Lack of racial diversity leads one to wonder why

Every week, if not every day some weeks, you read in the paper about some issue regarding development in Kootenai County. Developers think there’s not nearly enough, long-standing residents think there’s been way too much already, and newcomers want it to stay just the way they’ve found it.

I’ve been here 13 years and I have no property to sell or develop, so I guess I’m on the fringe of the long-standers. When I first arrived, from Las Vegas, no less, I was certainly an outsider, but there has been so much change during my time here that I can reminisce about Kootenai County’s good old days with the best of them.

The losses on the Rathdrum Prairie are my particular sore spot. However, I’ve had my turn at wanting to live on a mountain unspoiled by other houses getting there first, or in a development in the middle of a beautiful setting, or out somewhere where no one else will ever build. I don’t actually care much for the lake, so a lakeside home complete with dock has not been one of my vices.

Now I live in an older neighborhood near downtown and I like it a lot. I love the old, big trees and the diversity in building. So many new developments are carved from either the prairie � no trees at all � or the pine scrub � nasty crooked trees with horrible, constantly dropping needles. And I hate that frantic feeling you get when you drive home tired and can’t distinguish your house from all the others.

I was working on another project when I happened upon the census figures for Kootenai County. You can see them for yourself at http://quickfacts.census.gov/ qfd/states/16/16055.html. In addition to figures from the 2000 census, they include some estimates for more recent years.

The county’s growth is just astounding. While the population of Idaho grew by 13 percent in the six years since the census, Kootenai County has grown by 21 percent. In rounded off figures, we’ve added 23,000 people, and gone from 109,000 to 132,000 between 2000 and 2006. That’s a lot of people in six years, although when I left Las Vegas that county was growing by 10,000 a month.

There are lots of reasons for the growth, of course. In Las Vegas it was jobs. The growth itself was a massive job creator. I don’t see that here. The scenery and outdoor recreation may be a lot of it, but I’d have thought that winters would work against that number. For instance, why do people retire to North Idaho from places such as San Diego? Cost of living perhaps?

There are people who look at those data and make sense of them � looking for trends, making predictions. There must be someone at the county courthouse that does so in the name of planning for the future. I’m just wandering around through the data until I get to where I want to be to make a point, and to do some wondering.

Based on anecdotal information, I know that race has something to do with why some people choose to live here. A friend in Las Vegas was a policeman for 20-plus years. I knew him pretty well and I was never aware of his being overtly racist. When he retired, however, he moved to rural Missouri. He seriously considered North Idaho.

I asked him why, and he was quite straightforward in explaining that in his career as a police officer he had dealt with so many “problem” African Americans and Hispanics that he never wanted to deal with either group again, in any capacity. Racist or not, he described it as a lifestyle choice. I’m sure he saw lots of “problem” Caucasians as well, and that must have contributed to his desire to get away from people in general by fleeing to the country.

I’m not writing this to debate his motives or morality. I just want to take another look at the census data for 2005, which is not a whole lot different from 2000 in this respect. In a county of 132,000 people, there were 400 African Americans, 4,000 Hispanics (I can’t say that I understand the use of terminology here, but Hispanic is not considered a race) and 123,700 “white persons not Hispanic.” There were also 1,700 American Indians, 700 Asians and 1,500 none of the above.

Obviously we don’t have racial diversity in Kootenai County. I knew that, but I never realized to what degree that was true. Especially surprising to me is the lack of American Indians. In Kootenai County they account for only 1.3 percent of the population. In Benewah County they account for 8 percent. As with all groups other than Caucasians, American Indians, and especially African Americans, either don’t like it in our countyor they don’t feel welcome.

From a historical, a demographical and a sociological standpoint, I wonder why.