Interesting Article in the 7/31/99 Issue of The Economist
David Schilling
Wired in the woods
I S S A Q U A H , W A S H I N G T O N
When it comes to unbridled urban growth, the new economy
can be the chief culprit. The third in our
series comes from the Pacific north-west
EACH October, the Seattle suburb of Issaquah holds a
Salmon Days festival. Revellers wear fish-shaped
hats, eat fish tacos, and tour a fish hatchery right in
the middle of downtown Issaquah (pronounced
Iss-uh-kwah) and adjacent to Issaquah Creek, a productive
salmon-spawning stream. It may not be long,
however, before Salmon Days becomes more than a yearly
event. That is because the salmon that swim up
Issaquah Creek now enjoy federal protection, courtesy of
an Endangered Species Act listing for regional
salmon species that was announced in the spring.
The listing has caused chaos on a wide scale. In this
wildly growing part of the country, new roads, housing
developments and shopping malls are already being held up
while local officials try to work out whether their
proposals are salmon-friendly enough. Ava Frisinger, the
mayor of Issaquah, hopes that the city will escape
being ruled by federal salmon mullahs. If it does, that
will be about the only urban and suburban ill her little
town will avoid.
Issaquah is at the epicentre of enormous changes that are
shaking the Seattle metropolitan area. These include
traffic congestion that is among the worst in the nation,
air pollution, soaring housing prices, crowded schools
and a growing sense that local government is almost
helpless to solve these problems. Issaquah itself, a town
of not quite 10,000 people, has another 40,000 people
living chock-a-block at its boundaries. It sits astride
Interstate 90, a six-lane highway, and at the confluence
of several deep valleys that funnel cars from more
remote suburban areas through a street grid laid out in
the 1920s.
The town’s small airport, which was once favoured by
skydivers and glider pilots, is now a bustling retail mall
with a Costco (one of those giant warehouses where loo
rolls can be bought two dozen at a time), a giant
Eagle hardware store, a Barnes & Noble and Italian
restaurants. Newcomers to the area, eager to have their
own piece of the wooded hills that surround Issaquah,
have overwhelmed the land round the city with
subdivisions jammed with $500,000 homes. Mount Ranier,
the highest peak in the state, is often obscured by
exhaust fumes.
The culprit—if a booming economy deserves the word—is an
exploding high-tech industry powered by
Microsoft, and dozens of spin-off companies founded by
Microsoft alumni hoping to imitate their alma mater.
Remove the high-tech boom, and the area is at best
holding steady. Throughout the Pacific north-west, says
Alan Durning, director of a Seattle-based environmental
group that watches regional economic trends, the
past 20 years have seen 500 lumber and paper mills shut,
8,000 fishing boats taken out of the water and
15,000 farms and ranches shut down. Employment at Boeing
is roughly the same as it was in the late 1970s.
Yet during that time the region has added an astonishing
3m jobs, a 56% increase.
These new “green-collar” jobs (Mr Durning’s phrase)
should be every economic planner’s dream. The
Microsoft campus, for instance, sprouts no smokestacks,
has no pipelines dumping toxic waste into streams,
and sucks up only as much energy as fluorescent light
bulbs and PCs consume. The people who hold these
jobs are almost universally green-minded, habitual
recyclers of Coke cans and newspapers, eager to see
forests and streams preserved so that they can hike, ski,
kayak and mountain-bike.
Unfortunately, those same people also demand five-bedroom
houses, cars (the favoured kind in Issaquah is
the two-ton-plus, four-wheel-drive Ford Expedition) and
plenty of places to shop. It is an irony, laments Paul
Sommers, an economic-policy analyst with the University
of Washington, that the same people drawn to a
region because of its physical beauty, clean air and
abundant water are perhaps now doing more to destroy
those things than 100 years of logging and heavy
industry.
Issaquah is struggling to blunt the effects of these
changes, with mixed results. For the time being it has slowed
development until road construction within city limits
can catch up with traffic growth. But that accomplishes
little when hundreds of homes and new businesses pop up
almost overnight outside Issaquah’s jurisdiction.
And local topography is no help. Steep hills and lakes
cover much of the region, leaving few new pathways for
a road grid that has not changed much for 50 years.
Seattle itself has embarked on a costly light-rail project,
but that will have next to no impact on Issaquah, miles
beyond the nearest station. And since the high-tech
economy, being independent of traditional city centres
and communications, is apt to pop up anywhere,
transport planning is virtually useless.
Solutions will be slow to come, if they come at all. One
hopeful sign is the explosion of high-rise housing in
Seattle and Bellevue, a closer-in suburban city that 20
years ago was much like Issaquah today. Such
high-density housing—something Americans at last seem
willing to buy—will do a great deal to reduce the
push for more suburban sprawl, while making public
transport more efficient. But if even a handful of the
current batch of would-be Microsoft clones finds success,
growth may multiply. Already enough office space
for 50,000 workers is planned for a suburban area
stretching from Issaquah to Redmond, some ten miles to
the north, in an area that is impossible to serve with
public transport.
Mayor Frisinger of Issaquah still believes that local
government can cope with growth and yet preserve her
city’s small-town feel. But even she admits that the
trends are not in her favour, and not just in the matter of
development. Increasingly, she notes, residents pass
around ideas and opinions via the Internet. In a
meeting-happy city such as Issaquah—where a dispute over
what colour to paint a barn went on for
months—this means that the community’s leaders must
contend with a growing cacophony of voices. “It could
be chaos,” she says. “People change their minds so
quickly, and decisions made three years ago are met with
a reaction of, ‘Well, this is now’.”
As high-tech companies grow, even more voters are apt to
be wired. Democracy at the speed of light, and
traffic at the speed of a snail, should be an interesting
mix.