You remember
kid oakland, right? Skinny guy, lived on the front page for a while?
Well, he's got an idea. It's not a new one, but he describes it so...well...
(Jump with me, people, and take the poll!)
It's 2005 and the huge wave of Baby Boom retirements has already begun. On top of which, public school systems in our large cities are under enormous stress...such stress that life for public school teachers in our big cities has become almost impossible. Home ownership in creative centers like New York and San Francisco have "priced out" many of the artists who give those cities their flavor and allure.
Even without a single ounce of political motivation, there are urban retirees and young families, teachers and health professionals, and artists and creative professionals... looking for large and small communities located just outside our metropolitain zones. Communities with an infrastructure of historic architecture, well built homes, civic amenities and which provide close contact with both neighbors and the outdoors, with the cycle of the seasons, and, in this era of Whole Foods, Peet's Coffee and DSL...all the organic goodness and tech-connectedness that folks have come to expect in the digital age.
Cities like Petaluma, California....or Red Wing and Winona, Minnesota...or Holyoke Massachusetts. [. . .]
I'm actually talking about BUYING our Democracy back with ownership and private property, with joining the tax base and civic participation, with...ahem...the hard work of real estate developers and "our" kind of chain stores...of bringing a Martha Stewart touch to places that are MUCH CLOSER to a "Martha Stewart vision" than most people think...of creating our own answer to Sam Walton...a kind of Ben and Jerry's in the Heartland. [. . . P]erhaps it's time to do it the old fashioned way, the American way, and start to BUY our way out of it.
- by building retirement developments across the West and Rocky Mountain States
- by investing and developing in attractive communities in States that not currently "favoring" our side.
- by getting groups of families and disgruntled teachers and professionals and looking seriously at building "new paradigms" in attractive quality-of-life regions that folks might not have thought about before...purple zones.
- in sum, by starting a rolling wave of "Volvos and espresso machines" aimed square at the heartland of this nation.
Go read
the whole thing. (Check out the rest of
LSF while you're there.)
ko nails it, and makes a surprisingly good case.
I'm already in Wisconsin, so I'm not moving. But some of the rest of you may want to consider it.