The Issue: Flowers vs. Factories 汉译

Call it a tug of war between geraniums and smokestacks. For the Far West in general and California in particular, the issue of the late 1980s will be how to maintain the quality of life in an era of galloping growth that promises to last into the next century. With a few exceptions, the region’s economy remains healthy and the preoccupation has shifted from jobs. While that problem might be welcomed as a boon in blighted regions, it troubles many in urban parts of the West. San Diego, America’s fastest growing city in the 1970s, seeks to cling to its canyons and sagebrush in the face of estimates that its population may near the 2 million mark by the year 2000. Other California cities are just as worried. In recent elections, San Francisco and Los Angeles both approved voter-initiative referendums limiting growth.

San Diego’s mayor, Maureen O’Connor, likes to say when it comes to a choice between environment and industry, put her down on the side of the flowers. In office since last fall, she is unabashedly nostalgic about the San Diego of her childhood—a small city of 35000 that is no more. “I remember when the valleys were full of dairy farms, there were no high-rises downtown, the freeways were practically empty and everybody knew everybody.

The city over which she now presides has since become the sixth largest in America and one of its most bustling. To say it is in the full flush of health would understate it. The metro area’s gross product soared from $11.3 billion in 1970 to $36.6 billion in 1985. Sony is exploring expansion of its television-assembly plant, the city issued more than $500 million worth of apartment-building permits last year, and a $139 million convention center is on the drawing boards. But all of this has come at a steep price, and the mayor is finding her commitment to flowers being tested at every turn.

“If we put an initiative on the ballot right now to freeze growth in this city, it would probably pass by a two-thirds vote,” she says. A half-dozen communities have appealed for just such a moratorium on urban expansion. But the mayor, who must now worry about such things as the tax base, jobs and the construction industry, says that if possible, she would like to avoid a show-down over growth. She is in search of a goal that has eluded many U. S. cities—a way to keep her own city’s image as a clean, green place to live, yet make way for the growth that would mean more jobs and preserve prosperity.

She is racing the clock. A City Council study shows that, for the rest of the 1980s, San Diego is far more likely to gain population than lose it. To accommodate all the new arrivals—and stave off social problems that would accompany a stagnant economy—new jobs must be created, schools and hospitals built. Industry is the obvious answer, and San Diego has ample prospects. The question is how much will be enough and what kind should be permitted? And, in the process, how much of the city’s 12000 acres of undeveloped land should be committed to factories and plants?

Mayor O’Connor, 39, has no ready answers. But she does know poverty at first hand, and the memory of that seems to be tempering her oft stated devotion to the geraniums. Her own family of 13 was so poor that a brother once tried to mold a Thanks-giving turkey out of a couple of pounds of hamburger.