Here’s a follow-on to yesterday’s post, Business Dependency in Whitewater.
There’s a huge effort locally, from the Community Development Authority in particular, to spur growth through large, publicly-funded incentives.
These addled few are like men who’ve heard the expression, ‘if you build it, he will come,’ but don’t understand when it applies and when it doesn’t. That’s a much bigger topic than I intend here, and it has both economic and legal implications (ones that are being litigated elsewhere in Wisconsin now).
Sometimes – and here in Whitewater all too often — building something doesn’t attract anyone, doesn’t attract the target audience, or only attracts someone at an unsustainable cost.
Consider the story of men in rural Pennsylvania who built a commune, only to find no one else to take them up on the venture:
….They were born Michael Colby and Donald Graves, but once there, on 63 acres in the Mahantongo Valley, a bowl of land in central Pennsylvania, they changed their names to Christian and Johannes Zinzendorf and called themselves the Harmonists, inspired by a splinter group of 18th-century Moravian brothers who believed in the spiritual values of an agrarian life.
Their ideals were lofty but simple: They would live off the land, farming with Colonial-era tools, along with a band of like-minded men dressed in homespun robes wielding scythes and pickaxes. They would sleep in atmospheric log cabins and other 18th-century structures that they had rescued from the area and that they began to reconstruct, painstakingly, brick by crumbling brick and log by log.
But what if you built a commune, and no one came….
The 25 buildings that dot the landscape are mostly dormant, save for Zephram’s house and Johannes’s house….
See, They Built It. No One Came @ The New York Times.
These utopians, to their credit, tried to build a community with their own money; Whitewater’s development gurus want to do this with vast heapings of public money.
They’ve both the same problem, though: an ambition that exceeds aptitude, a conviction that they know what others want, perhaps better than others, themselves, do.