Just in the last couple of hours, the population of the United States topped 300 million residents. About 2.5 million of those 300 mil are right here in Utah, and about 2 million of those are clustered along the Wasatch Front, i.e., the part of the state where I happen to live.
No wonder my commute sucks so bad…
Joking aside, I’m very sensitive to the issue of population growth, because I’ve witnessed first-hand the dramatic consequences of what happens when a lot more people suddenly encroach on any given area. In my 37-year lifetime, and, more specifically, just in the last twenty years, I have watched the wide-open, largely rural landscape I grew up in and loved vanish forever beneath a sea of concrete, cookie-cutter tract homes, and fast-food franchises. Not to be too melodramatic about it, but this process has been deeply painful for me, and even worse for my parents, especially my father, who I fear will never get used to The Way Things Are Now. (If he has to drive farther than a couple of miles, he inevitably ends up in a wild-eyed, frothy rage because he just can’t deal with the amount of traffic and congestion. I worry that he’s going to have a stroke behind the wheel one of these days, because he gets so frustrated and angry about it. Shopping is even worse for him; he’d never admit it, of course, but I strongly suspect he experiences genuine panic attacks if he makes the mistake of visiting Costco on a Saturday afternoon.)
For someone like me, who admittedly struggles with the very concept of change, the transformation of the Salt Lake Valley has been nothing short of emasculating. There isn’t a damn thing any individual can do to stop or slow the juggernaut of progress (and there’s not much more that citizen’s groups can do, either, at least not around here, where the interests of developers and business owners constantly trump the concerns of people who don’t want another damn shopping center in their backyards). All you can do is stand and helplessly watch with a sick, fluttery feeling in your stomach as the bulldozers do their work. And that’s a humbling realization.
I hesitate to say this, because I know it will sound naive or even laughable to people who live elsewhere, where urbanization happened a long time ago and rapid, constant change is just part of life, but my overall feeling about the development of the SL Valley has been one of broken continuity. It wasn’t that I never expected things to change — I don’t think I’ve been that foolish in a very long time — but I did think that the valley I knew as a child, which was pretty much the same as it had been for my grandparents, would be pretty much the same for my own children, when I finally got around to having them. But that’s not how it’s turned out. When and if I have kids now, they will grow up in a very, very different Salt Lake than the one I did. And that fills me with a sorrow I can’t quite explain.
All this sense of loss and disconnection is because new people just keep coming. I know Utah is sparsely populated compared to other places, and that Salt Lake, for all that I perceive as being urban, is still a comparatively tiny city, and that my own hypothetical children will be part of the very phenomenon I’m disparaging, because they will, after all, grow up and need homes of their own. But I never said I was rational about these things…
Hi there! It’s your friendly correspondent reporting live from New York City (population: roughly 8 million; # of people in the city on an average workday: 14-16 million), before heading home to New Jersey, the most densely populated state in the union. So sorry to hear that Utah is almost full. 😉
All kidding aside, I always find it ironic that people complain about how crowded it is in a CostCo on a Saturday morning. Because, you see, if you weren’t AT the CostCo that Saturday morning, it’d be just a little less crowded. It’s easy to pawn the shopping centers off as “the interests of developers and business owners,” but the fact of the matter is that they’re in the interests of us, the citizens as well. Without people to buy the homes and shop in the stores, these things simply wouldn’t get built.
Two things, Brian:
First of all, while I realize that my local population is nothing compared to the East Coast in general and the New York area specifically (my remark about Utah’s relatively sparse population was made with your area in mind, actually), all things are relative. By Utah standards, and compared to the way this place used to be only a short time ago, it’s very crowded indeed these days. Even worse, the growth has largely come in the form of suburban sprawl, which I think renders a very different psychological effect than a “traditional,” compact urban environment. But that’s a whole other rant.
