Seventy-five residents packed into Onondaga Town Hall this fall to oppose a 436-unit housing proposal tied to Micron.

The concerns were familiar. Traffic. Character. Wildlife. Runoff. Bedrock.

If you’ve covered local government long enough, you can recite this script from memory. Different town. Same objections. Same tone of urgency over hypothetical harm, paired with silence about very real decline.

This is how these meetings always go.

Hyper-local fears dressed up as community-wide risk. Technical objections standing in for a simpler truth: People don’t want anything to change. Even when change is the only way a place survives.

Residents asked why anyone would build housing 20 miles from the Micron site in Clay.

But that question misunderstands the moment entirely. It also shows — genuinely — how little is understood about regional economies.

Micron isn’t a “Clay” project. It’s a regional one. And regions don’t grow neatly, parcel by parcel, within a single town line. Clay doesn’t have 9,000 spare homes sitting around. Neither do Cicero, Salina, Baldwinsville, or Liverpool.

Growth at this........

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