Posted on 08/20/2005 4:25:48 PM PDT by neverdem
The comparison is invalid. The Municipality of Anchorage is equivalent to a county, that would be a fair comparison. The old city of Anchorage is very constrained geographically and geologically. Most of the population has to live outside the Anchorage bowl. Anchorage cannot invest in high rises due to the extreme earthquake danger combined with the nature of the soil of the Anchorage bowl. Traffic access to the Anchorage bowl is very limited, and the distance to get from inhabitable land to downtown is large.
Actually, the majority of my company is located somewhere else. They are working in Russia developing oil fields in a place that are not held up by lying environmentalists, grand standing politicians and citizens that think building infrastructure is a bad thing.
The politicians/highway planners are talking about using the collected tolls to pay for improvements beyond the 121 corridor.
What a Joke.
Hey Alaska... enjoy that pavement. It sure would be nice if you'd spare any extra.
She's a resident of some twenty years in Haines and a prolific writer, or so it would seem from a quick Google.
I'll chalk this up as a NIMBY screed, albeit a well-written one.
Nonsense. You're in favor of government taking my money to build bridges to nowhere. If Anchorage is bursting at the seams like you say, there should be plenty of free-market incentives for developers to buy up homes like yours and put up townhouses. The fact that that isn't happening speaks volumes about development pressures in Anchorage.
I don't like going down to Anchorage any more. The traffic is even worse than Fairbanks's. I wouldn't want to live there, although living in Seward, Ketchikan, or Kenai and having a boat wouldn't be so bad. The thing that gets me is that there are so many unfounded ideas about what is going on in Alaska by those who haven't been here to see for themselves. Even Paul Harvey is annoying in that respect. But, Hillary is just unbelieveable.
The fact that it IS happening, shows the great pressure for homes in Anchorage. Three lots on my street are doing that NOW, and I live outside Anchorage and commute into town.
If you look online about the number of acres in Anchorage, make sure you understand that a lot of it looks like this:
Beautiful, but not very useful for homes.
Speaking of Houston, AK, if you lived there and commuted into Anch, it would be like living in Philly and driving into Manhattan. Also, speaking of Houston, AK, Fairbanks has been buried in smoke the past couple of weeks, just like all last summer. I understand Anch. lucked out on fire this summer. What happened to our clean air?
The article seems to lament the amount of federal dollars that Alaska is asking for the project. (I did not read the entire article as it is from the NY Times and I don't hit their site if I can avoid it.) My question was, therefore, as someone who pays federal taxes, as I am sure she does, is she as concerned with the fed dollars that flow in the WV and MA as she seems to be with the money that goes to Alaska?
Massachusetts gets 77 cents for every dollar we send to Washington.
Even at the peak of Tip O'Neill's power in the 1980s, when we got the money for the Big Dig, we never quite broke even. We came close, but we still subsidized the rest of the country by a cent or more on the dollar, even as our economy was spiralling into the Dukakis recession.
The difference between the Big Dig and the Bridge to Nowhere is that people actually use the Big Dig.
Thanks for the picture; I won't argue for a moment that I don't know anything about Anchorage's topography vs. someone who lives there.
That said, I fired up Google satellite to get an idea of what the development looks like, and found these neighborhoods:
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=61.112069,-149.795151&spn=0.038147,0.121708&z=4&t=h&hl=en
Huge areas of single family homes on nice-sized lots, occupying a swath of land as big as downtown. This doesn't look like the Lower East Side to me.
A common problem out West, and something I think most Easterners, Midwesterners and Southerners have no clue about. They don't realize how pervasive the control of the Federal government is out here. I'd wager that it is almost impossible to get out of sight of Federally controlled land west of Denver.
You may want to check your assumptions. How much of the $1.89 is going to back to the residents, and how much is going to administer the huge amount of Federally controlled National Parks, Forests, Wilderness Areas, Military reserves, etc. Combine the costs of running these with the small population, and you get this sort of skewed statistic.
Not to mention the traffic and hazardous driving to Anchorage from Wasilla in the winter. Oh man that's awful.
Traffic from Wasilla on is bad enough in the summer. I'll just stay in Fairbanks, thanks.
In 1992, Alaska got $1.26 back for every dollar it spent. The forests haven't gotten any bigger or needier since then, but Alaska's federal politicans have amassed FAR more power since 1994. You do the math.
If they would allow some resource development such as coal mining and open some land for homesteading it would be more tolerable. Most of the resources are frozen for development by those Eastern politicians.
You assume too much, Hostile, fitting name by the way. I was not "attacking" her "journalism" as much as I was questioning her politics and her agenda. My "silly" comment was a question.
Beautiful photos. Thanks for sharing.
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