Cascadia Scorecard News
December 2006

By Alan Durning

Freedom is a bedrock value for us northwesterners.

Yet last month, we rejected—spanked, even—ballot measures in California, Idaho, and Washington that would have granted unprecedented freedom to property owners. These “takings” measures would have given communities two choices: grant owners a virtually free hand on their land or pay them huge sums to obey land-use laws.

Is this a rejection of our respect for freedom? I think not.

It’s a sign of Cascadians’ sophistication about what liberty means. We northwesterners know that, whether we like it or not, our personal freedom is dependent on how our neighbors exercise their freedom.

Consider property values. If you’ve looked at the property-value website Zillow.com, you can probably visualize your home, labeled with a price tag, stitched into an edgeless patchwork of other parcels, each with its own price tag. The value of each lot is dependent on where it sits in that patchwork quilt and what happens nearby. My neighbors got richer a few years ago when I remodeled my house. Then, I got richer when the school district turned an asphalt lot on our street into an athletic field. Ultimately, the disparate actions of thousands of neighbors, shaped by community standards and augmented by investment in public facilities, build or degrade property values.

This observation—that our neighbors help to determine the value of our homes—is more important than it may first appear. Private homes are most Cascadians’ principal asset, which means that our wealth is not only a product of our own labors; it arises from the actions of our communities.

And the interdependence of property values is just one instance of a fundamental truth about our life in the Pacific Northwest: We are not just a group of consumers and workers who share some currency and a string of freeway exits. We’re a community and we depend on each other, even when we wish we didn’t.

It’s not just through property values that we’re stuck to each other. We’re joined at the hip or, at least, the pocket book in countless other ways. Our job prospects and salaries depend on the vitality of the regional economy. And that depends on the quality of our education system, the efficiency of our markets, and the fairness of our governance. We’re joined at the pension: our retirement savings depend on the earnings of younger generations (for public programs like Social Security) and the profitability of future enterprise (for private investments).

We’re linked in biological ways, too. We’re joined at the lips, the stomach, and the lungs: we breathe, drink, and eat from the same atmosphere, water cycle, and food chain. Our bodies exchange almost 90 percent of their matter with the world outside our skin each year; so whatever I put into our natural heritage—into our air, water, and land—may end up in your body, and vice versa.

None of which is to say that your individual interests and mine are always the same. They’re not. It’s just that they’re connected to each other. You can harm mine and I can harm yours unless you and I together make up some rules to govern both of us.

Without democratically set standards about how community members may use their land, for example, my land is threatened. With standards, I get as much freedom as I can have without diminishing yours, and vice versa.

On November 7, we northwesterners didn’t reject freedom. We affirmed it. We showed that, when it comes to liberty, we understand our connectedness. To protect our freedom, we must remember that we’re all in this life together.

Read more by Alan Durning

Bicycle Neglect--Daily Score blog series
The Year of Living Car-lessly: Daily Score blog series
The Year f 1 Percent
Life, Liberty, and Property Values