Guest Opinion | When growth ends and maintenance begins

Washington State Ferries, the largest ferry system in the United States, is not expanding to carry more people. Instead, the state is scrambling to replace aging vessels simply to keep existing routes running. Boats built decades ago are nearing or going beyond their life expectancy, and Washington expects to need more than a dozen new ferries by 2040 just to maintain the current fleet.

This isn’t just a ferry problem; it’s a sign of something larger.

Across Washington State, the infrastructure built during the great growth decades of the mid-twentieth century is aging out all at once. Bridges built in the 1950s and 1960s are reaching the end of their design life. Roads laid down during the suburban boom require constant resurfacing. Water systems, culverts, and power infrastructure are deteriorating.

Increasingly, public budgets are consumed not by new projects but by the cost of keeping what we already built from falling apart.

The ferry system illustrates the dynamic perfectly. Replacing aging vessels will cost billions of dollars. Even if the money is found, we riders probably won’t see more routes or shorter wait times; only the preservation of what already exists with newer boats (that hopefully don’t break down as often). But as Ken Burtness recently pointed out, it’s more likely we’ll fail to replace those old boats to even maintain the existing service.

The ferries aren’t the only transportation example of this shift to maintenance. Officials estimate billions are needed simply to prevent further deterioration of roads and bridges. Meanwhile, a federal court ruling requiring the replacement of hundreds of salmon-blocking highway culverts adds billions more in costs. This is essential work, but work that does not expand the transportation system (i.e. the infinite growth required to support an economy dependent on growth).

For rural counties like ours, the math is even more difficult.

San Juan County is a striking example. The islands are a beloved destination, but tourism and second-home ownership have reshaped the local economy in ways that make it increasingly difficult for year-round communities to function.

More than a third of the county’s housing units are classified as vacant, and most of those are seasonal or second homes. In fact, homes used for seasonal or occasional use make up the majority of vacant housing units in the county.

That means thousands of houses exist that are not available to the people who need them most: teachers, nurses, ferry workers, electricians, grocery clerks.

At the same time, housing prices have soared. Typical home values in the county now hover around $750,000, far beyond what many local workers can afford.

The result is a familiar story across the islands. Health clinics struggle to recruit staff, schools struggle to recruit teachers, businesses struggle to hire workers, and families leave.

Meanwhile, our local government faces the same aging infrastructure challenges as the rest of the state, with roads to maintain, docks to repair, and emergency services to fund, with a tax base that is both small and uneven. Tourism brings seasonal revenue, but it raises costs and drives housing prices even higher.

Symptoms of a larger shift

For most of the twentieth century, United States citizens lived in an era of expansion. We built highways, strung power grids across the continent, and flooded the landscape with reservoirs, industrial agriculture, and suburbs. Infrastructure networks grew rapidly, and the economy grew with them.

All of this growth rapidly drew down or destroyed the natural communities that make up the foundation of the web of life and support the economy. Climate change is the most visible example, but it is not the only one. Declining fisheries, degraded forests, water scarcity, soil erosion, and biodiversity loss all add pressures, and all have accelerated rapidly in recent decades. Each of these overshoot symptoms forces society to spend more resources on repair, adaptation, or replacement.

Economists call this the shift from growth spending to defensive spending.* This shift is characteristic of an economy moving toward a peak.

Growth spending builds new capacity, while defensive spending simply keeps existing systems functioning.

Washington State in defensive spending mode

The ferry system offers a glimpse of the future. We’ll spend billions replacing boats that already exist. Unlike in the golden era of the ferries (1970s to 1990s), success simply means the boats still run. No extra money is made on the new boats, so how do we pay for the replacements?

If infrastructure becomes too expensive to maintain, and housing becomes too expensive for the people who keep the community running, I wonder: What happens when a place becomes too expensive to live in even for the people who live here?

Property taxes rise. Utility bills rise. Insurance rises. Ferry fares rise. Every year it costs more simply to stay. Eventually the challenge overwhelms municipal and county governments (we’re all aware of the budget shortfalls at the county and state level). Then our challenge becomes continuity, rather than growth.

Can we keep the ferries running? Can we keep the schools staffed? Can we keep the clinics open? Can we keep a real community here at all?

In the twentieth century, the defining question of American development was how much more we could build. In the twenty-first, the question is: How much of what we built can we still afford to keep?

* For more on the shift from growth spending to defensive spending, see this recent paper by Tim Garrett et. al, Acceleration by climate change of global economic inflation.