And it involves elected positions and lobbyists. Sadly, there wasn’t a f—cking council/planning board member ANYWHERE who would vote to deny one of these fraudulent subdivisions in the past 10 years. Not one. They wanted the real estate taxes, “growth” and “jobs.” And re-election.

Ummm. There was at least one. Yours Truly.
And I’ll tell you what else, some of the people in the homebuilding industry really are creative, good folks but they’ve been shafted by the ‘market’, which is a sewer. And by dreams of Fast Money. And by their dumber, greedier brethren.

For a fact, speaking as one of those ‘council/planning board’ types, I had a period of time when — without any doubt — I was followed, and when you’re driving alone late at night on windy roads, that kind of intimidation can bother you. I’d like to say that it didn’t get to me, but when you have kids to raise, and other obligations, it can eat away at the edges of your mind. In my case, I kept at the land use stuff because it pisses me off when assholes try to intimidate me. But there’s a cost; it does nag at one.

I swear some of those builders are so stupid they make the characters in ‘Fargo’ look like smart guys. But the worst and most stupid of them are potentially dangerous. (And if you’re in land use, you know what I’m talking about.)

Put this way: the housing developers made political road kill of anyone who tried to stop their SprawlMachine. And there was an implicit threat from the worst among them that you’d be — literally — dead, because they were so important, their projects were such a big fucking deal that if you tried to ‘compromise’ with them on environmental protections, if you cost them even a single dollar it was as they viewed you as a threat. In their minds, ‘building homes’ was such a noble task that no other social obligations should ever be asked of them. (Yes, as you know, the worst of them were/are that narcissistic.)

And no one will ever convince me that this wasn’t a huge, politically and financially interconnected system.

A few people from inside muttered to me about it from time to time, and by the mid-2000s, I have reason to believe that some of the better builders were getting fed up with the ‘political shakedown’ and the expectations to keep feeding the GOP coffers. (That’s my murky sense of the meaning behind odd comments here and there that at the time didn’t really make sense. Which is probably why I remember them, in the way that you tend to recall things that are just odd and kind of nag at you.)

The whole K-k-k-karl Rove political dynamic of starting the GOP political takeover with school boards, often putting evangelicals up for office to control public education — hell, yes, we saw that in Western Washington (!) — then they moved up the political ladder to legislatures, then to judgeships; we have had it all.
As near as I can figure it out, it was the nexus of GOP + megachurches + ‘property rights’/developer alliances. The builders (and mortgage bankers) were funding their political machine, from what I was told by people in the industry, but I have no real understanding of just how all the mechanisms of campaign money worked.

In the Clinton years, the GOP-homebuilder-evangelical alliance picked off one, after another, after another of the sane, reasonable, environmentally progressive electeds who in the 1990s were trying to move forward. They all acted like Al Gore was some kind of ‘pansy’ for mentioning Smart Growth, or for talking about sprawl as an environmental disaster. They were so full of themselves, and so temperamentally black-white thinkers, that I had several tell me that peak oil and climate change were ‘just myths’. (I was dumbfounded at their obdurate stupidity, but I’m only preaching to the choir, I’m sure.)

And to ‘take out’ the environmentally responsible electeds, the GOP and their builder funders sent out smear, filth and slime that would make Lucifer blush with shame. And because of the ‘we are just observers’ mindset of the local press, these predators and their evil deeds were not exposed. They polluted the social discourse; a very short-term, opportunistic strategy. I think of it as the political equivilent of their irresponsible, fraud-riddled, crappy subdivisions; it’s all of the same character, if you ask me.

And I’ve seen some of those homebuilders treat planning staff, or public works/transportation staff, or demographers like absolute shit — and I’m guessing that you know what I’m talking about.

