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After reading the four-part series in the Post last week about the current growth cycle, it dawned on me that nobody really understands this phenomenon.
Despite our mythology concerning prospectors and sturdy yeoman entrepreneurs, Colorado's previous booms resulted from outside capital in large inflows: railroad builders and smelter operators in the 1870s and 80s, federal war plants and reclamation projects in the 1950s and 60s, mineral and oil firms in the 1970s and early 80s.
Pour enough money into any desert, and you're bound to make part of it bloom. But I can't think of a big current project along those lines.
Instead, we see a few new houses and a few new enterprises, as well as more tourism. This thrills local boosters, although it probably shouldn't.
When I edited the local newspaper 15 years ago, I got into an argument with some motel owners who wanted me fired because I wasn't sufficiently cooperative with their agenda. They wanted to attract more tourists; they assumed that their vacancy rate would thereby drop.
If we ever get enough tourists here to make your
motels truly profitable,
I contended, then Holiday
Inn will make the money, not you. The only reason you
manage at all now is because this place is too much of a
backwater for the big boys to be interested in it.
Now that tourism has increased, there's serious talk of
a Holiday Inn along U.S. 50. The new motels I've seen of
late are not Ma and Pa's Funky Pine-Panel Cabin
Court,
but things like Super 8
and Days
Inn.
Ditto for restaurants. When the tourist flow increases, the increase goes not to the Downtown Diner, but to McDonald's, Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken -- familiar places that tourists have seen advertised on TV.
Or retailing. Nationally known Wal-Mart, rather than the obscure local sporting goods shop, will see the money.
Or media. The national chain spends its advertising budget on direct mail and television, so that local media can't afford to hire much in the way of reporting staff. That way, we know a great deal about Madonna and O.J. Simpson, and very little about our own neighborhoods.
We thus become consumers in a national, perhaps global, culture, rather than informed citizens in our own communities.
To some degree, this explains why personal incomes haven't risen even when there's more money flowing through the state. If there's money to be made in Colorado, big corporations will make it.
But growth brings problems even to small local enterprises, because it begets other small local enterprises who want a slice of the pie.
Chambers of commerce call this Xerox Business
Development,
and it works like this. Suppose Smallville
lacks a bakery. As Smallville grows, some local
entrepreneur figures it might provide a market for fresh
doughnuts and croissants. She rents a building, borrows
money for equipment and remodeling, and opens her
doors.
Starved for fresh carbohydrates, Smallville residents flock to the bakery. Within months, another bakery opens down the street. There isn't enough trade to support two, so by the end of the year, Smallville again lacks a bakery.
This isn't just hypothetical. For about a decade in Salida, we didn't have a real place to buy records, tapes and compact disks. There was Wal-Mart, of course, but unless it's on the best-seller charts and doesn't have a parental warning, it won't be at Wal-Mart.
So about a year ago, Salida Sounds opened, offering a selection more in line with local tastes. You guessed it. Another potential music store operator is looking for a storefront to rent.
Or from personal experience, Martha and I hoped that this time around, we'd find a way to profit from growth. We hoped that our changing region might support a new publication. So we started a little regional magazine. We figured we'd found a niche so marginal that it would be years before we had to think about competition.
Two months later, a free weekly newspaper emerged, also professing to serve the region. It will be educational to see how many slices that people can cut out of the same pie.
This leads me to postulate two laws of economic growth in Colorado:
1) In general, when there is money to be made, you won't be the one to make it. A big national corporation will take over the market, but you'll have a chance to get a part-time minimum-wage no-benefit job with that company.
2) If the big corporation does not enter your market
during a time of growth, then someone else will. This
applies even if you're just looking for a job. When Time
magazine says that Colorado is booming,
then you
compete not with other Coloradans, but with everybody in
the country -- and they usually have more impressive
resumes.
In principle, there's nothing wrong with economic growth. But in practice, it never puts money in my pocket, and meanwhile the schools get crowded, it's impossible to find a quiet place to hike, and everything becomes more expensive.
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