Does Burlington need to be good?

This is an important question that I did not address in my project: does Burlington need to pursue an economic policy aimed at increasing the wealth of the population? Some may say the answer is yes, but it does not necessarily have to be so. Cities are extremely flexible and the small scale helps cities to compete with one another to bring the best product. Perhaps some people care more about having a lot of money spent on education than they do about being able to build wherever they want to. This may cause some to move in areas where heavy fees are imposed on builders to pay for higher quality public schools. This trade-off is problematic, but it represents the advantage of scaling down communities to the local level. If I were not a fan of such an approach, I could always move to another city down the road, which may offer more competitive economic policies. This is the dynamic of movement oftentimes in American families. Many children grow up in the suburbs, because their parents want them to attend better than average public schools. Later, these children will become young adults and move to college towns to build skills and have fun. After college, young adults will move to the city to get as high paying a job as possible and work for a living. After some time, these people will meet a spouse, have children, and move back to the suburbs because urban congestion and lack of quality schools (in some areas) affects the ability to raise children in urban areas. OF course, many people do not follow this model, but it accurately portrays a lot of people’s lives.

What does this have to do with Burlington? Burlington has several options: it can attempt to move businesses here, it can convert to a bedroom community that decongests itself (aka moves people out so citizens have more land for housing), or it can remain the same. The first may cause gentrification (a good thing, even if most people don’t believe it), which is at least nominally condemned in the policies of most cities, the second will change the demographic (like the first, except this would be mostly middle aged people with secondary school aged children moving in an attempt to better their child’s education), and the third is, of course, boring. None of these options are without their consequences and none of them are an island to themselves. The point of my project is to highlight the reason why we should opt for reason 1 instead of reasons 2 or 3; this city is better suited for business development than is occurring in Burlington’s city limits as of today.