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According to a real-estate advertisement I read a few
days ago in the local paper, offering an ornate old
Eastlake-style house for about a quarter of a million
dollars, F Street in Salida, the town's main drag, is a
prestigious tree-lined boulevard.
According to Channel 4 News on Wednesday night, when the Post's Ride-the-Rockies bicycle tour came through town, F Street is a noisy and dangerous thoroughfare where people can't sleep at night on account of kids who cruise and hang out on street corners.
This is not exactly a new issue. When we were looking for a bigger house nine years ago, we didn't look at anything on F Street for precisely that reason. If you can't abide the rumble of trains, you don't buy a house by the tracks, right? If you don't like jet noises, you don't move under a flight-approach path, right?
If certain Salida homebuyers suffer for their ignorance
of local customs, perhaps they should sue the Realtor who
promised them a prestigious tree-line boulevard,
rather than whining to the media and lobbying the city to
pass new and improved laws for the harassment of young
people.
Cruising and hanging out -- that's what kids do in little towns. If old newspapers are any guide, they've been hanging around, up to little good, since the first livery stable opened here in 1879.
You'd think that immigrants who wanted the joys of small-town life would also realize that there are trade-offs involved -- we don't have a shopping mall for entertaining upscale brats.
But many of these migrants who flee metropolitan areas for little towns are not refugees, happy to find a haven from the pressures of mainstream America. Instead, they're invaders, bent on adapting everything to their notions of how things should run.
By and large, they're suburban folks accustomed to driving everywhere. Pedestrians, such as children, are people who don't use cars, perhaps because they're too poor to afford autos.
Traditional small towns may have had room for the poor, but poor people are the last thing you want in an upscale residential subdivision -- if you let just anybody use a public thoroughfare, that old house might not fetch a quarter of a million dollars.
The invaders are also accustomed to shopping, not on a
small-town Main Street where you know everybody in the
store, but at corporate big-box eyesores out on the edge of
town. They want that because they don't know any better,
and the market
responds.
Almost every day, right before my eyes, I witness the transformation of Salida from a community with all kinds of people into a covenanted development concerned primarily with enhanced property values.
Anything that hints of practicality -- working on your car in your yard, a chain-link fence, keeping a few chickens -- is blight, on its way to being outlawed.
Because I enjoy small-town life, I fight the invaders and their pernicious ways, and so I was heartened to read about Fort Collins and its plan to return to American tradition: mixed-income housing on narrow tree-lined streets, neighborhood schools and stores and workplaces, alleys with garages, that sort of thing.
Naturally, anything that sensible attracts criticism, and perhaps for good reason. Living that way doesn't require you to spend nearly as much money.
For instance, if you can walk to work or to the store, the household might get by without a second car, and oil companies, auto dealers, insurers and lenders would suffer.
In a real neighborhood, you might be able to borrow your neighbor's lawnmower or snowblower, rather than buy one of your own to use only a few hours per year -- another hit to the Gross Domestic Product. If there's a park nearby, you don't need as big a yard -- lower water consumption, declining sales of plant-killing toxins, fewer toy tractors: Another threat to the Colorado Economy & Way of Life.
Kimberly Mavers of the Homebuilders Association of
Northern Colorado, commenting on the Fort Collins plan,
insists that city is taking the wrong route. We own a
lot of cars, and we need a three-car garage to store our
snowmobiles, boots, and bikes. We need workout rooms,
computer rooms, game rooms.
And the Fort Collins city government, if it has anything
like a spine, should tell her That's just fine. People
who need three-car garages to store their toys, just like
people who feel a need to live in 50th-floor penthouses,
can go live somewhere else.
Of course, if Salida's experience is any guide, the result will more likely be something like a new ordinance requiring three-car garages to front all residences after the sidewalks are ripped out, with stiff fines for those who fail to comply.
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