Help Stop SMART GROWTH - Regional Planning has arrived in the USA

mukraker

[mukraker]

Please help.

I have been doing some research on this SMART GROWTH epidemic sweeping through America, a plan that aims to regulate all land use in the country from the top down.

It starts innocently enough. Local governments are told they should come up with a plan to map out the future growth and development of their communities, and often an outside entity offers a sizable financial incentive to help with the anticipated costs.

As these local plans are drawn up, they become collected by the next step in the government, usually at the county level, as the local county is given the same sales pitch. Since the local towns and cities already have the plans in place or development, it is an easy step, to simply collect all these local plans and put them together, into a larger county plan. Before long these county plans are collected, and formed into a regional plan. And so on up the government bureaucratic food chain.

This Smart Growth is sold as a way to develop local development and growth maps, but it turns out to be a top-down method to institute regional planning for land use, something the Soviets and China became famous for in their Communist governance.

YOUR Private Property Rights are at stake! Smart Growth legislation imposes severe restrictions on the uses of your private property, in accordance with these regional land-use plans. If you still have the option, fight against these Stupid Growth schemes.

Now, can someone with the technical skills set up some sort of website to help organize us who oppose Smart Growth into a stronger organized force? I've seen groups from CA to FL to WI and many more states developing these plans. We Need To Stop Smart Growth!

Thanks.

[mukraker]

Here in WI the Smart Growth legislation was slipped into the back of a budget bill. No one bothers to read the entire budget bill before they vote, so it slipped in unnoticed and unread by most legislators. And like any government program, once it became law, it's almost impossible to stop or repeal.

[moyden2000]

Smart Growth = Socialism

[Libertarianize the GOP]

http://www.freerepublic.com/perl/bump-list

[kezekiel]

For more info on Smart Growth from the smart growth perspective:

http://www.smartgrowth.org/about/default.asp

[Andy from Beaverton]

Hate to say it, but where have you been. Oregon has been punished by a regional government and smart growth for over 20 years.

[sauropod]

Glad to see someone else is finally aware.

Do a search on the net for Wendell Cox. He has done some excellent "smart growth" articles.

Also, there is a significant Land Rights constituency here on FR.

[blackie]

We Need To Stop Smart Growth! ... Bump!

Be Well - Be Armed - Be Safe - Molon Labe!

[Nix 2]

GET EDUCATED! START HERE!!!

[ItsOurTimeNow]

We have a lot of Eminent Domain issues here in RI, so this is of very high interest for me.

*Bump*

[GOPcapitalist]

Smart Growth is euphemism for an epidemic of city-designing nazism aimed at reconstructing America in uptopia modelled after the urban cesspools of yankeeland, Portland Oregon, and your average run of the mill socialist euro-dump. There is absolutely no logic or rationality to it because its proponents adhere to it like a religion.

[Carry_Okie]

If you want some hard data on how badly Smart Growth works in an urban environment, try Randal O'Toole's book, The Vanishing Automobile, and other Urban Myths.

If you want to understand the corrupt foundations of environmental land use regulation, where it goes, and what can be done about it, try my book, Natural Process: That Environmental Laws May Serve the Laws of Nature.

[inquest]

The problem started when we started regulating the use of private property for the sake of automobiles - that is when some areas became zoned residential-only, because the residents there didn't want to deal with the traffic hassles of living next to businesses. This resulted in the closing of smaller businesses downtown, and the growth of larger corporate-owned businesses along the outskirts, which just creates even more sprawl.

In other words, government has been creating the problem it is now being called upon to solve with more regulation. As usual.

[Lorianne]

Exactly, various government bodies ALREADY impose severe restrictions on the uses of your private property and has for the last 40 years. Nothing new.

[gcruse]

Houston, TX, has no zoning and it kinda sux.
Peel Region, Ontario, was planned, and last
time I was there, it was pretty nifty.

[OXENinFLA]

http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_2_acorns_nutty_regime.html


Funny you should mention ACORN. I was reading this earlier.

If you thought the New Left was dead in America, think again. Walk through just about any of the nation’s inner cities, and you’re likely to find an office of ACORN, bustling with young people working 12-hour days to “organize the poor” and bring about “social change.” The largest radical group in the country, ACORN has 120,000 dues-paying members, chapters in 700 poor neighborhoods in 50 cities, and 30 years’ experience. It boasts two radio stations, a housing corporation, a law office, and affiliate relationships with a host of trade-union locals. Not only big, it is effective, with some remarkable successes in getting municipalities and state legislatures to enact its radical policy goals into law.

Community organizing among the urban poor has been an honorable American tradition since Jane Addams’s famous Hull House dramatically uplifted the late-nineteenth-century Chicago slums, but ACORN and Addams are on different planets philosophically. Hull House and its many successors emphasized self-empowerment: the poor, they thought, could take control of their lives and communities through education, hard work, and personal responsibility. Not ACORN. It promotes a 1960s-bred agenda of anti-capitalism, central planning, victimology, and government handouts to the poor. As a result, not only does it harm the poor it claims to serve; it is also a serious threat to the urban future.

[Diddle E. Squat]

Be careful with Wendell Cox. He has done some excellent research, but at times he has also resorted to junk science techniques as bad as any liberal. His work is a good starting point, but I wouldn't cite any of it without substantiation from other sources.

[Diddle E. Squat]

Actually some of the subdivision ordinances in Houston can be worse than zoning, and in the city they are enforced by the police as if they were zoning.

[Lorianne]

I agree many subdivision ordinances are very strict. However, one signs onto those subdivision ordinances when one buys the property. So one should be expected to meet them. Contract law.

[inquest]

I've always wondered if you could "squat" your way out of these types of contracts. Have someone you know squat on your land, have ownership revert to him as a matter of common law, and then have him sell it back to you, contract-free.

[Lorianne]

Don't know. Why buy property in a subdivision if you can't live by the ordinances? For that matter, why buy land anywhere if you can't live by the zoning restrictions on the property when you buy it?

Now if the laws and ordinances change ex post facto, then I think there is reason to complain and bring a lawsuit.