I used to scoff to my spouse about how those builder idiots seemed to believe that their dicks would lengthen with every additional subdivision. These guys were sitting on planning boards and in legislatures, yet they couldn’t read and understand an EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) unless they got brain implants. These were the last people on earth who should have been making planning recommendations, and it was a scandal. (The public stopped showing up for ‘Public Hearings’, which was one way to call bullshit. But the builders were so narcissistic they took it as a ‘green light’ rather than an ominous sign.)

So what we had — and I’m guessing that you saw the very same thing:
Biologists, soils scientists, hydrologists, demographers, civil engineers with years of experience, and other people with a lot of education (not cheap for any of them), hired for their expertise, trying their damndest to produce excellent work as a basis for good decisions.

And what happened?!
Well, the builders, who knew how to short-plan, adjust boundary lines, and create developments made 10x the money, and gave enough of it to political campaigns that they were able to get people elected who viewed these builders as ‘the experts’.

So then those electeds, who relied on the developers for guidance, went with the builder advice, rather than the statistics and data from their own scientists.
Lawsuit city!!!!!!!!!!!
So that put the municipalities in court again, and again, and again, bleeding away time and energy.
And the planning staffs and government employees just became exhausted and hopeless… at least, that’s what I saw.

The builders who couldn’t tell you jack shit about the lifecycles of anadromous fishes, or couldn’t follow the math of a well-written EIS — those same dumbfucks sometimes treated staff like shit. They didn’t read the studies that staff produced, because who needs to read science if you already believe that Making The Almighty Dollar Hand Over Fist is God’s Plan For You. (Cue in the megachurch chorus here… and I don’t mean to insult people who truly have Faith, I’m just heaping scorn on people who show up at church in order to make more contacts for their future business plans.)

So if you believe that God has a plan for you, then whatever biologists, or engineers, or hydrologists tell you just goes in one ear and out the other. Because in your mind, the science doesn’t matter because after all, anyone who disagrees with them is not legitimate because:
(1) only builders and GOPers are ‘legitimate sources of information’‘, and
(2) making money is always and everywhere the ‘right’ thing to do, so if anything slows down making money it should be scorned, discredited, and avoided, and
(3) environmentalists are extremist, unreasonable people who eat twigs, hug trees, and howl at the moon and therefore you can ignore them.

Clearly, this whole ‘sprawlWars’ topic still hits my ‘hot buttons’.

To say that the sprawl-enabling housing boom was an environmental disaster is an understatement.

What is happening today in the Gulf of Mexico already happened quietly, one subdivision at a time, through the 80s, 90s, and 2000s.

And the same fuckwitted, head-up-the-ass electeds who relied on builder money to get elected, relied on those same ‘Free Market Capitalism devotees’ for advice on stream corridor protections. Some of those electeds were so craven and feckless that if they’d simply run for office as members of The Spineless Weenie Party, that at least would have been honest.

But in my calmer moments, I have sometimes wondered how many of those electeds were partly making bad decisions because they weren’t all that knowledgeable, and it didn’t take very much to intimated them (nor to flatter them). There was more than one time that I got the implied message that to try and stand up to some of the worst among the housing developers was to sense that your brakes were going to suddenly fail.
Most people, perhaps rightly and wisely, don’t have the stomach for this kind of bullshit (or perhaps they’re just less obstinate than Yours Truly?).

Feel free to email me: [email protected]
I don’t check it often, but will make a point of checking it this week.

We have to get the money out of politics.
If we live long enough to give it a shot.

These people’s actions, and the desires of so many of us who bought into The American Dream, were catastrophic from a biological, long-term perspective. But anyone who tried to use facts, or science, or logic to argue against these egos was spitting into the wind.

On that whole ‘spitting into the wind’ thing, Yours Truly is an expert of the most exhausted, lowly, obstinate, and persistent order.

To retool this economy, honest to God, Obama would have to start with housing and build up from there. It won’t happen, because it’s too overwhelming to take on. But it would be so strategic: energy, transportation, housing, economics all in one move. It won’t happen. But it should.