register |  login
› WESTMINSTER
Loading Ad
Visit Other Hubs:
ADVERTISEMENT
Loading Tower
RECENT STORIES

Franktown terrorized by metaphor

Contributed by: Francis Miller on 6/21/2006

This weekend was Heritage Days in Franktown and the locals rode a wagon to the cemetery, displayed their genealogy and held a desert sale to raise money for the historical society. Observing this sentimental undertaking gave me pause to think, a dangerous enterprise for someone of my constitution.

Even if you aren't an HBO:Deadwood fan you can predict the story line from your past viewing of John Wayne's gunfighter movies and LouIs L' Amour's novels. It goes like this:

A small western town is comprised of small merchants who service the ranches and mining operations in the outlying hinterlands. There is one large rancher or mine operator who wants to control everything that goes on in the county for his benefit and he wants to control water and land and consolidate ownership to become even more powerful. The most properous merchants in town want to sell land lots as the town grows. To enforce control, a gunfighter in a black hat is hired to come into the town and exert the will of the major players. The small merchants counter-react by hiring their own sheriff who is meaner and tougher than the gunfighters. In the movies the forces of good win out over evil and the town becomes a thriving community.

Take this as a metaphor for Franktown. Here you have this historic place that has been a service center for the outlying agricultural economy. A new kind of gold was discovered in Franktown in the 1980s when a swarm of California, Texas and coastal ex-patriots escaping Mexican immigration, high coastal property costs and poor schools flooded Douglas County and began to subdivide large, historical ranches and create a gentrified social class of Russellville Road Grandees. Real estate development became the new economic force--the big-dog on the porch. Franktown, whose evolution has always been out of sync with that of Parker's by ten years, stayed a town of small merchants, most of whom speculated on lots in the town thinking it would eventually become a real estate play. But, because it takes a population of 25,000 to sustain big box retailers and because ownership in Franktown is fractionalized it just doesn't have the demographics.

Now, enter the evil gunfighter doing the bidding for the newly arrived large lot gentry and the real estate developer "force". Somewhere along the way, the County realized it benefits equally by increased property tax assessments and sales tax revenue. So, it decided that rather than to outsource the dirty, immoral job of gunfighting, it would get into that business and have its own captive, internal organization to protect its interests. It's called Community Planning and its job is to be an enforcer. First, make sure that the small town merchants are kept in line and that only large, planned developments controlled by capital-intensive real estate developers play in the game. This can easily be done the way the Mob roughs people up through the County's site planning, sign control, building codes, and decisions over the use of the building you own. It's a petty tyranny, but enough to discourage many small businesses who just want to move into a cheap space and hang out a shingle.

The second rule is "never, ever allow real estate supply to outstrip demand or allow a bubble to develop that can burst and cause assessed values to decline". Ironically, this occurred in the real estate bubbles of 1972 and 1987,and those same value declines created a vacuum which spurred the growth of developments such as the Pinery, Bannock Burn, and Deerfield, etc. Today, local land use officials, working in close concert with real estate developers control development in a measured way so that property tax values are maximized for the betterment of the County and the real estate developers alike. Existing homeowners who want to see their property artificially increase in value naturally endorse this through the election of County Commissioners. Oh, and do not, under any circumstances allow affordable housing to creep in and dilute the average value of homes or contaminate the purity of the demographics of the public schools which are quasi-private academies.

In most of America's 200-year history the settlement of our lands and development of the economy was organic. It came through the independent decisions of property owners and entrepreneurs, whether it was the small town merchants in places like Franktown or startups like Coors, Gates and Samsonite. These enterprises built offices and factories and homes whose functionality and aesthetics were the lengthened shadow of their owners.

This is rapidly being eclipsed by a politically "socialized process" of capital-intensive, centrally-planned development determined by concentrated-power interests. Cabals of real estate investors consolidate small parcels of land or acquire large ranches in the outying areas and mass manufacture cinder-block medical office and retail space that maximizes their rents. Overnight, they can use modern production techniques to build upscale stick-frame housing, sold as custom homes to the naive, using stucco, asphalt roofing, and cultured stone that looks expensive and reminds the buyer of some Mediterranean villa they admired on their last trip to Italy or France. It is called "new urbanism" or "ex-urbia" and it is only separated one degree from the central planning, socialistic ways of our European cousins. It is artificial, contrived, and elevates the tyranny of the majority over the interests of property owners and small business.

The frontier, independent, organic growth and development of the past is considered volatile and too much of an economic roller-coaster for state, county and city governments and their allies in the education and health care estates who now depend on constantly increasing tax-based revenue streams to pay salaries and fund pensions.

The private sector has increasing has become dependent on retail and construction jobs in two income families and routinely sucks the equity out of their inflated home and leverages their ordinary incomes to the max to acquire the American dream now, not later. These families easily buy into any scheme that increases their home's value.

The frontier mythology, if it ever existed, is at least dead in spirit. Even if Franktown's small town merchants hired a Wild Bill Hickok type, he would be relentlessly pursued and exterminated by the "Machine". The allied forces of the real estate developers, large-lot landowners, and the local government estate nexus are too great for any one individual or a small group of merchants to fight.

Lest you lose hope, believe that this too shall pass, for contained within the genetics of all trends are the seeds of that trend's destruction. The creation of villas throughout Douglas County is predicated on cheap energy and water drawn out of the Commons. It is based on a food delivery system that keeps the shelves stocked at King Soopers and the ability for the BoBos* to commute to work. It is based on a set of fundamentals which will likely change in the next decade.

I no longer believe that the inmigration to Colorado is cyclical or tied to the national economy. From my stint on the Infrastructure 2050 Committee, if anything in-migration will likely explode when terrorist or natural disasters in coastal areas force the migration of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people inland. That might reinstate the frontier, any-thing goes ethic of the past, as shanty towns become necessary until infrastructure can be built. But, if New Orleans is an example, we will see a confederancy of aligned, vested power interests exerting their will over the landscape using employed hacks to do their bidding.

If you have not already signed up for one coalition or the other there is still room to check your hat and you soul at the door and get on the dance floor. For the small town merchants in Franktown, I would recommend taking your profits and enjoying party.


SUBMIT COMMENT

Rate the above story



Talk Back : submit comments to the story

*Note: you need to log-in to add a comment or rating.

CONTRIBUTOR INFORMATION

Francis Miller

Parker , CO

Francis Miller has posted 699 stories and 9 comments since joining on 11/17/2005. Francis Miller's average story rating is 4.2.
SAVE AND SHARE THIS STORY
STORY RSS FEEDS
WANT TO WRITE FOR YOURHUB.COM?
Want to see the stories you write and the photos you shoot featured in the YourHub.com Thursday print section available all over the Front Range and with home subscriptions of the Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post? All you have to do is register, then post a story or column, start a blog or tell everyone what events are happening in town. We will print the best stories, columns, event listings, photos and blog entries in our print sections.

ADVERTISEMENT
Loading Ad

Loading Ad
ADVERTISEMENT
Loading Ad

This YourHub.com community is produced by The Denver Newspaper Agency
Web Development and Channel Analytics provided by Indigio

terms of use //  privacy policy
the staff //  advertise //  help & faq
buy photos