Fastest Growing U.S. Metros: Atlanta tops all

[edluva]

I think it's pretty amazing, and scary, that LA-Santa Anta-Riverside, a "metro" of 15 million, grew by about 1.3 million. That's over 8%. Pretty crazy for a metro of its size.

Master Shake - What Houston, Atlanta, and other sunbelters are doing is not spectacular. In fact, it's not realy that they're doing anything at all. The sunbelters are just the frontier to american capitalism's manifest destiny. Cheap land, cheap taxes, cheap energy, and lax regulation have always been our economy's nectar. Nothing mysterious in that.

What impresses me more are cities in europe/japan and other old cities which appear to maintain a relatively modest but constant growth despite the lack of cheapness and spatial bounty. Such cities apear to have moved beyond relying on the bounty of open space and other exhaustible natural resources for growth. though I'd have to temper this admiration with the fact that in truth, even older cities feed off sprawl-belters such as Atlanta and Houston for their growth. In the end, the fact is that we're economically linked. Japan's society and economy, for all it's professed urbanism and environmentalism, relies heavily on ecologically-inefficient american growth for revenue. so it all comes full circle. Noone's blameless.

Which brings me to attack the self-righteousness of urbanists, urbanists including myself at times. Slogans such as "smart growth" are bullsh!t, as long as such growth continues to rely on the current mode of capitalism. Sustainability and capitalism are oxymorons because capitalism is inherently unsustainable. And this is because capitalism, by its very nature, requires a constant state of growth and environmental consumption to survive. It can never acheive a level of homeostasis that the concept of sustainability entails. Capitalism's a one-eyed beast bent on securing it's own survival, and we are it's pawns. One thing I've realized is that it really is all bullsh!t. We're just all too distracted by slogans to realize it.

Okay, I've drunk enough for tonite.