wanted to start a family. Developers responded by building affordable
single family houses in rows upon rows in what were called at the time,
"housing projects". One of the iconic cartoon themes of the day was the
vision of hundreds of husbands coming out of their houses, kissing their
wives goodbye at the door, climbing into their cars, and driving off,
all in unison.
It didn't happen then, and it doesn't happen now.
When elderly housing was first proposed for Nobscot, one of the knocks
on it was the housing density and the traffic it would cause. As if all
of the residents would pour out of their apartments at 7:05 and drive
off to......... Well, not work, certainly.
The people who worry about the traffic caused by new residents are often
the same people who want to attract retail businesses. In order to
survive, a retail business will have to attract a lot more traffic than
a couple hundred people coming and going twice a day five days a week,
so it's not really traffic, per se, that they are worried about, it's
traffic on their roads, when they want to use them.
Controlling the growth of population doesn't work. Ask China. So if the
population is going increase, the means to get them in out of the rain
will have to be provided. How that is done can have either a negative or
a positive effect on the community.
In my view, the best chance to improve life for everybody is to attract
people of means to the community. And the best way to do that is to
provide them with attractive housing.
And to put them into the smallest footprint possible. Apartments are
attractive to people with small families and fewer kids who need to be
schooled. They are attractive to busy people who don't have the time or
interest for yard maintenance. And they are attractive to professionally
mobile people who don't want to be locked into an expensive commitment
that they will have to dispose of if they get a chance to move up and
move out.
These same people will have money to spend and they might spend some of
it in our community, if we give them something to spend it on. So if
there are people who want to spend their money, businesses will spring
up to help them do so. If they come, you can build it.
And the probability that any of these new residents will pull out in
front of you while you are driving to work is about equal to the chance
of you winning the meggybucks.
So lets leave off with the knee jerk reactions and political posturing
and the crying about all those other people using my roads, and see if
we can't attract people to our community who can add something to it.
George Marold