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There's an entertaining TV program on cable called
Junkyard Wars.
It features teams of mechanical
wizards who race to scrounge and adapt junk in order to
meet a challenge and beat another team.
But there are some other junkyard wars that are even more interesting, although they haven't been discovered by television yet.
These wars are breaking out in communities all over the West, and they represent a grassroots (or perhaps more properly, weedroots) effort to repel an invasion by the People of Money.
It surfaced here in Salida recently. There is a group, the Arkansas River Trust, which wants to make the area along the river more attractive with parks and trails.
That's a commendable goal, but there were some problems with insurance and easements, and the Trust accused our city administrator, Scott Hahn, of deliberately delaying the project.
During their discussions, Hahn said he feared that
Salida was getting too dependent on tourism and the
associated need to maintain appearances, with the
consequent elevation in real-estate prices, and that
perhaps what we needed was not a river walk, but a few
more houses with washing machines on the porch.
As a good citizen, I wanted to assist, even though I thought I'd already been doing my share by parking the rusty '65 Dart in front of the house. Our washing machine isn't available for porch duty, and I didn't have any non-mobile cars to mount on cinder blocks in the side yard.
But cars aren't the only junk that we economically challenged people keep around for spare parts. This is a high-tech era, and in the shed and cellar, I found old tower computer cases that won't work with modern ATX motherboards, some dead dot-matrix and laser printers, several monochrome and CGA monitors, a couple of external modems whose 1200-bps speed had seemed impressive at the time, at least a furlong of cables and several dozen ISA cards whose purposes and jumper settings are now known only to God.
Maybe they wouldn't be quite as depressive as an old Maytag with a kick-start two-cycle gasoline engine on the porch, but times do change. I called a Realtor, who requested that his name not be used, and asked how much beneficial effect this would have on property prices if I mounted the junk on cinder blocks where it could be seen from the street.
It won't help,
he told me. Salida's rated one
of the country's top 100 best small towns for art, and if
you stack your old computer junk out in the yard, somebody
is bound to see it as a piece of conceptual art, as an
ironic commentary. Your sculpture will add at least
$20,000 to every house in the neighborhood.
With attitudes like that, Salida may be beyond
salvation, but there is apparently a lively junkyard
war
in Moab, Utah. There are new arrivals who paid
plenty for their property, and they figure they'll be able
to sell it for more if the town will just eliminate trailer
houses, junk cars and other visible evidence that not
everyone is wealthy.
To protect local interests, the Canyon Country Zephyr
published an article last winter entitled Moab's Beloved
Junk,
and more recently, an essay by Rick Best, who
argued that those of us who come from the bottom of the
heap also have the right to preserve a socioeconomic
environment that makes our enjoyment of the southwest
possible. We can uglify our towns to help maintain
reasonable property values and fight gentrification and all
its attendant ills.
This battle is going strong in Leadville, according to
Joe Swyers. He serves on the city council, and he's also a
prime mover for Citizens to Stop the Boulderizing or
Aspenizing of Leadville and Lake County.
Swyers is fairly libertarian, so he has some philosophical problems with any governmental regulations of private property that aren't absolutely necessary for public health and safety.
But there's more to it than that, he said. The
ordinances we have now are enforced selectively -- if your
neighbor gets mad at you, he can report you for allowing
weeds to grow on your property, and then you can get stuck
with a lot of trouble and expense. That's not
fair.
Some of the laws are just economic bigotry, he said.
You can keep rabbits in your yard if they're pets, but
not if you plan to eat them,
he pointed out. We
want to raise awareness about some of these bad laws, and
get them repealed, and make sure that we don't get new laws
that might forbid woodpiles or clotheslines, the way they
do in some towns.
It may be a long struggle, though. There's a big
gentrification element, even in Leadville. They want to
use local government as a way to improve the resale values
of their property. Why should we be helping anyone whose
main goal is to sell out and move on? Shouldn't we be more
concerned with those who plan to stay here?
That would be refreshing -- a local government more concerned with property rights than property values.
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