The Holy Grail of Elk Grove

My little burg of Elk Grove has apparently decided that we don't have enough vacant strip retail in the city. Nope, what we need is more commercial building, and to facilitate that effort the city has slashed their developer impact fees in half...making it even more attractive to building more of what we don't need.

Regardless, this city has excelled in the approval of building absolute shit; nothing built in the last thirty years will still be standing in another thirty years. Well...our buildings might still be physically standing but they'll have no standing...the facades will have faded, graffiti will line the walls, roofs will be continually leaking, parking lots will have warped and blistered and neglected vegetation will dominate. In thirty years time our city will be approving lowered developer impact fees not for refurbishing the existing tiers, but for new construction south of Eschinger and Dillard. Our existing suburban build out will have turned to liquid shit like every earlier suburban Sacramento ring, with higher crime rates, more traffic calming devices and neglected private realms. Those who can will move to these new areas; those who can't will care less and less about their "communities."

There must be three or four hundred strip retail 'outlets' in 'power centers' across this city that currently stand vacant, waiting for a resuscitated economy to fill them with Asian nail salons, cell phone kiosks, ReMax realtor centers, balloon shops and bible stores. The mayor hopes that even more of these will jumpstart our economy, producing badly needed jobs and wa-hey! tax revenues.

A total crock of shit. It's not as if the impact to infrastructure has magically disappeared, that the addition of a new strip retail store on Bilby Road that sells chocolate covered strawberries has less a need for a fire department, has reduced needs for road upgrades even though 99.993% of its clientele are solo motorists because the store is physically isolated from housing. It's not like the three service sector jobs created by the owner are jobs whose tax receipts pay for the services these employees use; these are fake jobs, jobs that gain the city nothing, jobs that drain the city because all that suburban infrastructure these people will have to use to commute to their homes isn't paid for by them from their taxes.

Of course this isn't limited to commercial real estate; home developers also get a break -- so in the midst of three thousand foreclosed vacant homes in the city we are encouraging the development of even more homes. This shows how utterly fucking dependent this city is on expansion of subdivisions, strip malls and office parks, that without ad infinitum growth the city cannot support itself.

This effectively means that we're gonna shift the burden of these infrastructure requirements not to those who created them but to those who already paid for their own and now get to subsidize the newer entrants. All for the holy grail of Elk Grove-- perpetual growth.