Yes! No growth

If we're looking for culprits, the evildoers who put Georgia on the road to development perdition, we might as well start with Franklin D. Roosevelt. After all, that Yankee aristocrat liked to go slumming in Warm Springs, where he saw firsthand the grinding poverty in the South during the Great Depression.

In 1937, when FDR was inaugurated for his second term, his recollection of the awful plight of poor Southerners prompted some of the best oratory of his career. "I see millions lacking the means to buy the products of farm and factory and by their poverty denying work and productiveness to many other millions," FDR declaimed. "I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished. But it is not in despair that I paint you that picture. I paint it for you in hope. ... The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."

Georgia got the message five by five, and embarked on decades of making things cushy for business – economic progressiveness built the commerce engine of the South, Atlanta. That was good, up to a point. Along the way, FDR's words got reversed. Especially under Gov. Sonny "Florida Boy" Perdue and the current cabal of bimbo-chasing, lobbyist-beholden nitwits in the Legislature, the "test" is whether more can be larded onto the platters of those who already have much, while those who have little are freighted with the bill.

Even that could be written off as "business as usual" in the Legislature – graft, corruption, greed and pimping for moneyed interests will always be with us, as surely as the poor will be. But there's a disaster looming, a train crash whose wreckage in human tragedy will be far worse than what FDR saw from the steps of his Warm Springs retreat.

How bad will it be? Let's play with some numbers. The growth rate in the United States is about 1.1 percent annually. Hah, you say, a measly 1.1 percent is nothing to worry about. But all those consecutive 1.1 percent increases, compounded, add up. We'll double our national population in 63.63 years if we sustain that growth curve. The prospect of America with 600 million people isn't pretty -- but most of us won't be around in 64 years, so why worry?

However, national growth isn't uniform. Just as surely as shit floats, population heads south and west. Georgia's growth, compared with the rest of the nation, is a rocket racing a dirigible. The state's growth rate is 2.4 percent a year – meaning that our population will double to about 20 million people in 30 years. The city of Atlanta, with 3.2 percent annual growth, will have twice its current 500,000 residents in less than 22 years.

And the scare-the-bejesus-out-of-you number is for the metro area. With 5 million people already staggering from near-terminal gridlock and pollution, the current 4.2 percent growth rate will double the population in a mere 17 years. That's 10 million people, folks. Do you want 5 million new neighbors?

I've never been a fan of Malthusian projections of population doom. Something always intervenes prior to the final collapse of civilization as we know it. In Georgia, that "something" is likely to be one of two things: Either we radically change course by design; or we don't, and the outcome is even more radical.

One reason we'll never reach 10 million people in the metro area is that we'll run out of water first. At the current consumption levels, that many people would use about 900 million gallons of water a day from the Chattahoochee basin – and the most optimistic estimate is that the Hooch tops out at about 700 million gallons a day.

The other limiting factors are well-known. We don't have a transportation system adequate for today's population, much less for millions more residents. The latest wholly inadequate Pied Piper solutions are toll HOV lanes – read: The rich speed to work in the limousine lanes while everyone else's commute increases, increases and increases. Big solutions are needed: Either to retrofit the metro area with a comprehensive transit system or build sufficient roads (an impossibility) to accommodate millions of additional cars. Either scenario has a price tag hovering at the $50 billion range, and climbing.

Behind all of this is a real villain: growth. Our state only has one real industry: growth. We have one god: growth. It's a false god, a golden calf.

Surveys show that each new resident costs the current population, and constant growth has little beneficial impact on jobs and incomes.

Georgia Power, for example, builds into the rates we pay today the cost of building plants for future new residents. One national study, by the Carrying Capacity Network, found that each new person costs the existing population in a metro area $15,378. Our metro area adds about 200 new residents a day. That means every one of us in metro Atlanta chips in about 60 cents a day to pay for the cost of the nouveau Atlantans. It's like flushing your hard-earned money down the toilet – except that in a few years, as the Chattahoochee turns into caked mud, your number of flushes is likely to be severely rationed.

But some folks get rich. I don't believe developers, utility executives and governors are stupid. I think they know exactly the disaster that's awaiting Georgia. They want to fleece the population of as much money as possible before the state collapses under the weight of unbearable population. And, of course, these fine bidnessmen – along with their political servants – will have already staked out walled and gated reservations to which they'll retreat.

The solution, not hard to figure out, is to dramatically deter population growth. Send the Yankees back North. Other states – Florida, most notably – have adopted sensible growth-management laws. The developers screeched, but guess what? They're still in business.

In reality, "smart growth" – encouraging urban anthills – isn't the best answer. We'll just end up with a hideously dense intown Atlanta, with no curb to exurban sprawl.

Nope, the only sane goal is no – NO – growth beyond only a slight increase in our current population. Anything else is too extremist and radical to consider. To rip off FDR, it's not with despair that I paint you the picture of no growth. I paint it for you in hope.