Part One
Understanding Growth, Development, and the Changing American West
The first step toward prescribing better development patterns for the American West is a clearer diagnosis and prognosis, a better sense of where weâre at and where weâre going. Key to this analysis is an understanding of the regionâs historical development trajectory and of the forces driving and shaping its current land use patterns. Population growth, burgeoning wealth, mobility, and changes in construction technology all drive and enable the sprawl of development across the western landscape. The region has moved beyond its history of âboom-and-bustâ economics, and there is little reason to expect anything other than a rapidly spreading development footprint in a region seen as an attractive place to live and do business.
Figure 1.1 Places in the American West.
1
The Long Boom of Western Development
THE AMERICAN WEST is in transition. Population growth at more than twice the national rate and leading rates of per capita job growth, business starts, and income growth attracted national attention to the region in the 1990s.1 The national media offered a steady stream of stories hyping the Westâs latest development boom while also expressing residentsâ concerns about urban sprawl, displaced wildlife, and stretched water supplies.2 Those concerns flooded onto the editorial pages of the major newspapers, into local public meetings, and onto election ballots. Predictably, the growth surge also evoked allusions to the Westâs frontier history. Some observers saw this latest development rush as another round of the regionâs infamous boom-and-bust cycle; they argued that the current development rush would bust, just like the gold rushes, cattle booms, and energy bull markets before it.3 The implication: we had better not do anything to squash the boom and thereby risk making the inevitable bust even worse. Growth boosters spent millions of dollars instilling this fear in voters during campaigns over growth management initiatives on the 2000 ballot in Arizona and Colorado.
The boom did slow, briefly, along with the national economy, in 2001â2002, giving many political leaders an excuse to ignore public concerns about sprawl, traffic, and loss of open space. But most western places (fig. 1.1) continued growing rapidly right through the national slowdown (especially large cities such as Phoenix and Las Vegas and charismatic rural areas such as those near Yellowstone National Park), and the region continued to outpace the nation in growth. This sustained growth belies the expectation, based on a misreading of western history, that busts inevitably erase the effects of growth, that regional economic expansions always end in contractions. This view bears closer scrutiny as we contemplate decades of future western development.
I use the words âboomâ and âbustâ here with some hesitation because in this chapter I will argue that we have mischaracterized western development history as a repetition of booms and busts, as a cycle of growth followed by retrenchment. This misconception is especially relevant to land development: except in very isolated cases, land development does not come and go (ghost towns are sufficiently rare to be tourist attractions). Instead, development subjects land to increasingly intense uses that permanently transform the natural and cultural landscapes, even after growth spurts end. The Westâs geography is permanently inscribed more by boom than by bust.
Episodes of rapid population growth and land developmentâthe âboomsâ of western historyâdo indeed subside, and perhaps a few places actually lose some population in local downturns. But the trajectory of western development is much more cumulative than the cyclic historical model implies. Even in the last episode that westerners called a âbustââthe end, in the early 1980s, of the big run-up in energy development that was spurred by high oil pricesâno western state showed a permanent loss of population (that is, no state had fewer residents in 1990 than it had in 1980), and many areas still outpaced national growth rates. It was not long, moreover, before the word âboomâ was again heard in the West, in reference to the 1990s development rush, which did not slow until after the new millennium.
I started to study western development closely during the 1990s boom, and I began writing this book during the slowdown in regional development brought on by the national economic downturn that marked the second and third years of the new millennium. Spanning these different patterns of growth strengthens this analysis by allowing a more measured assessment of enduring regional land use problems, not just the effects of a particular boom decade.Yet I must report at the outset that, even in a period of slower growth, I was still impressed with the regionâs potential for future rapid development and its ability to grow even when the national economy languishes. As of this writing, in 2006, the Interior Westâs population is still growing faster than that of any other region of the nation, and the fastest-growing places in the nation are immediately east of me in Weld County, Colorado.
If anything, the slowdown between 2001 and 2002 and the subsequent return to faster growth showed that the regionâs development trajectory remains fundamentally unaltered. It did provide a breather, offering westerners a chance to assess the landscape changes visible across the region, to catch up with growth, and maybe even to do some effective planning and growth management. But ratcheting growth, well illustrated by the increase in the regionâs share of total U.S. population over time (fig. 1.2), is the overarching fact of western development and its centuries-long, cumulative spread across the landscape.
Figure 1.2 Share of total U.S. population by census regions, 1850â2000. The West stands out as having grown faster than the other U.S. regions through most of its settlement history. (Modified and updated from George Masnick, âAmericaâs Shifting Population: Understanding Migration Patterns across the West,â The Rocky Mountain Westâs Changing Landscape 2, no. 2, Winter/Spring 2001: 8â14.)
