Anyone who ever puts one brick on top of another soon learns the no-growth mantra: New homes create so many problems with roads, schools, parks and police that new homebuyers have to pay $100,000 in additional taxes to solve them.

But sometimes even that is not enough, as members of the Ecke family found out last year when voters rejected plans to turn their Encinitas farmland into new homes. Opponents said city services for the new homebuyers would be too costly, ignoring the huge budget surpluses and other benefits that new homeowners are generating in North County cities.

If growth is costly, no growth can be downright catastrophically expensive. Just ask the 2,750 "outraged" residents of Encinitas and Carlsbad who have been paying $800 a year for almost 10 years to finance a middle school only to learn recently it is no longer required.

The reason is simple enough: Not enough children. The kind of children that would have lived in the nearby Ecke Ranch.

The Ecke proposal lost by a 2-1 margin. I do not remember these outraged citizens fighting for their school when it counted the most: During last year's election when the NIMBYs shut down the homes that would have made this school viable.

Today, some would have it both ways: Shut down housing opportunities for families, then demand we open new schools for kids that are no longer there. These are the same kind of folks who shut down roads, then wonder why we have traffic problems.

Curiously, Ecke opponents are silent about their role in closing the school.

The school might be canceled, but the tax is forever. There will be no refund. School officials, however, have assured the "outraged" residents that the millions they paid in taxes for the new school will be well spent on other projects.

Call it a no-growth tax -- just another of the many real costs the NIMBYs have imposed on the rest of us without our permission or even knowledge.

The city of Carlsbad recently caused a firestorm when it released a study saying a no-growth proposal would cost tens of millions of dollars. Another no-growth tax.

The city of Oceanside is having the same kind of problem. Recent news stories show that enrollment in Oceanside schools is down by 623 students. That means the district will lose out on more than $3 million in state aid this year.

Another no-growth tax: The costs residents have to bear after decades of shutting down the production of new homes in the North County -- forcing up prices and forcing our young people to move to Riverside if they wish to buy their first home.

The consequences of a generation of no-growth policies are clear and expensive. And here is just the latest: More and more of our towns have fewer and fewer children.

The implications of this anti-child policy were largely hidden from us when they were first proposed. We didn't vote for a single one.

Nevertheless, every day we pay our no-growth taxes.

- North County Times columnist Michael D. Pattinson is president of Barratt American, a builder based in Carlsbad.