No More Billboards

Below is an post from a forum about billboards, do you think that more and more cities would like no more billboards?

Pro Beauty is Pro Business!
Beauty is good for business. That is a fact. Four states and thousands of cities across the country prohibit new billboards. They do so - not because they are anti-business - but because they are pro-business.
The members of the billboard cartel are out for themselves.
This cartel is an anti-beauty. This cartel is anti-business. In scandal after scandal around this country, these purveyors of blight are known for their efforts to bully a community or any individual with the courage to stand up to them.
How many communities say, gosh, we need more billboards? None.
Communities across this country say No More Billboards. Whether you call them ‘highway spam,’ sky trash,’ or ‘litter on a stick,’ billboards are a blighting influence.
El Paso could be a beautiful community.
It is not today. El Paso will never be a beautiful community until this spam finally disappears. Do not fall for the industry’s games and bait-and-switch tactics.
Start with the simple proposition - no new billboards. Then watch the landscape gradually heal itself year by year.

Without question, billboards are not an aesthetic addition to any city or town. But, then again, neither is most of the commercial areas or premise signage. So you can either have a pretty town with no commercial area and no signs and no local business and no economy, or make the choice to have a healthy town, which pretty much requires clutter and some degree of ugliness.

I have been to El Paso. Anyone who tells you that billboards are what makes El Paso ugly has no sense of reality. You could remove all the billboards tomorrow, and it would still be ugly. It’s just not a pretty town, period. But billboards are easy to blame for all aesthetic problems – few people work in the industry to object. Premise signs are a far bigger problem in El Paso, but nobody wants to talk about those, because every little business has one.

The most ignorant part of what that writer was saying was that signs would gradually disappear if they enacted a “no new billboards” stance. The mayor of El Paso, himself, acknowledged that he talked to some cities that had enacted such ordinances years ago, and not one sign has come down. Why would they? Most signs can last virtually forever, given proper maintenance. It doesn’t matter what El Paso does, the number of signs currently up will never go down. They are there permanently.

Good reply Frank

The most beautiful billboards in the world…

For beautiful cities: Austin, Texas – Denver, Colorado.

Abandoned Hell Paso for the best climate in the states, -coastal southern California!