Stanley Kurtz on Obama’s War on Suburbs
The truth is, HUD’s new rule is about a great deal more than forcing racial and ethnic diversity on the suburbs. (Regionalism, by the way, is actually highly controversial among minority groups. There are many ways in which both middle-class minorities in suburbs, and less well-off minorities in cities, can be hurt by regionalist policies–another reason those plans are seldom discussed.)
The new HUD rule is really about changing the way Americans live. It is part of a broader suite of initiatives designed to block suburban development, press Americans into hyper-dense cities, and force us out of our cars. Government-mandated ethnic and racial diversification plays a role in this scheme, yet the broader goal is forced “economic integration.” The ultimate vision is to make all neighborhoods more or less alike, turning traditional cities into ultra-dense Manhattans, while making suburbs look more like cities do now. In this centrally-planned utopia, steadily increasing numbers will live cheek-by-jowl in “stack and pack” high-rises close to public transportation, while automobiles fall into relative disuse. To understand how HUD’s new rule will help enact this vision, we need to turn to a less-well-known example of the Obama administration’s regionalist interventionism.
In the face of heated public protest, on July 18, two local agencies in metropolitan San Francisco approved “Plan Bay Area,” a region-wide blueprint designed to control development in the nine-county, 101-town region around San Francisco for the next 30 years. The creation of a region-wide development plan–although it flies in the face of America’s core democratic commitment to local control–is mandated by California’s SB 375, the Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act of 2008. The ostensible purpose of this law is to combat global warming through the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. That is supposedly why California’s legislature empowered regional planning commissions to override local governments and press development away from suburbs into densely-packed urban areas. In fact, the reduction of greenhouse gases (which Plan Bay Area does little to secure) largely serves as a pretext for undercutting the political and economic independence of California suburbs.
Essentially, Plan Bay Area attempts to block the development of any new suburbs, forcing all population growth over the next three decades into the existing “urban footprint” of the region. The plan presses 70-80 percent of all new housing and 66 percent of all business expansion into 150 or so “priority development areas” (PDAs), select neighborhoods near subway stations and other public transportation facilities. This scheme will turn up to a quarter of the region’s existing neighborhoods–many now dotted with San Francisco’s famously picturesque, Victorian-style single-family homes–into mini-Manhattans jammed with high-rises and tiny apartments. The densest PDAs will be many times denser than Manhattan. (See the powerful ten-minute audio-visual assault on Plan Bay Area at the 45-55 minute mark of this debate.)
Surely, people in the ‘burbs can fight this, right?
Here’s where the Obama administration comes in. Not only does acceptance of the administration’s $5 million grant make it next-to-impossible to de-densify Plan Bay Area, but the grant itself helps to fund “grassroots” supporters of the plan–leftist groups dedicated to radicalizing the scheme still further.
The administration’s “sustainable communities” grants generally require recipients to “partner” with local leftist community organizations. Opponents of Plan Bay Area often outnumber supporters at public meetings. Yet such supporters as are present–groups like TransForm, the Greenbelt Alliance, Marin Grassroots, and East Bay Housing Organization–are funded (or slated to be funded)with the help of the same federal grant that backs up the bureaucrats in charge.
Isn’t that special? Single-family-home owners get to pay taxes to pay for people advocating for their destruction!
But Obama’s neo-fascism never sleeps and wants to make sure no suburb gets away so:
Recalcitrant suburbs can also be brought to heel by lawsuits claiming violations of federal fair housing law. California’s SB375 facilitates such suits by placing the burden of proof on local jurisdictions accused of housing discrimination. Such legal claims are often brought by leftist community organizations of the type currently funded through the Obama administration’s grant. […]
All of which returns us to HUD’s controversial new regulation expanding the obligation of recipients of federal aid to “affirmatively further fair housing.” When HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan announced that rule change, he acknowledged that it wasn’t really focused on preventing “outright discrimination and access to the housing itself.” The Obama administration is using traditional anti-discrimination language as a cover for a re-engineering the way we live. The real goal is to Manhattanize America, and force us out of our cars.
And don’t for a moment think that the People’s Republic of California is the only place this can happen.
If that was the beginning of Obama’s second-term assault on the suburbs, the next step is about to be taken in Minnesota. Katherine Kersten writes about “Thrive MSP 2040,” a soon-to-be-released plan that may take regionalism to unheard of levels. At a minimum, when it comes to densification, we’re likely to see the thrust of Plan Bay Area replicated in the Twin Cities.
Potentially, things could get more radical still. Kersten talks about a proposal to create a giant, seven-county metropolitan school district to enable apportionment of students by race and income across current district lines. This plan would be the product of unelected regional bureaucrats, not local officials.
Personal choice? Pffft! Save it for your sex life (so far). Otherwise, you belong to The State.
