WHAT’S BEHIND “THE VISION” in YOUR TOWN?

Advance Bulletin ^ | Feb 15, 2005 | Susanna Lynton Jennings

[hedgetrimmer]

The visioning process includes: “values” research, how to run "facilitated" workshops and to how to use “consensus building” to create scenarios for area “change”. When public officials and NGO's (non-government organizations) use the term "visioning" it really means Agenda 21 principles are being implemented.

Television makeover programs that transform men and women from sloppy to slick are popular. Makeup artists, hair dressers and clothing specialists remake their passive subjects and the new look is shown off to gasping friends and family. Transformational changes are not limited to people these days. American neighborhoods, swarming with central planners and government funds are getting made over too.

America’s new look starts with federal and state funded “visioning councils” who impose their plan utilizing compliant politicians, compliant business people and paid representatives from foundation and tax-funded non-profit organizations. The unsuspecting public becomes the recipient of a vision that implements “Smart Growth.”

Smart Growth restricts housing construction to high-density subsidized (cost-shifted) apartments or condominiums. Cities are “filled in” by building vertically and cramming people together. Occupants living in these new developments are often subject to increasing rules and regulations administered by Associations or Housing Trusts. Cluster developments with purposely limited parking (near train or bus stops) are designed to take people out of their cars, thereby frustrating people’s ability to get around as they might choose.

Some planners in the Western United States learned their terminology and techniques from a group called “Envision Utah”. Through “Envision Utah” planners learned about the “visioning process.” Planners return from the “regional” visioning workshop with a mission in place. “Our visioning sets up a framework project for zoning,” says Gordon Garry, Director of Research and Analysis for the Sacramento Area Council of Governments.

Once the framework for zoning is in place, local governments, non-elected regional councils and public/private partnerships, begin to change residential neighborhoods to “mixed uses,” often utilizing processes that work outside constitutional governmental procedures. By transforming the “look’ of the town, planners and politicians are also engineering social changes that will negatively affect the lives and the lifestyles of existing residents.

If your town is working toward a “vision,” it’s best to understand the Smart Growth plan behind the façade.

[djreece]

Well, actually fellow FReeper Carry Okie has a book detailing ways the free market can handle all those situations that would be fair and just to the property rights of all. Innovative, market-based solutions like his are what we need in the conservative movement. If we just go around telling people that suburban sprawl is the free market at work, I believe we will end up with Smart Growth because many people would desperately like a change.

Thank you for the lengthy discussion. We both agree that Smart Growth is evil and disastrous. I just think it is time for new ideas from the conservative movement on addressing the very real issues our cities and communities face today.

[hedgetrimmer]

Acquitting Sprawl

By Brian J. Taylor

Suburban sprawl has been blamed for almost every social ill, with the most common accusations damning it for traffic congestion and the decline of the inner city. But according to a recent study, it's getting a bum rap.

In "Some Realities about Sprawl and Urban Decline"--published in the most recent issue of Housing Policy Debate, a journal of the Fannie Mae Foundation, a private (though tax funded) community development group--Anthony Downs of the Brookings Institution distinguishes sprawl from general suburban development by listing 10 characteristics specific to the former, such as low-density "leapfrog" development, reliance on the private automobile, and a political order in which planning power is fragmented across several municipal authorities. According to Downs, most analysts oversimplify the problem--and possible solutions--by focusing on only a few of sprawl's defining traits.

Downs analyzed data from 1980 and 1990 in 162 urbanized areas to measure both sprawl and urban decline, using nine variables for each. Low or diminishing population density, for example, was a marker for sprawl; so was the ratio of central city density to densities on the outlying fringe. Measures of urban decline included increasing crime rates, decreasing income, and decreasing population.

Downs' conclusion, which he found "very surprising": "There is no meaningful and significant statistical relationship between any of the specific traits of sprawl, or a sprawl index, and either measure of urban decline." The "basic traits of the general growth process"--the relatively high standards required of new housing, the concentration of public housing in urban cores, the exclusionary zoning laws adopted by suburban governments, the tax systems that encourage such laws, and racial discrimination in housing markets--"would produce concentrated minority-group poverty in large cities even if sprawl did not exist."

http://reason.com/0006/ci.bt.acquitting.shtml