The ‘YIMBY’ Town
October 6th, 2006
Founded in 1926 to provide a tax- and regulation-free dumping location for chemical giant Monsanto, tiny Sauget, Illinois (population 250) still revels in welcoming polluting industries shunned by other communities. From zinc smelting to garbage processing to the now-shuttered PCB factory, Sauget accepts its noxious neighbors in exchange for a modicum of prosperity in the bleak post-industrial wasteland around East St. Louis.
Not surprisingly, Sauget is a pretty toxic place. Along with one Superfund site (the aptly named Dead Creek) the town is tainted with heavy metals, benzene, dioxin, and the other remnants of eighty years of heavy industry. In 1992, alt-country band Uncle Tupelo memorialized the town’s unique smell in the song “Sauget Wind.”
Note the tone of this article, taken from the Wall Street Journal: “Sauget…might offer some lessons for other Midwestern towns desperately seeking economic rejuvenation.” What lessons would those be? Poison your citizens to survive? We should be celebrating the many cities in the Midwest that are adapting to the future by going green, not by throwing carcinogens in the air.
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