Sustainability, not unbridled development, should be the guiding principle
Looking for signs of recovery in our part of the country, we note that homebuilders took out permits to construct nearly 1,900 new residential units in the Baltimore metropolitan area in the first four months of the year. That’s a 70 percent rise over the same period a year ago. According to The Baltimore Sun’s report on this, there’s something of a land rush taking place, with builders snapping up lots “at an aggressive rate,” according to John Kortecamp, executive vice president of the Home Builders Association of Maryland.
This is the way we do things — we measure progress in permits for new housing. That’s how we define growth, and growth is always considered good, especially as the region and the nation try to emerge from the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. Foreclosures continue, and many of the people who for a time owned a home have returned, perhaps permanently, to the ranks of renters. But we still look to new housing for evidence of recovery.
We do this, in one sense, out of tradition. Development and construction symbolize the progress of the American Dream, a return to the steady suburbanization of the country. We associate new housing with the period of growth and prosperity that marked most of the second half of the 20th Century, the good old days.