Local economic development can depend on many factors. But one of the most important is the availability of sewers. There is probably no better example of this than a section from Joel Garreau's influential book, Edge City: Life On the New Frontier (1988). In the following excerpt, the author is interviewing a developer.
"I'll never forget David Hunter, one of the first developers I ever interviewed back in Virginia. He was bulldozing hundreds of acres of forest around a lovely stream called Little Rocky Run for a subdivision. I had found the forest delightful in its erect state, so I was keenly interested in his reasoning. Especially because he was touting his massive subdivision as a 'planned community.'"How was it 'planned'? I asked him.
"I still find Hunter's answer memorable because it so thoroughly blew away any liberal-arts preconceptions I may have had about how things get built in our world. Hunter basically said: Planners? Architects? Say what? Here's what happened. And he started running the numbers. It was like a mantra. Like a Gregorian chant:
"'Anybody knowledgeable about the sewer system knew that there was only one place growth could go, and that was west,...'"
Garreau continues the story with the developer going into a 2-page account of the number-crunching involved in making the basic decisions on where and how to develop. At the end, the author recounts the developer's final summation:
"'So that's really how the whole thing came about.'"I was breathless. I scarcely knew where to start.
'The controlling thing was sewers?' I cautiously generalized about his 'planned community.'
'Yeah.'"...
"Years later, David Hunter's recitation of the facts of life remains a classic vignette of the way our world is shaped, really."
| Economic development | Economic development strategies |
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