Anyone who has even a rudimentary understanding of architecture knows that a building must have a strong foundation in order to remain standing and be of use as the years pass. It is also a basic construction principle that each foundation is custom built to withstand certain structural pressures and is no longer dependable when too much burden is placed on it. And even the best constructed foundation needs maintenance and reinforcement from time to time.

The same things can be said of the community in which we live. Indianapolis has a strong foundation, laid by history and vision that has served us well, but that foundation was only intended to bear a finite burden and we have exceeded the weight limit. The infrastructure that serves as the foundation of our City has not been properly tended to and yet we continue to add more and more to our "building" without expanding the strength of the infrastructure at the same rate. If our City is going to continue to permit and encourage new development, then it is far past time for the City to make sure the infrastructure grows along with the number of residents that depend upon it. Otherwise our "building" is going to come tumbling down.

It seems whenever a new residential rezoning petition comes up for discussion, there are recurrent themes echoed throughout the neighborhoods of Marion County: "we already have too much traffic in the area", "the drainage is already bad", "our schools can’t handle any more kids", "this piece of ground should be a park - we don’t have much ground left for parks". In other words, our infrastructure - our roads, our schools, our sewers, our park system, our fire departments - are overburdened and we are overtaxed trying to keep them viable.

I understand that the building industry contributes to our economy by providing jobs and purchasing services. I understand that people must have homes to live in. But I also understand that from every corner of the township where I live and in every part of Marion County, we have had enough. I also know that the people who move into these new subdivisions become part of our community, often concerned with the same issues with which existing residents have been struggling. But I also think the most obvious result of unrestrained residential development that many neighborhoods see is overcrowded schools with increasing demands on limited financial resources, congested roads that have not been upgraded to handle increased traffic, fire and emergency services struggling to keep up with exploding development, stagnant development in our commercial areas, scarce wooded areas that are being devoured, and loss of our rural and established urban tranquility in exchange for increasing taxes and overburdened infrastructure and services. It is time to ask new development to contribute more to building and strengthening the infrastructure upon which it depends to draw in buyers.

There are those who may perceive this as being "unfair" to new homebuyers by asking them to supposedly pay more than their "fair share" of infrastructure costs. However, I would respectfully disagree with that viewpoint because the new development depends not only on the new infrastructure developed within a subdivision (like the streets and sanitary sewers and even some open space and playgrounds), but also the broader base of community services and infrastructure that was paid for in past years. After all, SOMEONE paid for the streets, and the sewer processing plants, and the firefighters’ training, and the school buildings that already exist when a new development is proposed.

I am not talking about some sweeping fee that would suddenly shift every single historical infrastructure cost onto the backs of the developers and new homeowners. And I do, of course, recognize that some of the homebuyers in all these new developments are already residents of Marion County who have shared community infrastructure development costs in the past. But the system we currently have is failing miserably, and we seem to have an uncomfortable trend in this County of waiting until some infrastructure system is in failure or at critical mass before we pay any attention - let’s look at efforts to retrofit combined sewers, or fix traffic snarls in the Castleton area, or come up with parks out of a rapidly dwindling inventory of ground, or hauling portable classrooms in for the influx of school children because the buildings can’t go up fast enough and the taxes are going up TOO fast.

A few years ago, I watched a movie called "Pay It Forward" about a boy who comes up with a plan to do good deeds for three people who then, by way of payment, each must do good turns for three other people. These nine people also must pay it forward and so on, ad infinitum. If successful, the resulting network of do-gooders ought to comprise the entire world. We should not view the idea of the City requiring the developers to step up to the plate (and to be fair, we have already seen a few developers who share this vision and invest in the community voluntarily through their work with neighborhoods) and put a little more into the community from which they draw their livings and their profits as somehow placing an "unfair burden on new homebuyers". We should look at it as asking them to help build our foundation and our future. They owe it to the new homebuyers who will also share this community’s infrastructure.