--John Kenneth Galbraith, economist
Get primed for Amazon because it just might be showing up on
Boston's front
stoop very soon and this smiling package contains within it growth
unimaginable.
For Amazon might choose our fair city of Boston as the site for its future second
headquarters. The Hub is one of twenty North American finalist cities in
Amazon's competition to build one behemoth of a project. Imagine this: 50,000
new jobs, $5 billion in construction spending, and $38 billion dollars in
direct and indirect investment in our metropolitan area.
Ka-ching! Wowsa! Talk about growth!
The even better news is that our little slice of paradise is
more than ready to absorb such gargantuan growth. Land is plentiful and cheap.
Housing is readily available and modestly priced. Our roads and bridges and
transportation infrastructure can absorb all of those tens of thousands of extra
people and cars and subway and train riders.
Our state and city governments
have plenty of extra cash to offer Amazon generous tax breaks and
incentives.
Oops. Correction. I was thinking of Hartford
or Worcester or Springfield,
not Boston.
I know that's a bad joke. But what's not so funny is the
notion that the city and the rest of us in the greater Boston area could actually digest such an
Amazonian growth shock and not pay for it in a diminished quality of shared life
if the Amazon juggernaut rolls into town.
To be anti-growth is not a real popular stance these days.
Not with scores of cranes dotting the city skyline. Not with unemployment in
the Bay State standing at 3.5 percent, the
lowest rate in eighteen years. Not with house values skyrocketing at a pace
unheard of since the boom of fifteen years ago. Homes go on the market one day
and immediately frenzied buyers desperately jockey to outbid and overbid each
other.
To not be in favor of growth is positively un-American. Both
political parties in D.C. and Boston
instead scramble to build, to drill, to develop, to cut taxes, to expand, and to
always grow, grow, GROW. Do whatever it
takes to push an already healthy economy to even greater heights. But what's never talked about in such fevered
fantasies about infinite economic growth is the huge price to pay in the quality
of communal life when growth is gospel; when growth trumps all else; when
growth is the sacred golden calf we all worship.
If you are one of hundreds of thousands of folks who drive
or "T" or train into the city daily, you know what a disaster it already
is, the hours, the days you spend in wall to wall traffic or waiting for
non-existent subway cars to arrive. If you are middle or lower class or poor, you
know how expensive it already is to try and find a decent affordable place to
call home anywhere inside the Route 495 belt. According to a recent Inc. magazine article, Boston
is the seventh most expensive area in the United States. To live
"comfortably" a Bostonian needs an income of at least $89,000. To rent costs on average almost $2,900 a
month. Where are folks coming up with
all of this money? Or not?
Here's an economic heresy to consider. Growth is not always
good. Growth not managed smartly and
wisely harms the place being grown, and can easily change it for the worse, not
the better. Growth unfettered can cause the basic systems of life--schools,
infrastructure, housing, health care--to break down, even collapse under the
weight of overgrowth.
So count me among the tiny minority of folks who aren't
excitedly jumping on the Amazon bandwagon.
Instead Amazon: why not build in Detroit or Cleveland or any other
struggling place in the United States, a city and region that could actually use
an economic boost? That would actually prosper
and grow smartly with the delivery of such an unprecedented influx of jobs and
money and hope? I've no doubt that such
metropolitan areas would embrace you with wide open arms.
But in Boston? Send back the Amazon parcel. Return to
sender. This is one delivery we just can't
afford to accept.
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