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Trust the federal government to find a way to destroy a charming Colorado pastime. Here we were, savoring the pleasures of carping about the invading Californians who give us sprawling suburbs and 35-acre ranchettes. And then the Internal Revenue Service, as detailed in Sunday's Post, did some checking on migration inside Colorado.
It turns out that the main sprawlers are Coloradans moving ever farther away from the cities and inner suburbs, which are filling up with immigrants from other states, including California.
That is, the folks who are chopping up Teller County are not from Orange County, Calif. They're from El Paso County, Colo., and they've moved out of El Paso because it is filling up with people from Orange County, Calif.
We need a term for this, so I'll invent one: splash
development.
Throw a rock into a puddle, and there's a
big splash that propels the water past the puddle's old
boundaries.
Colorado development seems to be working that way, too. The rock of immigration lands in a metro area. That drives up housing prices, which means some long-time residents can sell for big bucks, then splash away to buy their dream homes out in the country but continue to commute to their urban jobs.
Why is the American Dream Home out in the boondocks?
If I turn on the faucet and only air comes emerges, I find it a lot easier to call city hall and raise hell than to assemble tools and venture outdoors to try to fix the well -- and remember, rural wells go dry only when it's dark, windy and 25 below zero, when the local driller is vacationing in the Bahamas.
Much the same holds for sewage. Car repairs are easier to manage when you can walk to and from the garage. As long as the cross-country skis are in the shed, I don't have to worry about not being able to get to the grocery store if there's a blizzard.
In other words, just about every facet of life is simpler in town, and yet the American Dream Home sits on a few acres, far from any settlement.
Over the years, I've known a few people who lived in such abodes, and they tell me that they enjoy the rustic quiet. Funny. When I'm out there, I hear coyotes howls, low-flying law-enforcement helicopters, bellowing cattle, gravel trucks, farm machinery -- a lot more noise than I've ever noticed in town.
At any rate, the way that Colorado develops, even a quiet hermitage wouldn't stay that way for very long.
Start with those dream homes on their acreages. Some of the property owners might get greedy and subdivide, thereby turning Dream Estates into what the other residents were trying to get away from.
Perhaps they have zoning and covenants in place to prevent that.
In that case, our public-spirited real-estate hustlers commence a new development just up the road, which is soon congested with commuters. The Dream Estates people get noise and pollution and the pleasure of waiting half an hour to make a left turn into their own driveways. They just lost the amenities that made them want to move to Dream Estates in the first place.
Building more highways just extends this cycle over a greater area. Enacting growth limitations just changes the problems without eliminating them -- Boulder limited residential construction years ago, but now has parking problems from all those people who work in Boulder but can't live there.
The only people who profit from this are the real-estate developers. As one of their projects becomes less and less attractive to its residents, it means that there will be a demand for a new project that hasn't grown all those problems yet.
The developers are happy to provide the new project, and to contribute to political campaigns to insure that there will be more highways to encourage even longer commutes.
Now, I suspect that this process was more or less invented in California, home of the world's first freeway. So even if California immigrants aren't the ones practicing it here, it seems only fair to give the Golden State due credit for its contribution.
But the California connection might hold in other regards, too.
That's the place where for decades they built houses on unstable hillsides, prone to slide in any heavy rain. You see such construction in our foothills and mountains, and heavy rain is at least theoretically possible in Colorado.
California is also the home of the world-class brush fires that spread through expensive houses that never should have been built where they sit. Such developments are now common in Colorado, too -- big tinderbox houses sitting in the predictable path of wildfire.
And though our faults are nowise as active as the famous San Andreas, they could act up at any time.
In short, there's hope for Colorado, assuming that Mother Nature is as benevolent here as in California.
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