Letters to the Editor
-
Hm
Andrew, I think it's a bit unfair to say that planners should have taken overdevelopment into consideration. I'm sure they did. But any calculation has its limits. The problem is the same fundamental one we've had for a long time, and which few people want to deal with - overpopulation - and unfortunately, it's a "delicate" question which the public had never wanted to address. (Mainly because the vast majority of people are not willing to give up the idea of making copies of themselves, just in order to relieve the stress on the planet.)
There's plenty of water. There just isn't enough water for how many people we've got sucking it up. We keep reproducing at explosive rates, OF COURSE the water (the land, the food...) will run out. What do people expect??
If environmentalists are really serious about earth changes, they're going to have to deal with this issue, because eventually it's going to eat the planet up like a big ol' chocolate covered cherry. Until I hear more "concerned" people speak up on this, the most fundamental of environmental issues, everything they say will be so much hot air.
-
How many golf courses in Georgia?
Just wondering.
-
NIMBY
I lived in Atlanta until a few months ago, and I saw the good and bad sides to Atlanta's development issues. Although I left before the water shortage kicked in, I'm not that surprised.
However, there have been some attempts to reign in "sprawl", and in large part, they've been defeated due to NIMBY attitudes. I lived in an area where there was a proposal to build compact, affordable housing. It was near public transportation (as much as Atlanta has) and major highways, and because it was compact, it would have had much less impact than the same number of people living in typical suburbia. There were plenty of people willing to buy this kind of housing, but the locals wouldn't have it. They all screamed about how it would "bring down the value of their houses" and "bring in the wrong kind of people". I think the project was eventually dropped.
The result is, people end up moving outward in order to find affordable housing. (There are some fancy-shmancy condos downtown, but they're not anywhere near "affordable".) Which means more sprawl. I saw the same issues when I lived in the NY suburbs, and I'm seeing it here in PA where I live now. Current homeowners don't want anything built in "their neighborhood" other than McMansions, because they feel that anything else will "lower their property values". And because homeowners vote, and go to zoning meetings, and scream loudly, their views carry the day - and you end up with more sprawl.
Until someone solves the NIMBY problem, it's going to be difficult to combat sprawl.
-
Atlanta...the City That Doesn't Work
As a one time Chicagoan, that was may favorite refrain about "the city too busy to hate (but full of racism anyway)".
I also left Atlanta fairly recently, but I have to disagree with the last poster--people have been returning to Atlanta and the "intown" suburban areas like Decatur for quite a while and the condo market is too depressed for anything downtown to be all that expensive. Greater Atlanta has an oversupply of golf courses and just about every bad development idea imaginable. The forest canopy is disappearing, public greenspace is extremely lacking in comparison to many other major metros, and most of the new suburban developments are treeless wonders.
There have been efforts at water conservation in past droughts, although they have been poorly publicized and enforced--limits on lawn watering and the like. Beyond that, there have been none of the initiatives that would be familiar to people from Southern California or other places which have had to confront these problems. Yes, the rest of the sunbelt keeps growing recklessly, but every now and then, people notice. Unfortunately, virtually all of the jurisdictions in the Atlanta area are ruled by people heavily indebted to developer interests and with in absence of large employers with real roots in the community (for every Coca-Cola or Delta, both in trouble, you have a skeletal HQ like UPS or several branch offices of big companies with no real investment in the community), developers constitute a disproportionate amount of local business sector political influence. There's a lack of real grassroots organizing of any kind outside of a few pockets in Atlanta and some of the near suburbs. "Growth" continues to have a constituency and efforts to control it are small or only intermittent. There have been occasional glimmers of hope--even in Cobb County (Gingrich-land), people have organized against Wal-Mart and fast growing Cherokee County briefly had a county commission not in developers' pockets. But I wouldn't hold my breath. Perdue is a standard issue GOP gasbag and many of the Dems are major disappointments.
-
overpopulation is a red herring,
the real problem is our poor use of land and resources. Phobia of regulation, shortsightedness, and as another person pointed out, NIMBY attitudes, is what has landed Georgia in trouble. Hand waving about "overpopulation" is just a lame excuse for sprawl and bad habits.
-
sprawl
this is what happens when greed rules.
Note that the wealthy will always be able to buy water. It's everyone else who'll suffer so that the wealthy can make money on things like suburban sprawl.
Things will get really interesting here in the West when the snow-pack begins its inevitable shrinkage due to global warming. You think Atlanta short of water is bad...what happens when Los Angeles can't get enough water? Talk about a city that shouldn't even exist. That's Los Angeles.
time to start plans to head to Portland... a place not unlike a wet sponge, but, plenty of water there.
Get ready, Portland. A lot more Angelenos will be heading your way one day.
As for Atlanta? Fuck 'em. Too stupid to live. This should have been planned for 50 years ago.
-
Portland is desert half the year
Sure Portland gets the coastal rains every winter, but the rest of the year the rain spigot shuts off and it's like the rest of the West. Lawns are brown for months. Plants go into a semi-dormancy.
Drinking water here is from wells. The water table has been reliable, but the intense agriculture in the surrounding area is entirely dependent upon groundwater for anything to grow in the summer.
As for Atlanta reaching the limits of its water conservation, I don't believe it for a second. But a crisis always needs to happen before people begin to value the simple gifts of nature and life.
Atlant's problems are entirely the result of profligate resource use, waste, and poor planning.