Don't forget that the Growth Machine also includes nonprofit organizations

Harvey Molotch's Growth Machine thesis ("City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place") states that local economic and political elites are united around a growth agenda focused on an intensification of land use and increase in the value of property. And we see how the government's resources get used to aid profitable for-profit development.

But universities and hospitals, among other nonprofits, are key to the growth agenda too, providing steady employment and construction projects. Today's Post has two pieces, inc luding one by business columnist Steven Pearlstein, "A Last Shot At Hospital Competition" about nonprofit Inova Hospital System, which dominates Northern Virginia health care services, and how they are fighting the entry of possible competitors.

The way this article "Inova Not Giving Up Fight Against Plan for Competing Hospita " describes how the hospital has set up front "citizens" groups to push its agenda is no different from how for profit developers do the same thing. In fact, it reminded me of pieces from the Washington City Paper from the 1990s about how developers, aided by the lawyers, would bus people into hearings to have a good group of proponents, without disclosing the meal money and other inducements. (The proponents of the Florida Market urban renewal project did the same thing--bused seniors in from Fort Lincoln, people who lived miles away from the project--while fundamentally excluding people who lived across the street from the project, but in Ward 6, not Ward 5.)