“Let’s take away...’ ‘We ought to build...’
Assumption of a controlling class of the usual leftistist bureaucrats who have the power of coercion. The central planners who move human beings around as if they were plastic pawns.
The only people who benefit from this is the controlling class. The don’t care about the disastrous results of coercion and central planning, they come out on top.
All you have to do is look at the past. The total destruction of black communities in chicago and elsewhere when public housing took over. go look at the Youtube videos taken from old 60’s news reports of Martin Luther King enthusing about the wonderful new public housing in Chicago.
It never works out; always destruction of communities, extended families, self-reliance. Descent into thuggery gangs dependency and addiction. But hey; the bureaucrats who say things like ‘Let’s take away...’ and ‘We ought to build...’ live well, so that’s all that matters.
Cincinnati City Council destroyed existing businesses downtown using eminent domain as part of their master plan ,and promoted sports complexes that lose money .Great leaders.
The nation’s biggest problem is all the people who believe the government can and will give them something for nothing,that government money is free and andless, and other fairy tales.
Why do you think that suburbs are an expression of the free market? They depend utterly on eminent domain for acquiring the rights of way for new arterial roads, and on systematic subsidization of infrastructure costs. Those are governmental policy choices, not the free market. Take them away and cities would again tend to grow as they have grown historically: much more densely, with much more aggressive rehabilitation, redevelopment, and infilling, in order to take maximum advantage of existing infrastructure.
The modern American suburb has about as much to do with the free market as the modern American farm, which is the product of three generations of federal commodity and farm lending programs. At least in agriculture, we get planned abundance and the world’s lowest food costs (as a percentage of consumers’ incomes). In housing policy, we have bought comfortable suburbs at the price of brutal commutes, hollowed cities, and a huge, socially and economically isolated underclass. I’m not sure we’ve made good choices.
We can debate the policy, but let’s not begin with the strawman argument that suburbs are a natural development. They are an artifact of transportation and housing policy, every bit as much as was Cabrini-Green.