About Connections: Love it or hate it, history is a map. Those who hate history think it irrelevant; many who love history think it escapism. In truth, history is the clearest road map to how we got here: America in the 21st century.
Reports are that the Stockbridge Planning Board meeting on January 3 became rude and unruly. A woman suggested she was sorry she moved to Stockbridge given the level (and volume) of the conflict.
I cannot contradict the report because I was not there. I do not know what happened, but I do know something about the subject matter: development, preservation, and the great estates.
So is there a way to get to the meat without the heat? Maybe…
One mistake we sometimes make is talking about preserving the past. It sets up an invidious comparison. The truth is that what we are engaged in is preserving our future. What Stockbridge, or your town, will be in 20 years is based on what we decide to build or tear down, allow or disallow, now. What are the possibilities and choices available; what limitations do we face? Most important, what is sacrosanct? What makes one place uniquely and distinctly that place? Save that. However, it is not easy.
Progress and preservation, land use and conservation are simultaneously cross-supportive and at odds. If we accept that change is inevitable and, at the same time, acknowledge that preservation and conservation are parts of sound planning, we have not arrived at a solution, we have only agreed to grapple with the problem.
The problems are oxymoronic. For example: those things that maximize profits can destroy the things we wished to purchase with the gain; the things that attract second home owners are changed by their coming and, in an effort to accommodate tourists, we build the things here that they travelled to escape.
Last summer, a tourist corralled a woman on the street and asked where to park. It was July; it was a good question. When dissatisfied with the answer, the tourist launched, “I would think you people would have ample parking, a free parking lot on Main Street, public toilets, fast food restaurants and big signs directing people. It’s just good sense to provide for them if you want the tourists to come.”
The beleaguered local hesitated only fractionally before saying, “But we don’t.”
Here is the problem: for decades Stockbridge residents opposed fast food and lodging chains, obtrusive signs and the destruction of historic buildings to make way for parking and public rest rooms and, at the same time made their livings from the tourist industry. It seems contradictory, and it is just that: one example of inherent contradiction, and there are more.
Some of us support land conservation and affordable housing without realizing that protecting land makes the remaining land too expensive to develop at an affordable price.
Some are proponents of affordable housing and, at the same time, opposed to cluster housing, the demolition of old buildings and buildings higher than four stories without realizing that this confluence of factors make housing unaffordable to all but the privileged few. The contradiction is not in the minds of the people but in the complex and interdependent aspects of the problem. And the problem is not new.
At the turn of the century, Stephen Field, who invented and constructed the first electric trolley car, led the fight against having one run on Main Street, Stockbridge. Inventor Field wanted Main Street preserved – even from him and his invention.
Today, preservationists, merchants, environmentalists, developers, full-time residents and second home owners may think they represent six opposing sides and find they have bedfellows as strange as Mr. Field.
If Stockbridge “enters the 21st century” and puts up neon signs, parking lots, motels and a Taco Bell on Red Lion corner for the tourists, there won’t be any tourists. Why come here when they have that there? If we strictly preserve our bucolic hills without reference to modern invention, we lose our children to job markets elsewhere. There is no winning; no absolute right.
The complexity and internal contradictions inherent in planning – in modernizing, preserving, and conserving – call for sober contemplation. Quiet discussion and cool heads are better than heat and anger.
Next week: Part Two: The choices