The Start of the Long Boom
Since humans arrived some 13,000â15,000 years ago, most of the West has been occupied, at least seasonally, at increasing human densities, resulting in a spreading transformation of its landscapes. Some early, intense developments did come and go. The citylike settlements of the Chacoans and Hohokam in the Southwest fell into disrepair after 1200 A.D. These ancestral Puebloans didnât âdisappear,â although they did de-urbanize for the most part. Some were absorbed into a more dispersed Southwestern culture; others maintain settled pueblos along the Rio Grande to this day.
The European invasion, starting in the 1500s, set in motion the development trajectory that marks the region today. The rate of historical development has varied, quickening and slowing, in episodes that came to be seen as the endemic western pattern of âboom and bust.â Episodic economic and demographic booms certainly did put new people and investment into western places faster than prevailing frontier diffusion rates. The Spanish incursion up the Rio Grande Valley in the early 1500s brought on rapidly expanding irrigated agriculture and settlement. After gold was found on the American River at Sutterâs Mill on January 24, 1848, the European American population of California increased from roughly 15,000 to over 60,000 in just one year, and reached some 220,000 by 1852.4 A few years later, gold was found in the southern Rocky Mountains, and by the summer of 1860 over 5,000 miners a week, some originally on their way to the California diggings, inundated the Rockies.5 Next it was silver in Montana and Idaho. Although many of the western towns that got their start in mining never became bigâand today a few are even abandonedâthe wealth that flowed in and out of the gold, silver, and copper fields spurred the growth of cities such as Denver, Boise, and San Francisco, cities that then fueled further growth. Moreover, mining required railroads and wagon roads, and this infrastructure also began to serve ranching and logging (even as the minerals played out), which were operating pretty much wherever the requisite resources existed by 1900.6
Still, the economic regime of gold, cattle, and timberâlike most economies based on raw materialsâwas inherently unstable. Although a bust inevitably seemed to follow each boom, precipitated by a crash of commodity prices, a change in consumer tastes, or a catastrophic event (as when the open-range livestock industry virtually ended in the drought- and blizzard-induced âbig die-upâ of 1886â1887),7 these setbacks were not permanent. Many of the forty-niners left the California gold fields as the placer deposits played out, but they didnât leave California, and the region never returned to anywhere near its pre-rush population. There were other reasons for settling in California: farming, trade with Asia, and the strategic occupation of territory wrested from Mexico. The underlying settlement regime was more stable, and more cumulative, than the regionâs image as boom-and-bust territory suggested.
Commodities to be shipped out were not the Westâs only attraction; land itself lured people, especially during the national demobilization following the Civil War. Historian William Robbins described the West as looming large in the nationâs postâCivil War economic outlook. It was seen âas an investment arena for surplus capital, as a source of raw materials, and as a vast vacant lot to enter and occupy.â8 To settle the nationâs western reaches quickly and to disperse demobilized armies, the federal government encouraged western settlement by surveying the region and offering homesteads for a small fee. It also granted land for 25 miles on either side of the rails to the transcontinental railroad companies, which then further encouraged settlers to fill the space and, not incidentally, their freight and passenger cars.9 If early settlement faltered due to climate or economics, the government stepped in to shore it up, with outright subsidies and with infrastructure such as dams, irrigation projects, and crop insurance.
Western land speculation was self-reinforcing. Although the history books focus mostly on tangible resources such as cattle, timber, and gold, the deep-seated expectation that land values would increase was, and still is, a key driving force in western development. Historian Patricia Nelson Limerick put it this way:
If Hollywood wanted to capture the emotional center of Western history, its movies would be about real estate. John Wayne would have been neither a gunfighter nor a sheriff, but a surveyor, speculator, or claims lawyer.10
He might also have been a real estate broker. The nationâs âmanifest destinyâ was rooted in acquiring, dividing, and reselling property, and settlers in the West took to it with a passion and rapidity that kept them ahead of the governmentâs efforts to survey land and record land claims. Although we tend to see the âland rushâ as a uniquely frontier phenomenon, there is little difference between the speculation-driven development in the homesteading era and the late twentieth-century run-up in western resort real estate, or the more mundane appreciation of suburban homes. Speculation feeds, and feeds on, the rational expectations (and, occasionally, the irrational exuberance) of landowners, who then push for, or at least tolerate, the pro-growth postures of local leaders because their policies sustain land appreciation.
Homesteaders brought new land uses and technologies that transformed the regionâs ecology and economy in more profound and enduring ways than their predecessors had, imposing a land regime based on priv...