Earlier Toxic Fumes: Underdeveloper and proud of it!

This is the latest Toxic Fumes column The Hellbender Press has run (written under the pseudonym Robin Goodfellow). The Hellbender can be read at http://www.hellbenderpress.com/.  

Underdeveloper and proud of it!

by Robin Goodfellow  

 Disclaimer: The following column contains wildly abusive language, full of gross stereotyping, sweeping insinuations and blanket condemnations of a certain species of occupation. Which is not to say it's wrong.

Why did God invent utilities? To give developers something besides the weather to blame for project delays. Curious, isn't it? Despite having to build everything they've ever built in the rain, no developer has ever developed a project schedule that realistically accounts for weather delays. Any time there's a dry spell, "unexpected utilities problems" serve as a good scapegoat. For certain, the one thing that will not be blamed for delays is the developer.

Ever hear the story of the First Developer? It appears to be Biblical in origin, first appearing in "Numbers" as an allegory involving a poodle. The First Developer appeared when early Hebrews were ready to move out of the dank, smelly caves they were living in and settle down as urbanites. Tribal, shepherding folk, they were accustomed to holding their possessions in common, so they decided to pool their resources and create the first publicly funded housing development.

There were those who argued that the smelly old caves held a certain primitive charm and that their adaptive reuse should be the tribe's next project. This is how historic preservationists were born.

The low bidder who got the project kept pushing back and pushing back the completion date, until everybody was utterly fed up and called for a review of the project ledgers. The First Developer sent his accountant over to meet with the tribal elders while workers finished up his stupendous luxury yacht, the funding for which had been a subject of intense speculation among his neighbors.

At the very moment the tribal elders announced that the books, and therefore the developer's goose, were cooked, the mother of all downpours hit, and the whole project and almost everyone on Earth was destroyed in a great flood. The developer's ark was completed just in time to allow survival to this day of "the weather" as the best excuse for project delays.

Humankind has constructed things in all weather for untold centuries. Yet, from all this experience developers have had working in the elements, they seem unable to recognize natural forces' effect on their work, and the effect of their work on nature. Is it too much to ask them to acknowledge that runoff from their construction sites pollutes nearby streams? That denuding great swaths of land of vegetation increases erosion and flooding and destroys fragile wildlife habitat? Then again, these are men incapable of grasping the concept that it rains in the rainy season.

This, of course, is why developers are not trusted to take care of such details themselves. Instead, laws minimizing environmental impact are promulgated by government, and standards for meeting these laws are formalized in contracts concluded between the public's governmental representatives and the developers. Thus are the public's interests safeguarded. Still, writing a standard into a contract is one thing, enforcing it is another. The devil is in the details. Why did the devil build hell from scratch? Because he was scared to sign a contract with a developer.

Besides the difficulty in ensuring that developers abide by environmental standards, do their work in a timely manner, and fulfill the terms of their contracts, another problem with them is, simply, getting a worthwhile result. A much-ballyhooed standard for development bandied about in downtown Knoxville states, approximately, that the removal of any existing structure is acceptable, as long as what replaces it is better.

Even under this nebulous standard, can the Turkey Creek development be called an improvement over its previous state? Are Market Square and Krutch Park better now than before? Will the Knox County Farmer's Market be better as a Target? Will TVA's riverfront property be better in the loving care of private developers?

Does a tree grow in Brooklyn? No, because some damn developer bulldozed it down to build something ugly and shoddy. Use developers if you must, but watch them like hawks, and wash your hands afterward.

Disclaimer: The preceding column was prejudiced, uncharitable, mean-spirited and just plain nasty. It was exaggerated to the point of caricature. Plus, it ignored the many public projects in which the developers' work is timely, cost-conscious, and satisfactory overall. It was an expression of the frustration inherent in all public projects, where all interestswill be disappointed in some respects, and the people who do the work, the developers, always get blamed, often unjustly. Which is not to say it was wrong.