The Small Town Project

Three stages in the growth of sprawl:

Novak: An early stage of development in a future tract of sprawl.

Stonebrook: A development at a slightly more advanced stage of growth.

Just a bit of exponential growth goes a long way. Typical, well developed sprawl hints at a possible future for our area. Image source: nativeecosystems.org/Jacob Smith and LightHawk

We’ll conclude here our three part series on the myth that “the new developments pay for the old developments.” In Part I we exposed the unwitting admission the growth machine makes in asserting this myth. They can’t spread this notion without admitting that another of their assertions, “Residential development brings in needed revenues,” is untrue. In Part II we demonstrated that the notion, “the new developments pay for the old ones” is indeed a myth, another attempt on the part of the growth industry to bamboozle us so that they might destroy our open spaces and small towns in pursuit of profit. Now we’ll look at what this myth implies about the attitude toward our future held by those who spread the myth.

When those in the growth industry say, “The new developments pay for the old ones,” they’re trying to convince us we “need” ongoing residential development for the economic survival of our towns. Now I ask you temporarily to suspend judgment and imagine what it would mean if the new developments really did pay for the old ones, and we really did need ongoing development for our towns to survive. (You may be thinking we’d have a huge problem once we ran out of room to grow. We would indeed, but that’s another essay.)

The most frightening kind of growth
Understand that under this scenario only the newer development at a given time keeps the town’s economy afloat. Just what qualifies as “newer” would depend on the specifics of the equation, but clearly we’re talking about some small percentage of the town as a whole. So what happens when the town grows? Well, as the town gets bigger, the newer development supporting it has to be correspondingly bigger. Every new development has to be bigger than the last to keep supporting the rest of the ever growing town. So if the newest 3% of the town supports the rest, that 3% grows alarmingly as it becomes 3% of an ever increasing whole. In other words, the scale of new development must increase in direct proportion to the size of the rest of the town. This is known as exponential growth. It’s a kind of growth which starts off gradually, but accelerates to an almost unbelievable rate.

An astonishing illustration
To appreciate the nature of exponential growth, consider this example on the web, provided by the University of Colorado Department of Applied Mathematics. It involves the simple act of folding a letter size piece of paper in half. With each fold its thickness doubles. Though it’s nearly impossible to fold a small piece of paper in half more than about seven times,

* At 7 folds it is as thick as a notebook.
* If you would have been able to fold it 10 times, it would be as thick as the width of your hand.
* At 17 folds it would be taller than your average house.
* 20 folds and that sheet of paper is a quarter way up the Sears tower.
* 30 folds and it has crossed the outer limits of the atmosphere.
* 50 folds and it has reached the sun from the earth.
* 60 folds it has the diameter of the solar system.
* 100 folds it has the radius of the universe.

That’s no joke. That’s exponential growth.

While a small town’s growth isn’t going to be as fast as the doubling piece of paper, any time a growth rate is steady and directly proportional to the amount already present, as it is under the scenario of the new developments paying for the old ones, you have exponential growth.

What about our little part of the universe?
For a down to earth example, a seemingly modest growth rate of 2.75% per year would cause MV or Lisbon to quadruple in population in only about 50 years! See for yourself.

If it were true, therefore, that we needed continual residential growth because the new developments paid for the old ones, it would mean we faced exponential growth. It would mean our growth might be gradual for a few years, but would quickly accelerate to levels which would completely destroy our small town character and surrounding environs. This is what those in the growth industry are advocationg every time they tell us the new developments pay for the old ones!

The few who would love it
Such growth would of course delight the growth machine. They want as much growth as we can possibly handle without the whole process collapsing on itself. The more growth, the more profit – for a few. And do you think they put environmental damage, our quality of life, or small town character ahead of tremendous profits?

Yet mature towns such as ours need no residential growth at all. They need development in the true sense of the word — improvement, not physical expansion.

So the next time you hear someone in the growth industry say, “The new developments pay for the old developments,” just remember exponential growth, and ask yourself if this person has in mind what’s best for the town.