"Gary" wrote in message
news:uy9_9.93477$6G4.12304@sccrnsc02...
Our local Seirra club leader in Northern Colorado also only attacts the
effects of growth. Their main marching-line speaking points are that big
bad builders and governement are building too many buildings and streets,
AND then this causes the people to come here. every single time this guy
is
interviewed he says this. The one last week is about building another
reservoir for water. He thinks this will cause more people to come here.
I
have news for him, they are already coming and mainly caused by legal and
mostly illegal immigration. Either from people being pushed out from
Texas
or CA or coming here directly.

Companies and Governments do not build infrastructure and house if they
don't think the population is growing. If that were the case I could go
to
any dead town, buy up all the land for cheap, and start building and wait
for them to come.


Well, if you went into a ghost town, wouldn't you wonder why it was a ghost
town in the first place? If nobody wanted to live there, then you could
build thousands of homes, and still nobody would want to live there. If, on
the other hand, you went into a housing market that was vibrant and robust,
and built your thousand new homes, then you would probably make out pretty
good on your investment.

Now, over time, those that bought your new homes in the vibrant and robust
community will be followed by others that want to live in a vibrant and
robust community. The new arrivals will want to get from one side of town to
the other, or maybe from one community to another, so interconnecting roads
will be required or traffic congestion will result. Eventually, there will
be demands on the water supply, electric supply, natural gas supply the
list goes on, that will need to be addressed.

The real issue before the SC, and maybe the real challenge, is the need to
provide these things in an environmentally sound manner. Is it right to
completely shut down project after project, or shouldn't the goal be to
anticipate what problems a project might cause, then mitigate them. Some
projects are so utterly poor that there is no way to make them work well
from an environmental standpoint, and these should be stopped at every
opportunity. Some projects are fundamentally good projects that need some
rework to eliminate some offensive aspect; these should be allowed to
proceed with the reworks that may be required. For example, maybe a road
through a wilderness is problematic because it blocks migratory routes, so
we raise the roadbed and put bridges and tunnels under it so the migratory
routes can be preserved. In this way, we can meet the demands of people
while accomodating the needs of the habitat.

People don't move into an area because there is infrastructure, they move
there because they like the community and the surrounding areas. They
discover afterwards that they are part of an underlying problem of the lack
of infrastructure.