Letter: This isn't working

In an op-ed I wrote in August entitled "The HOA no one signed up for”, I said, "would-be developers at Homewood, Crystal Bay, and South Lake Tahoe are learning similar expensive lessons with multi-decade approval processes.” Those words turned out to be somewhat prophetic, as the Biltmore is headed for foreclosure auction and Homewood recently announced they wouldn’t be opening at all this season.

With these announcements alone, thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in economic activity have evaporated, including the nearby small businesses now without an anchor to draw foot traffic.

The problem isn’t part-time residents, a lack of bike infrastructure, a lack of government-sponsored affordable housing, or a lack of open space. Instead, the problem is us. We metaphorically chain ourselves to ski lifts we rode as a kid, and get angry when that money-losing operation says “no more.” We fight tooth and nail to preserve an artificially dense forest that looks nothing like the one the Washoe lived in, and get angry when our insurance companies don’t renew our policies. We have entire organizations centered around educating and rehabilitating selected charismatic megafauna while ignoring those that don’t fit into our Disneyfied vision of nature. We weaponize permitting processes with specious lawsuits and procedural delays under the banner of environmentalism and then wonder why there are few well-paying jobs to support families. By doing these things, we have created a different kind of unsustainability. This isn’t working.

Our infrastructure is rotting, our housing stock is aging and built for a world that is no longer affordable for most, and our commercial corridors are filled with end-of-life buildings built for a pre-Internet economy that doesn’t exist anymore and will not exist in the future. Fighting change and development at any cost through taxation, lawsuits, #activism, bureaucracy and excessive regulation has significant costs. How much longer would you like to look at blighted and shuttered buildings and the shadows of the jobs and livelihoods they once housed?

Redevelopment agencies were abolished in California in 2012: the government isn’t coming to help us out of the hole this time. We simply must get past ourselves. The perfect can no longer be the enemy of the good, romanticized visions of the past can no longer be the enemy of the reality of the world we live in. The Basin needs to attract billions of dollars of outside investment for the housing and jobs we purport to want. We need to create a regulatory environment that decreases uncertainty and allows investors to have a fair rate of return for the risk they take. No doubt there are externalities to these changes, and everyone (including me) has a hard time embracing them. However, without significant changes to our planning practices and #activism, we won’t have to worry about a “vibrant, not vacant” community; there won’t be the economy to sustain any community at all.

- Seth Dallob

Seth Dallob is the COO of NexGen Housing Partners, a workforce housing developer with projects in metro Seattle. He is a candidate for the STPUD Board of Directors. He and his wife are full-time South Lake Tahoe residents.