Fast Food Nation - Eric Schlosser [36]
Many of the problems that caused white, middle-class families to leave southern California are now appearing in the Rocky Mountain states. During the early 1990s, about 100,000 people moved to Colorado every year. But spending on government services did not increase at a corresponding rate — because Colorado voters enacted a Taxpayers Bill of Rights in 1992 that placed strict limits on new government spending. The initiative was modeled after California’s Proposition 13 and championed by Douglas Bruce, a Colorado Springs landlord who’d recently arrived from Los Angeles. By the late 1990s, Colorado’s spending on education ranked forty-ninth in the nation; fire departments throughout the state were understaffed; and parts of Interstate 25 in Colorado Springs were clogged with three times the number of cars that the highway was designed to hold. Meanwhile, the state government had an annual surplus of about $700 million that by law could not be used to solve any of these problems. The development along Colorado’s Front Range is not yet as all-encompassing as the sprawl of Los Angeles — where one-third of the surface area is now covered by freeways, roads, and parking lots — but someday it may be.
Colorado Springs now has the feel of a city whose identity is not yet fixed. Many longtime residents strongly oppose the extremism of the newcomers, sporting bumper stickers that say, “Don’t Californicate Colorado.” The city is now torn between opposing visions of what America should be. Colorado Springs has twenty-eight Charismatic Christian churches and almost twice as many pawnbrokers, a Lord’s Vineyard Bookstore and a First Amendment Adult Bookstore, a Christian Medical and Dental Society and a Holey Rollers Tattoo Parlor. It has a Christian summer camp whose founder, David Noebel, outlined the dangers of rock ’n’ roll in his pamphlet Communism, Hypnotism, and the Beatles. It has a gay entertainment complex called The Hide & Seek, where the Gay Rodeo Association meets. It has a public school principal who recently disciplined a group of sixth-grade girls for reading a book on witchcraft and allegedly casting spells. The loopiness once associated with Los Angeles has come full-blown to Colorado Springs — the strange, creative energy that crops up where the future’s consciously being made, where people walk the fine line separating a visionary from a total nutcase. At the start of a new century, all sorts of things seem possible there. The cultural and the physical landscapes of Colorado Springs are up for grabs.
Despite all the talk in Colorado about aerospace, biotech, computer software, telecommunications, and other industries of the future, the largest private employer in the state today is the restaurant industry. In Colorado Springs, the restaurant industry has grown much faster than the population. Over the last three decades the number of restaurants has increased fivefold. The number of chain restaurants has increased tenfold. In 1967, Colorado Springs had a total of twenty chain restaurants. Now it has twenty-one McDonald’s.
The fast food chains feed off the sprawl of Colorado Springs, accelerate it, and help set its visual tone. They build large signs to attract motorists and look at cars the way predators view herds of prey. The chains thrive on traffic, lots of it, and put new restaurants at intersections where traffic is likely to increase, where development is heading but real estate prices are still low. Fast food restaurants often serve as the shock troops of sprawl, landing early and pointing the way. Some chains