[Carry_Okie]

It's The Squeeze.

On the demand side, needlessly draconian environmental regulations are being enforced on low-to-middle income communities in the County hinter-land, forcing those residents back into the city. The Agenda 21 system thus Balkanizes the County into zones of rural rich and poor.

The method can make new rural-suburban lots available for redevelopment using environmental laws in much the same manner as applied to owners of target tracts of acreage properties. As you recall, Measure J had other effects besides chewing up the forest in big chunks. Prior to the election, the people who held small suburban lots in small rural towns owned something that could support a residential structure, worth about the same as any other small urban lot. After the passage of Measure J, a once buildable 3/4-acre lot in town worth $50,000 (in current dollars), a fell to about one-fifth its prior value. Their land was “worth-less.”

We’ll call this one, “The Squeeze”:

1. Rezone suburban lots with urban potential to a larger minimum size.
2. The owners of “worth-less” lots get to hold the bag and pay the taxes.
3. The County recognizes the “urban sprawl” and circumscribes the area by zoning “greenbelts.”
4. Prices of residential housing rise due to a lack of available acreage.
5. The big landowners wait for the market to develop and buy the “worth-less” lots for the less that they are “worth.”
6. The County recognizes the “housing shortage” and rezones the minimums for “in-fill.”
7. The property, now worth a lot, gets developed, and the County rakes in additional taxes.

   Now that those “worth-less” lots are worth lots, why didn’t the bag-holders keep them?

8. To produce new lots, use environmental and zoning laws to require modifications to building codes that the current class of owners cannot afford. To take the dirt, condemn the property. Sell it to whom?

   One has to wonder if there were politicians out there, clever enough to realize that they could serve the developers, the anti-development activists, and the environmentalists, all in one policy swoop. It all seemed so plausible, repetitive, and ubiquitous.

   Snip

   Are politicians and planning bureaucrats really smart enough to set up a system like this, or was this just a misattribution of random events and human nature suffering from the creative scrutiny of some paranoid author? Every lawyer and planner interviewed during the research for this book who was asked that question, stated flatly that the politicians aren’t that smart and are ideologically opposed to such things. The subject of one interview how-ever, was (unknown to me at the time) one of the very people who had made oodles of money in the land conversion business. His comment was that there are people who are that smart, and that certain authors should be “careful.”

   The purpose of this book is not to bust people but to point out the systemic flaws that develop when government does not respect private property rights as unalienable. That flaw is the lack of civic discipline that “limited govern-ment” under the Constitution was intended to provide; i.e., the power to feed one's urges with other people's money. It is the power to take control of property without compensation. It is the essence of democratic government.

Agenda21 (Sustainable Development, Smart Growth, whatever) is nothing more than a playbook for the rich and powerful to stay that way enslaving everybody else via the unconstitutional regulatory powers inherent to socialism. As you know well ccg, both political parties are playing the game.

[calcowgirl]

>>As you know well ccg, both political parties are playing the game.


Yep--just follow the money. It's not too hard to see.

[Grampa Dave]

"Are politicians and planning bureaucrats really smart enough to set up a system like this, or was this just a misattribution of random events and human nature suffering from the creative scrutiny of some paranoid author? Every lawyer and planner interviewed during the research for this book who was asked that question, stated flatly that the politicians aren’t that smart and are ideologically opposed to such things. The subject of one interview how-ever, was (unknown to me at the time) one of the very people who had made oodles of money in the land conversion business. His comment was that there are people who are that smart, and that certain authors should be “careful.” "

That response is why I cringe when those on our side label the masterminds behind the dark side as dumb. They are that smart and as dangerous as you were warned.