In the Spirit of Being Unreasonable
She was unreasonable in her reach. But I’m no more reasonable than her.
I’m a planning commissioner. Tonight, several residents attended a meeting, and I talked with one afterward.
Her big powder was saved for What Was Happening To Her Town. Too much growth. Too many apartments. She’d lived here forever, and her family had been here for generations. I – visiting regularly for only three decades before moving here a few years ago – couldn’t understand.
What she wants, near as I can tell, is outside current law and regulation. Heck, it’s probably outside the Fifth Amendment.
She was unreasonable in her reach. But I’m no more reasonable than her.
Libertarian Chaos Greg would happily approve more apartments next to your house. Or a duplex. Or a minimart. Or a nuclear reactor. He doesn’t care if your family helped settle this valley.
All LCG cares about is: Do you own the land? Have you mitigated known externalities for what you’re planning to do with it?
Of course, I don’t have the votes to do any of that. And my fellow resident doesn’t have the law on her side to preserve the city in amber.
Our limitations are probably for the best – if not in principle, then in practice. Cities are tiny universes that appear out of nothing, all potential. But the initial big bang sets the ground state for nearly everything afterward.
Change in the cityuniverse is endless. But it’s incremental, rarely revolutionary.
Carson City was started by a handful of lawyers who bought a lot of land with $500 and a herd of horses. It grew (and grew important) on the backs of miners, prospectors, and hangers-on from across the country. They willed the town out of the sagebrush and sandy soil, many walking here from half a continent away for a shot at something new and better.
Now we – the inheritors of this explorative, self-interested and wholly amazing local history and legacy – get twisted when apartments spring up on the other side of town.
Across a few generations, we went from forcing our will on the land to trying to stop the other guy from using his dirt.
I can’t fix that, but I’ll keep pointing it out.
In the spirit of being unreasonable.
Greg W. Brooks. First published on Facebook, Feb. 26, 2025.