Posted on 11/26/2002 12:25:51 AM PST by Andy from Beaverton
I majored in city planning as an undergrad, although I never worked in the area. One reason is that I noticed all my professors who advocated planning away the private auto and forced living in planned communities driving away in their tanks out to their farms and large suburban homes after they finished teaching for the day. So instead, I went to work for an association for developers. The hypocrisy was mind-boggling to me.
A perfect example that backs up your comment is the Hollywood Lefties like David Geffen, Spielberg, Streisand, et.al, trying to stop public beach access anywhere near their homes...such hypocrits.
That just about sums it up. Don't have to read any farther.
If the world ended tomorrow, the news story would read,
"World Ends Tommorrow; Poor and Minorities Hardest Hit"
(SIGH) - off to the salt mines...Thanks for the post.
This is absolute hogwash. Homes are easier to buy today then they ever have been... their prices are higher, but other than some very insane markets, Cali, North East, etc... homes are easy to find and to purchase with little money, if you have decent credit. Segregation occurs because of income, not because of color in most market.. lets face it, if the median house price in a neighborhood is 300k, you aren't going to find too many people earning 30k a year living there.
I personally don't have any issues with the smart growth concept, its implimentation by various legislations is comical, but the concept is fine. England has been using this model for centuries and it works fine. London for example has nearly 8 Million people living there, yet has a distinctive city limit, and when the city stops, the farms begin... not stip malls and fast food joints or outlets etc... The city just ENDS and the Country begins.. and it is a very compfortable city... I think NYC which is far larger geographically feels far far more crowded than London.
The problem is that most of US policies are written by or driven environmental nutballs who are not really interested in saving the environment or even smart growth, but are driven by undermining the capitalist system... they aren't written with responsible growth in mind, but with stopping enterprise all together.
Here in Humboldt County the Planning Commission just turned down a 50 unit subdivision because it didn't include enough "affordable housing".Of course this just continues the housing shortage that is driving prices out of sight for thousands state wide. These people must be running on the theory that the population is stagnant while nationwide it approaches 300 million.
You obviously know nothing of what you speak, but that's to be expected from numbskulls that insist on calling our republic a "democracy".
Green space means telling a local farmer or homesteader that his 40 acre property can't be sold off or sectioned (as it could when he bought or inherited it), depleting it's value tremendously. It means laying a variety of new encumberences on homeowners to the point where they don't really have property rights anymore, they just get to pay the taxes and upkeep like good little "tenants".
All this is done with the wave of a bureaucratic hand. No consideration for devaluation or the destruction of property rights. No compensation for the taking they found themselves on the wrong end of. No say whatsoever in the process.
The large gated community developers (the real cause of "tract housing and congestion you speak of) and agri-corps never have their property incumbered. They get to sit in on all the meetings - along with the rich enviro-orgs - where these anti-American "growth plans" are developed, the peasant homeowers get to shut up and take it. The upper income property owners watch their property values go up while the surrounding rural community gets squeezed out of existence.
Feel free to continue running your head, even though you have zero correct information. After all, we have the right to free speech in our "democracy".
BZZZZT!!!
Wrongo! Instead of believing the sizzle about Smart Growth, you'd better learn about the BIG mis-steak that it constitutes (before it's too late). Perhaps you might consult the work of Dr. Randal O'Toole in his book The Vanishing Automobile, and Other Urban Myths. In it, he does a detailed analysis of how Smart Growth worked, uh, DIDN'T WORK, in Portland, OR. Here's a clue: more traffic problems, more congestion, more smog, higher housing prices and vacant multi-unit developments subsidized by tax dollars. Or you could come down here to Santa Cruz where we adopted the first local Agenda21. We have all of that plus the highest housing unaffordability index in the nation!
Isn't that exciting?
Once you figure out that Smart Growth doesn't work for people, then you can read my book on why it doesn't work for the environment and how a free-market alternative might really do a better job of managing both.
It's a taking. It amounts to taking land and property rights from owners. Democracy? There's no more justification that the mob uses votes, instead of physical threats, to take what they don't pay for.
The "greespace" you speak of in my area is bulldozed homes where instead of barbeques, we now have overgrown, tax-useless, mosquito infested wasteland.
You've have been sold a lie. Smart growth is not some peachy local issue that creates pretty neighborhoods with low traffic and lots of happy trees.
Get informed and I promise I'll try not to hurt your feelings.
This isn't about selling books (if it was, I wouldn't have written the book that I did); it's about informing you. Much of the information if free (that is, if you care enough about such things to bother clicking a link and reading it).Your pompous ignorance in defense of a fraudulent bill of goods shows how badly you need to read them.
I was a participant on the first in the nation Agenda21 (aka Sustainable Development, aka Smart Growth) Biodiversity and Ecosystem Management Roundtable in 1994. At that time, I believed in planning, regulation, and zoning laws and a government that would help people do the right things for nature if we would only disseminate the information. I have since learned what a corrupt and destructive system Smart Growth really is. Best you shake that smirk and get to work learning about it yourself.
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