And your little dog, too.
nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more
Obama’s Regionalist Revolution, Step Two
It was never about the environment.
It was never about racial shuffling and discrimination.
It was never about quality of life.
It was never about transportation.
It was always about power, and control.
From the time the first bandit chieftain salted farmland or burned out villages, to population exodus around Greece and Rome, to the Great Wall of China and Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s thousands of hostage families to the various and sundry ethnic cleansings we’ve experienced in the last century.
All that’s new, and barely new at that, is the method.
The really, really sad thing is that every utopia is made to fall, which doesn’t really matter if it paves over you in the building.
states need to get into the habit of telling our fascist clowndick federal government to fuck right off I think
go close an embassy or do something useful like that cowardly federal pussyboys
we don’t need you here
I really hate these people.
The bastard wants to ‘Community Organize’ this Republic out of existence.
– Bumblefuck is so duplicitous, nobody trusts him anymore, even the Jihadists he’s befriended are mistrustful of his motives and actions now.
@bbh
perhaps of interest
The First Global Warming Prophet: Was He the Most Accurate?
Guy Callender was a superb scientist and an expert on the physics of steam. He wrote a seminal article in 1938 on the potential for increasing levels of CO2 to warm the atmosphere:
The Land of the Decree and the Home of the Slave
Would I be forgiven for thinking the Democrats have no intention of giving up their current position of power ever again?
I hope you don’t mind me stealing that line, StrangernFiction?
BTW, I love the idiot commenter “Joe Jenson” at NRO hammering away that “Just because someone wants to live in a given area doesn’t give them a right to do so.”
Sure, Comrade, whatever you say.
– I would agree with DeMint in most regards, except I would tend to think that Al Qaeda thinks of Bumblefuck as a freaking Leftwing loon rather than just weak. Kumbaya diplomacy would end quickly with Jug ears head on a pike. I think the Jihadists have very little patience for “nuance”, or Progressive crackpot intellectualism.
FTFH
Shouldn’t the term Agenda 21 show up in this discussion?
Kumbaya diplomacy would end quickly with Jug ears head on a pike. I think the Jihadists have very little patience for “nuance”, or Progressive crackpot intellectualism.
You’re assuming that what Obama says — what any of the proggs say — is somehow connected to what they’re really up to.
Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood are the Bloods and the Crips. We’ve made common cause with the Crips; ergo, the Bloods gotta make war on us.
That’s not nuanced at all.
“I have never heard of anything like this at all,” said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011.
– Welcome to the brave new Utopia Nancy, where the ends justifies the means, but don’t you dare call Obama a Marxist you white cracka raaaaaaacis.
That the place that has huge restrictions on one “natural right,” self-defense. The place that vomited up to the Senate one of the most virulent enemies of that same right. That they should be the focus of a scheme to also limit the other “natural right” of humans from birth seems to be a progressive’s natural fit.
Fully expect waivers for those like the ones owning the home where Obama talked of the bitter clingers. In the good progressive future we shall all need waivers to live at all.
In Minneapolis they are forcing the closing of an ADM milling operation as well as other local businesses along the light rail corridor to build even more apartments, a stretch of about 6 long blocks. They have already built a bunch of complexes along either side of that route.
It’s depressing.
I find CNN’s actions disturbing and disappointing. Your credibility as a supposedly unbiased news network will most certainly be jeopardized by the decision to show political favoritism and produce an extended commercial for Secretary Clinton’s nascent campaign.
– Because, hey lets face it, who in the world would ever question the totally fair and unbiased objective journalism of main stream American media. I mean jeeez.
– Of course its a bit late in the day for the RNC to get a pair. Had they done it when the Bumblefuck parade started we could have a whole different set of hoary problems under a McOldFart or Mittens equally bumbling administration, just maybe with a bit less lawlessness, but still bumbling.
– During the 50’s,60’s, and 70’s, at the hight of the cold war, if anyone, anyone at all, other than a dyed in the wool known Communist or Marxist would have said we’d come to this in America I, and everybody I lknow, would have thought them certifiable, yet some 45 years later here we are. I’m still trying to figure out how this was let to happen, not the mechanisms, those are all well documented.
– The question is more a character and spiritually based one it seems.
– Bitter clinger cracka raaaaaaaaacists!
– More of the same….Rut roh
OFA is a cult indeed.
Obama’s mind is the mother of all raging torrents, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into waterfalls of creative alternatives.
– From geoffb’s piece – “More guns don’t cut crime”
– Maybe not but I would hazard a guess they really cut the crap out of “repeat offender” statistics.
That’s a neat trick, quantifying crimes that weren’t committed. I want to learn how to do that.
Right. Because nothing says “suburbs” like low income gov’t housing. Didn’t you never know ? If you live in the projects, you’re practically in the burbs already!?