I think your amusement at my distress is a classic example of how Easterners fail to understand the Western mentality and its concerns — you’re used to a high (very high, by my local standards) population density, and it’s been that way for decades if not centuries, so you take it for granted and don’t see a mere 2 million souls as so much of a burden. Out here, though, we have historically been accustomed to the idea of wide horizons, short drive-times, and easily accessible solitude whenever we want it, and we’re struggling with the loss of those things, as well as how rapidly they’ve been lost.
As for the “interests of developers and business owners,” I respectfully submit that you don’t know what you’re talking about in this instance. Or perhaps I should say, you don’t know what I’m talking about. I was referring to a couple of recent situations in which the will of the community was clearly and plainly stated, only to be ignored by the politicians and their capitalist buddies. In one case in particular, the residents preferred an abandoned gravel pit be turned into a park rather than a new WalMart Supercenter, which was unnecessary because there was already a regular-sized WalMart only a mile or two away. The developer argued that he had to upgrade to a SuperCenter because, well, it’s super, and the current one wasn’t. There were many community meetings and, I believe, a referendum on the matter. In the end, it didn’t matter. The city council took a vote behind closed doors, there’s a SuperCenter going up on that empty lot, the old WalMart is now a rotting eyesore that nobody knows what to do with, and there’s no park.
This sort of backroom deal happens a lot here, and while I have no doubt that people will shop the new Wally-world when it’s finished, a whole lot of people, myself included, are left with the distinct impression that it’s been shoved down our throats for the benefit of a wealthy few, regardless of what the community actually wanted or needed. And in the meantime, the chance for creating a little open space in the middle of a suburban wasteland has gone the way of the dodo, and you have no idea how damn frustrating that is to those of us who value such things…
Incidentally, I realize that your comment was made in a friendly tone and my response probably seems unnecessarily defensive. I apologize for that. But this is obviously an issue that I have strong feelings about. A small handful of developers have become very wealthy in these parts on promises that what’s good for them is good for us all, but I don’t believe them.
Even worse, there are certain social and districting conditions in effect that make it very hard to remove the backroom dealers from office when they do ignore their constituents, and that tends to reinforce those feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness in the face of progress that I mentioned in the original post. And the end result of that is immense frustration…
Sorry if I offended, Jason – my comment was intended to be tongue-in-cheek, and it obviously didn’t come across that way. When my parents moved the family to New Jersey in 1976, our housing development was surrounded on 2 sides by horse farms, one side by an empty field, and one by another housing development. Now, it’s homes as far as the eye can see, and every available corner has a strip mall or something similar on it. So I do have some sense of how this kind of thing happens.
That said, I still don’t buy the gripe about the developers and the back-room deals. Not that I’m denying it happens, just that the fact remains that if they built the Super-WalMart and no one shopped there, it would close down in a couple of months, and eventually you’d have your park. The fact that the WalMart will undoubtedly turn out to be super-busy (and super-profitable), means that the group in favor of the park, while vocal and passionate about their position, are actually the “few” in this scenario.
After all, it takes a much larger group of people to keep a WalMart profitable than it does to protest (sub)urban sprawl..
No worries, Brian – this is simply an issue about which I’m very sensitive, and I was feeling extra-special testy the day I wrote the entry for unrelated personal reasons. I apologize to you for getting all huffy.
I get huffy on this issue because I hate the sprawl that has utterly transformed my home in a head-spinningly short period of time — You know that old Joni Mitchell song about not knowing what you’ve got ’til it’s gone? Story of my life, friend — and I also hate feeling completely powerless to do anything about it. I’ve been on the “losing side” of several of these land-use disputes and it’s incredibly frustrating to end up feeling disenfranchised and marginalized time and time again.
While you’re no doubt correct about the SuperWally’s future profitability, trust me when I say that there was a backroom deal in this instance. Also, I can’t help but wonder if there’s something of a chicken and egg scenario here: yes, people will shop the SuperWally once it’s there (especially since the other nearby Wally is now closed), but is that really because the majority of citizens wanted the thing to be built, or because it just happens to be there, so we may as well use it?