From: wallich@ncd.com (Ken Wallich)
Newsgroups: alt.culture.oregon
Subject: Re: future transplant
Date: 11 Jan 93 20:30:57 GMT
Reply-To: wallich@ncd.com (Ken Wallich)
Distribution: usa

Chris.Hynes@launchpad.unc.edu (Chris Hynes) writes:


>Don't worry, Oregonians, I'm not from California and I'm not going to bring
>millions of people with me.  

Of course, you will still be another one or more people moving into the
state, and as such will have the exact same impact as one Californian
family moving there.  More people in the state, less land available
per-capita, higher housing prices, more mini-malls.

It's so nice to be alive during a time when logic, tolerance, and
goodwill have been replaced with a phobia about taking responsibility
for your own actions (and consequently what happens in your community,
if you just sit by and watch it go to hell), and a prepensity to hate
other groups (Californians, homosexuals, people who enjoy having oral
sex in the privacy of their own homes, you know, *them*) for causing
all these problems.

If the people in Oregon and Washington didn't want the state 'taken
over' by Californians, and didn't want their housing prices going
through the roof, then why did they build more houses, sell the ones
they had (for a large profit, of course)?  They did it to make money.
The same reason the people from California went to California.  They
made money, then left after they had made a lot of it.  They don't
seem to realize that they, or the people who used to be in their
community, are the same people they claim to despise.  Why did they
support big businesses who expanded and hired more people, creating
more jobs than the community could supply, and encouraging growth?

The time to keep your community small is not *after* it has doubled in
size, but *before*.  Go to city council meetings, oppose new
development.  If *everyone* in the community did this, the community
would stay as you claim you wanted it.  If you allow developers to
come in, sell your houses for a big profit, and don't stop the
building of mini-malls, you have no one to blame but yourselves.
*They* didn't cause the problem *you* did.  Take responsibility for
your own actions and the behavior that results from those actions (or
the lack of action) in your community.

Look at Montana (go ahead, it's there on the map, next to Idaho).
There are a lot of old 100,000+ acre ranches that have been sold to
developers (for a *lot* of money, so the sellers made a big profit,
even if the sellers were a bank that repossessed the ranch because the
rancher lost his farm subsidies that he had come to rely on to make
all his payments).  The developers' line the appropriate political
pockets with gold, and get approval to subdivide the land into 20 acre
parcels.  Why was this allowed?  Profit, cash, money, green stuff,
lots of it.  Once the 20 acre parcels are sold off and 50% of them are
inhabited, you now have 2,500 more families than you used to have.
Population goes up, prices go up, the new people are "different" and
start advocating the things "they" want to see in the community.  Who
gets blamed?  The people who *bought* the parcels.  What utter lunacy!
If you didn't want that many people moving into your community, why
didn't *you* violently oppose the development?  It's the
county/city/state that allows zoning and development permits like this
to go through.  These agencies are suppose to be serving *you*.  They
can usually be controlled.  Especially if a large percentage of the
registered voters vehamently, vocally, and tenaciously oppose them.
But, like everything else these days, the symptom gets blamed, not the
problem.

You don't see Californians burning the cars of the millions of people
who've flocked to this state from all the other states.  I am one of
the very few *native* Californians I know, and I don't endless bitch
about how all those East Coast people moved in and ruined my life.  Of
course, not all all of the Pacific Northwest residents have given away
their brains to science.  Some realize that a large percentage of the
Californians that have been buying up their state are actually people
who came from someplace *other* than California, made a killing in
real estate, *then* moved to Oregon and Washington (and Montana, and
Nevada...).  They realize that as population increases, there are more
people (a difficult concept for many to grasp), and that these people
often seek to move to an area like they remember from when they were
young.  A place with natural beauty and space.  Of course, as we have
more people, there is less and less room for them to all have their
space, and we keep cutting down and paving over the natural beauty,
but that's ok, we'll just find more somewhere else.  Yeah, that's the
ticket.  We'll just annex Canada when we run out down here.  They love
us all up there anyway.

Rainy days on Mondays always make me wax cynical...





-- 
Ken Wallich

wallich@ncd.com ~ ken@wallich.com ~ kmw@al.org ~ [...]decwrl!vixie!amber!ken