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Friday, December 15, 2006
Growth and development in Gwinnett - necesssary evils?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
BILL ALLEN WILL BE BACK WITH A NEW BLOG ON JAN. 12. DO COME BACK.
My cousin Suzanne got married this past weekend.
Carol, the bride’s mother and my aunt, is Irish. Carol is one of 13 brothers and sisters. Most of her family are scattered throughout the U.S., but a few of them, including Carol’s sister Gabrielle, still live in Ireland.
The family stayed at my parents’ house in Duluth last week until they went to their hotel. I talked to Gabrielle about Duluth and how much it has grown in the last 20 years I’ve lived here.
“I know what you mean,” she said. “I live in Kildare, just 40 minutes west of the Dublin airport. The Irish economy started booming about 16 years ago, and it hasn’t stopped. Intel and Hewlett Packard are two big companies here with development in Kildare, and they just keep growing and taking up factory space. Back then, there was nothing. There was so much land around here to develop, they haven’t stopped building.”
I told her about how housing has increased in Duluth, in terms of houses available and price.
“My husband and I bought our house for ₤35,000 ($68,800) 20 years ago. We borrowed ₤20,000 ($39,000) from my Dad, and he thought we were nuts. Today the house would be worth ₤100,000 ($196,000) minimum.”
I told her about traffic in Duluth, how hard it was getting around on the roads here, much less driving into Atlanta.
“You don’t know the half of it,” she said. “Fifteen years ago I could make it to downtown Dublin in 20 minutes during rush hour. Today, if I can make it in an hour and a half, I feel pretty lucky. There are no roads around Kildare anymore, only parking lots. That’s what happens when everyone wants to live here.”
I told her Duluth’s population has increased dramatically in the last 10 years, especially the number of immigrants.
“Well, Ireland has exported its people for the last 150 years. This may be the first generation in a while that stayed home and didn’t go to another country.
“But immigration is exploding. The Chinese are here. They study hard, work hard, save every penny. We get a lot of immigration from Poland and Russia, the Eastern European countries. They are mostly manual laborers and a low paying work force. They don’t speak the language very well, and they are becoming a drain on government resources because they are poor and unskilled. And the crime! The Russian Mafia has drugs and prostitution, and the murder rate has just exploded in Dublin. In Kildare, we have it too, and all the stuff that you just don’t get in a sleepy little town. I mean, it wasn’t long ago when this was literally a one-horse town.”
It was an interesting conversation. Much of what Gabrielle said about Kildare - the growth, the immigration, the crime - was the same things that I have heard said about Duluth.
There’s a movie called The Quiet Man, with John Wayne. Its cinematography became a daydream of Ireland in my mind, just like the pine trees in my back yard growing up here.
If an old country like Ireland can lose its old-world charm to the “Celtic Tiger” of growth and population, then we in Duluth who oppose losing more acreage to roads and apartments don’t seem to have much of a fighting chance. It was surprising - and disheartening - to think about how much we really have in common with the Emerald Isle.
Growth and development in Gwinnett - are they inevitable and necessary evils?
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