When is enough enough on growth?

  • By Tom Hoban Realty Markets
  • Thursday, March 24, 2016 1:13pm
  • Business

I have been giving talks on entrepreneurship to college students around the country the past two years. After a recent one at Ave Maria University in Florida, a student asked the provocative question “Is growth good or bad?”

My answer came from the heart: “Attacking growth is an attack on someone else’s hopes and dreams for their life”.

I explained that a no-growth position smacks of selfishness if too extreme and can ultimately take communities the wrong direction over time. The real culprit in most of America, I added, is poor planning for growth, not growth itself.

Here in the Puget Sound it’s easy to see we’re not always good at planning for growth. Constrained by our geography, we see congested roads, long lines when shopping, overcrowded schools, and the rising cost of housing. Growth, it seems, comes in fits and starts, not a nice tidy smooth line.

But limiting development doesn’t solve the problem, it just makes it worse. If we don’t build the roads and infrastructure to support growth, people will be forced to compete and eventually we price ourselves out of viability or send the major employers to other places. Boeing opening a plant in South Carolina was about more than moving to a right-to-work state. It spoke to our rising costs of doing business here, which are linked to growth management challenges.

Save the environment, you say? The notion that development and the environment are always at odds is a form of giving up. Good planning and deploying the best ideas into a growth environment works. It’s called “smart growth” by some and offers a pathway that attempts to find balance.

Paradoxically, most who rail against growth probably depend on it even if they don’t know it. Any one drawing Social Security depends absolutely on a growing tax base of younger employed Americans to pay into the system, for example. Social Security, after all, is a payment transfer system, not some endowment that keeps growing. Run out of taxpayers and you run out of Social Security benefits unless you think it’s fair to impose higher taxes on younger working people.

Necessity being the mother of invention in a new world where all 8 billion of us are connected by super computers held in our hands should give us great hope, I tell students. I illustrate the power of this connectivity in entrepreneurship terms but it applies to all forms of idea-sharing and innovation. We’re just now unleashing that power.

The reality is we will probably be in both positions in our lifetimes. We find ourselves resisting change in our neighborhood but wanting to see growth in our careers. We feel strongly about supporting a growing economy, but become frustrated with the impact of it when it touches us in negative ways.

There’s no simple answer except that we must always view growth in the context of change, planning and the effect on others. Denying someone else the chance to pursue the same dreams for themselves and their family that we enjoy is selfish. That can never be part of the equation.

Tom Hoban is CEO of The Coast Group of Companies. Contact him at 425-339-3638 or tomhoban@coastmgt.com or visit www.coastmgt.com. Twitter: @Tom_P_Hoban.

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