A Lesson for Our Leaders: Looking Back Is No Way to Plan for the Future
Here’s something regressive states need to learn: when you plan for the future, the future welcomes you.
Public schools in Maine were always overcrowded. Our classrooms were stuffed from front to back, and many of the programs weren’t funded at a level to keep up with student demand. Even the most well-meaning teachers weren’t able to offer the attention that their students deserved, because there were just too many of us.
For years as a student, I just assumed that this was how public schools were everywhere. But in high school, a social studies teacher just casually dropped a piece of information mid-lecture that revealed the real reason why Maine schools couldn’t keep up with the growing student population.
My teacher said the school was overcrowded due to a local law that rendered government agencies unable to properly serve their constituencies by planning for the future. When the population of my elementary school started swelling thanks to an influx of out-of-state young professionals moving to southern Maine, the district could only build a new school that had the capacity to handle exactly the number of students the school had at the time the project was being planned. They weren’t allowed to project for future growth.
This law was probably put in place to avoid government waste, but the result created waste of a different sort: by the time the new school had been approved and planned and built, it would already be too small. Then the district would immediately have to plan workarounds, including portable schoolhouses and new wings of the school, to meet current increased demand. And so on.
Because they were literally not allowed to plan for the future, the public schools in my town were fed into a negative feedback loop. The schools got worse and worse, and young people fled the state in search of a community that wanted them around. As a result of laws, policies, and attitudes like these, Maine’s population has for years held the uncomfortable distinction of the highest median age in the United States.
So Mainers are older than even citizens of retirement havens like Florida and Arizona. That aging population, in turn, isn’t interested in long-term investments in the future, and so still more young people leave. In 2016, the New York Times reported:
As older residents retire or die, they are not being replaced. Maine was one of seven states that lost population last year and one of two, West Virginia being the other, where deaths outnumbered births.
Now that the aging population is openly embracing racist baby boomer politicians like Governor Paul LePage and this impossibly dumb jackass, even immigrants—who were at one time helping keep the state’s fortunes afloat—are abandoning Maine.
Because Maine didn’t plan for the future, the future abandoned Maine.
In 2000, I moved from the east coast to Washington state. A big part of the reason I chose Washington was that, unlike Maine, it felt like a state with a future.
In the years since, Washington has more lived up to my early characterization. King County planned and built a fantastic light rail line, with 62 more miles of rail on the way soon. Our city teamed with private business to invest in the construction of a whole new downtown neighborhood, which houses our burgeoning tech sector.
And most importantly, Washington state has refused to build these achievements on the backs of its poorest citizens. Seattle was the first major city to pass a $15 minimum wage. We passed a secure scheduling law to ensure that no large employer can force a worker to adhere to restrictive scheduling practices. Statewide, we’ve passed a groundbreaking paid family leave program with bipartisan support.
And we’re not done building for the future.
On Friday, Washington Governor Jay Inslee helped announce a major step forward in building high-speed rail infrastructure between Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver BC. High-speed rail is a more environmentally sound, affordable way to bring the region closer together; it will generate billions of dollars in tourism and it will closely align our business interests, making it easier than ever for the regional economy to grow.
And private business is getting in on the future, too: on Thursday of last week, TransAlta announced that it is planning to transform the state’s biggest coal mine, just outside Centralia, Washington, into one of the state’s biggest solar power facilities:
The Tono Solar project would generate up to 180 megawatts of electricity. It would occupy nearly 1,000 acres on the Centralia Mine site in southwest Washington, which closed in 2006.
There’s a lesson here for Donald Trump and his frantic efforts to save coal mines in West Virginia: rather than fight to keep a dying, dangerous, ruinous practice afloat, TransAlta is investing in the future. It’s great for the economy, it’s great for consumers, it’s great for the environment, and it’s fantastic for workers—so far as I know, no employee at a solar power plant has ever died young from a case of “solar lung.”
Maybe my favorite future-thinking project, though, was just announced: Northgate Mall, at the very northern edge of Seattle, is getting a future-forward redesign that might change the way we think about malls for the next century.
Northgate, which was one of the world’s first shopping malls, has been languishing over the last decade. Like most malls, it’s suffered from the decline of retail shops and the increase of traffic in the Seattle area. Instead of quietly drifting away into obscurity, Northgate’s owners, Simon Property Group (hereafter SPG), just announced that they’re rethinking the idea of what a mall should be.
By 2021—the year that Link Light Rail to Northgate Station is set to open—Northgate will be restructured. SPG’s statement promised…
…Our vision for Northgate still encompasses 500,000 to 700,000 square feet of retail. But we also see 500,000 to maybe 750,000 square feet of Class A office as alternatives to South Lake Union and eastside office nodes. The addition of more hospitality to support this area, and, of course several hundred units of housing, are what we think is really going to strengthen Northgate’s future.
This is the definition of forward-thinking development. SPG is looking at the transit that’s coming and, rather than doing everything possible to fight it like some other mall owners I could mention, they’re planning to maximize its space for the new crowds of people who are coming.
In fact, if I have any criticism of the Northgate development, it’s that it should go as high as possible. The city is currently considering zoning Northgate as an NC-95 area, which means that buildings there could go as high as 10 stories. If I were planning Northgate for the future, 10 stories would be the minimum I’d consider.
Elected officials should work to make the permitting process in Seattle even easier, and they should go even further to reward big, ambitious ideas like this reimagining of the decaying shopping mall concept. There are no real views in the Northgate area to worry about spoiling, and Capitol Hill can attest to the sudden growth explosion inspired by a new Link Light Rail station. I’d urge Seattle to encourage SPG to go as high and as big as possible (in exchange for a considerable chunk of affordable housing in return, of course.) By 2021, Northgate will be a mere 14-minute train ride away from downtown Seattle, which means the property will be in high demand. At this point, it’s almost impossible for SPG to be too bold in their plans.
I spent too much of my life in a community that actively fought the future. That community is now living with the results of those actions. Washington is growing, and that growth is not coming without a cost: homelessness, gentrification, inequality.
Regressive economies like Maine prove that we can’t solve these problems by pretending they don’t exist. In fact, quite the opposite: we must plan our way to a better tomorrow. When we plan for a better future, the future rewards us a thousandfold in return.
