Irony

As we were driving to visit my mother in law yesterday we went down Route 5. As we passed through the area that was formerly the district represented by Richard Pombo, I was struck by two things. First, the area is growing rapidly. When I was in my undergraduate studies at the University of the Pacific in the 1960s this land was basically empty. Now housing developments are popping up all over. Second, there were signs from the Pombo land company that were offering even more spaces to build new houses. Pombo lost his re-election bid in part because of perceptions about his environmental record and because a lot of the new voters in his district did not share his "agricultural" values. A lot of those new voters were there because the Pombo land company saw the opportunity to offer houses to people who were being priced out of the Bay Area market. So these voters, who could not afford the houses on the other side of the hill moved to Pombo's district, decried the desecration of the pristine land and then voted against Pombo.