At a recent meeting of the 3rd District of the Colorado Municipal League, I heard many elected officials and municipal town staff describe their challenges in areas such as traffic, air quality, climate change, affordable housing, and water quality and availability.
Almost every one of these municipalities hoped to meet these challenges with a plan for “growth.” Several said something along the lines of: “Unfortunately, we are landlocked, so our only growth strategy is through infill and densification.”
“Growth” is not the solution to these problems. It is the cause.
Growth aggravates affordable housing problems. Growth makes traffic and air quality worse. Growth places higher demand on limited and dwindling water supplies. Growth produces increased demand for housing, which raises costs.
One might be more open to growth if the municipal governments of the Front Range were handling our current situation well. They’re not.
Denver is among the 10 worst U.S. cities for hazardous air pollution. Denver residents are regularly breathing unhealthy air on more than 260 days a year and it’s almost as bad all along the Front Fange. How is growth going to improve air quality?
Our airport, perpetually under construction, is an ongoing disaster. How is growth going to improve the seemingly eternal mess that is DIA? Has DIA been another example of Public Private Partnerships gone wrong?
Traffic in metro Denver on I-25 north and south of I-70 is a nightmare. Denver is the 33rd most congested city in the U.S., our post-pandemic rush hour goes on all day, and Denver drivers lost nearly two entire days in traffic in 2021. Denver Regional Council of Governments tell us that, by 2040, Denver drivers will be spending 56 hours in stopped traffic. That is more than a working week of your life every year. How will more people moving to the Front Range make this improve?
The dwindling flow of the Colorado River is a slow-moving train wreck. It is abundantly clear that there will be less water in the future, yet we are planning for, and trying to attract, even more people because growth is good.
“Growth is Good” is bad mythology and the people of Colorado know this. So, why do leaders promote growth and ignore what most Coloradans want?
A recent survey of 1,024 Colorado likely voters found that 90% of us desire a future in which far fewer people move into the state. Nearly 60% of survey respondents want a complete halt to population growth or a reduction in Colorado’s population. Seventy-six percent of those Coloradans surveyed thought the idea of Fort Collins, Denver, and Colorado Springs merging into a “mega-city” (or, as I would call it: IMLA, or Inter-Mountain Los Angeles) through population growth would be a negative thing. The Colorado Sprawl survey notes that ‘Anti-growth’ is a 90-to-10 voter issue in Colorado, yet almost no elected, corporate, or civic leaders in the state are talking about it.
Moreover, unwitting Colorado residents are supporting growth in ways they don’t even realize.
For example, real estate developers privatize profits while socializing the costs of development. Tax incentivized financing is a legal mechanism that provides real estate developers with sales-tax kickbacks to pay for new projects under the auspices of economic development.
This maneuver is authorized by state law in nearly all 50 states. Many of us could be paying taxes that do not provide government services but get diverted to developers as a subsidy for their development projects. Tax incentivized financing is arguably a form of legalized corruption that fuels unwanted growth.
Coloradans have historically voted down transportation bonds. So, governments surrender funding to private equity firms. We often use private funds to build, operate and maintain our highways. But these “public private partnerships” cede control of public goods like our highways to private interests who are beholden to shareholders rather than the people of Colorado. Wall Street is eating Main Street’s lunch. Growth is profitable for Wall Street while the costs of growth are a disaster for the people of Main Street in Colorado and other places around the country.
We do ultimately have a powerful say. The first step is to talk with one another about the costs and benefits of growth, and the second is to vote for politicians that are honest and consistent with our ideals regarding these matters. If we don’t, then money, and not our values, will keep driving the politics of growth.
Paul Sutton, of Morrison, is a professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Denver.
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