rich and we should vote against people and factions that felt otherwise. And whereas there was some small glory, and later some money, in being on City Council, nobody ever joined the School Board or Planning Commission for the material rewards or the enhanced reputation. Nobody paid you for being on those bodies, and often, nobody knew you were on them. The logical conclusion was that all the members were after was a decent place to live, and they were willing to do the extra work to get it.

Developers were another thing. They spent money for land, and materials, and engineers, and they expected to get it back. They were always so sneaky about it. One developer offered the city land in return for utilities. He was only doing it, he said, so that he could build houses and make a boatload of money. When the hippie-ass liberal smart growth contingent found out about it, they screamed that he was only doing it so that he could build houses and make a boatload of money. God knows how they found out.

Developers were sneaky like that. There was one in particular who studied the hippie-ass liberal smart growth principles and saw a way to make a boatload of money. He designed a community for older people, because there was a housing study that said we needed that, and it wouldn’t strain city services, because we had other studies, not to mention life, to tell us there was too much of that strain going on. He designed it with some exceptions to city standards, because they didn’t really apply in the kind of community he was building, and the planning department looked at the plans and said that was fine. He and his engineers snuck around to the public safety people and the utility people and the public works people and found out everything they would need to do to earn the variances they needed. The bastard even put in green space. And because developers are such a sorry lot, he never mentioned that he was only doing this in order to make a boatload of money.

And so he took his project to the planning department, and to the Planning Commission, and they all said it was great, and by the time it got to City Council there was little that we could do but admit that it was a great project and would make more tax money than it would cost, and that it was perfectly in accordance with hippie-ass liberal smart growth principles. It was going to make the developer a boatload of money, but we couldn’t help that.

The project contrasted (Starkly? Badly? Baldly? Harshly? Insert your own adverb.) with a project that recently cleared City Council. The developer in the recent case benefited from the presence on council of one member who believes on principle that government should accommodate business, and two who just seemed to think it would be a nice thing to let the guy build his townhouses. Two council members steeped in the principles of planning and development argued strenuously and in depth for rejecting this project, which the planning department and the planning commission had said should be rejected.

There are principles having to do with planning and density that would make your eyes glaze, and did mine, but which, in general will not glaze the eyes of those who do not read them. One council member who understood planning and community development principles said that ignoring those principles would make us look like Manhattan. “I’ll take Manhattan,” sang two council members who apparently didn’t realize he was being facetious.

It was a case that helped the developer and not the city. Stretch geography to put three townhouses on two lots, then stretch logic and credulity to say it was a good thing. (The developer said this was the kind of housing the planning department said they wanted, but the planning department said he shouldn’t be allowed to build it, so you have to assume there was some level of detail here, which is, in general, what you trust your planning department and Planning Commission to iron out. But I digress.) And the stretching reached the breaking point when the developer declared on a blog that it wasn’t a developer asking for a variance. “It was me,” he wrote, suggesting that he did not deserve to be judged by the history of his profession nor by his actions as a businessman, but purely as himself, separated from all but his own me-ness.

For some reason I was reminded of a young woman of that same generation who worked for me at the DNR for a school year as a two-night-a-week intern. She was a journalism major (which was relevant to the job) and her favorite color was orange and she looked like Amy Fisher (which is not). At the end of the school year we arranged for her to return in the fall. On the appointed date, she did not return. I called her to ask if there was a problem. She seemed surprised that I had thought she would show up. “You don’t understand, Mr. Fitzgerald,” she said in a patronizing tone. “I changed my major.” And I should not have assumed she was a student with a part-time job she’d agreed to show up for. “It was me,” she was saying.

In my wildest fantasies, a member of this generation buys 5 acres, hires an engineer to design a small apartment project, gets the Community Development department on board, and convinces the Planning Commission to recommend a rezoning or variance or some damned thing. He then shows up in front of City Council with a plan for a strip mall and tells the astonished council, “You don’t understand. I changed my major.”

Two out of five of the current council members would probably vote for his changes.


 

Last Revised: 07.19.09    Publisher: Joseph Gus Fitzgerald