Burn Down the Suburbs?

National Review ^ | Aug 1, 2012 | Stanley Kurtz

[KeyLargo]

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE www.nationalreview.com

Burn Down the Suburbs? By Stanley Kurtz August 1, 2012 4:00 A.M.

Editor’s Note: This article is adapted from Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, by Stanley Kurtz, from Sentinel HC.

President Obama is not a fan of America’s suburbs. Indeed, he intends to abolish them. With suburban voters set to be the swing constituency of the 2012 election, the administration’s plans for this segment of the electorate deserve scrutiny. Obama is a longtime supporter of “regionalism,” the idea that the suburbs should be folded into the cities, merging schools, housing, transportation, and above all taxation. To this end, the president has already put programs in place designed to push the country toward a sweeping social transformation in a possible second term. The goal: income equalization via a massive redistribution of suburban tax money to the cities.

Obama’s plans to undercut the political and economic independence of America’s suburbs reach back decades. The community organizers who trained him in the mid-1980s blamed the plight of cities on taxpayer “flight” to suburbia. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Obama’s mentors at the Gamaliel Foundation (a community-organizing network Obama helped found) formally dedicated their efforts to the budding fight against suburban “sprawl.” From his positions on the boards of a couple of left-leaning Chicago foundations, Obama channeled substantial financial support to these efforts. On entering politics, he served as a dedicated ally of his mentors’ anti-suburban activism.

[upchuck]

Excellent article. Thanks for posting the print and 56K dialup friendly version.

The ominous steps outlined in this article, by itself, are way more than enough reason to toss nobama out on his ass come Nov.

When that happens the lame duck session will be hell on wheels.

[Lady Jag]

Add dyslexic to his plethora of personality disorders.

[concerned about politics]

President Obama is not a fan of America’s suburbs. Indeed, he intends to abolish them.

And he publicly said his plans are working. Unemployment is skyrocketing, yet he claims things are going well and in the right direction.

Everything IS going well, and things ARE going in the right direction..... if your goal is socioeconomic destruction.

[Sooth2222]

"President Obama is not a fan of America’s suburbs. Indeed, he intends to abolish them. With suburban voters set to be the swing constituency of the 2012 election, the administration’s plans for this segment of the electorate deserve scrutiny."

I agree that Obama is not a fan of America’s suburbs (populated with all those bothersome "clingers") and he would love (not "like") to abolish them. But as is the case with almost everything this doofus has tried to accomplish, the opposite is more likely to happen. Commuter suburbs with commuter rail links have been around for over 100 years in the northeast. Suburbia predates the welfare state and the creation of an urban underclass by more than half a century, and only accelerated under Johnson's "Great Society". Notwithstanding "Hope n' Change", this trend will not change. If anything -- with the advent of the internet and telecommuting, there are even stronger forces pushing workers out to the suburbs, exurbs and rural areas than there were in the 1960s. It is much less costly to reside in the suburbs and telecommute than it is to live or work in a city.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/UnintendedConsequences.html

[cripplecreek]

Agenda 21 proceeds no matter which party runs the show.

Gov. Rick Snyder OKs $38M for recreation, conservation projects

Collecting already rural private property to make it state property to "preserve" it. However the bulk of the money is going to things like urban basketball courts and bike trails.

List of projects (Pdf file)

[G Larry]

“greenways and preserves” are NOT the same as the Suburban deterrents described in this article.

I live in a Denver suburb, complete with “greenways and preserves”, which happen to be a great way to provide open trails and enhanced mountain views.

There’s a difference between managing housing density and prohibiting growth.

The simple fact is that you’ve made an unsubstantiated claim, unsupportable by the facts, so you hide your fraud behind insults.

[concerned about politics]

Population density is very strongly correlated with the level of leftism.

Like dogs in cages, they're easier to control.
The dogs are lured into the cages with small pieces of free, red meat. Once trapped, freedom is gone, and all they offer to the dogs after that is a monthly brick of stale government cheese to gnaw on.
From that point on, the dependant dog learns to defend it's owner.

[Pollster1]

The sad part of this plan is that it’s doomed to failure and worse. Everyone would lose, especially those the far left claims they want to help. Imagine that the suburbs are integrated into the governmental structure of the cities they surround. We would have a repeat of the School Busing conflict of the 1970s. Back then, given a choice of having middle class kids who were assigned to failed urban schools spend three hours a day on a bus to attend a dangerous school, or taking a loss on the house and moving to the suburbs, millions of Americans moved. Involved parents left, even if they were not racist. That was just one of many problems in the cities, but together with other issues, white flight killed many previously successful parts of our urban schools.

If the far left grabs the suburbs, we’ll have a rerun of that catastrophe. Parents, faced with the corrupt and inept governments and school systems of Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, Boston, DC, Philadelphia, and similar cities taking over their pristine suburban schools, will flee. They may go just outside reach of the first urban land grab, provoking a second urban land grab, or they might immediately cross state lines to the adjacent states of WV, CT, NH, VT, and ME, or they might cross the country to the comparative safety of Alaska, Idaho, Wyoming, and Texas. Either way, instead of failed cities with failed schools but still a tax base generated by business and jobs, the cities will be surrounded by a radius of desolation to which no educated parent would expose a child, unless protected by private school. While the top executives, lawyers, physicians, and accountants might be able to afford elite schools like Sidwell Friends (where the Obama kids go), not enough will have salaries in that range to maintain a full business base near the cities. The urban employer will die, dragged down by this power grab from bloated and corrupt city governments. What reason beyond pure evil (glorying in the destruction) or pure stupidity (obliviousness to unintended but inevitable consequences) could the far left have for such a plan?

[cripplecreek]

And you aren’t man enough to face reality.

[G Larry]

and your attempt at on on-line peeing contest is a testament to your masculinity.......

[SCalGal]

Agenda 21 proceeds no matter which party runs the show.

The progressive agenda overrides party lines.

[Darren McCarty]

Greenways and preserves drive up housing costs by reducing supply. It makes one either pay up the nose for a shack or apartment in a city/close-in suburb or force one to live 50 miles out of town past the greenway.

I'm dealing with that outside of Ann Arbor within outer Washtenaw County. While it's personally good for me, it's bad policy. If this goes to its full intentions, I'd have to either live in an Ypsi ghetto, pay big bucks for Ann Arbor, get lucky with a spot in a small town, or go past the county line and pay for it in transportation costs as well as increased housing costs from supply.

[varyouga]

What idiots like this don't understand is if you overtax the suburbs, those people will go even further. This is why one-world government is the Socialists' goal - tax slavery with nowhere to run.

Here in NYC, it's true that most upper-middle class families live in the suburbs beyond the reach of tax collectors. They don't pay the NYC income tax, so a commuter tax is always being proposed. The only people paying those taxes are the lower-middle class and elite. Both groups are taxed to death and have been leaving this entire metro area in droves.

But it's not just the taxes. I'm a single guy that can afford to live in the city but I would probably never live here with kids or a wife that wants to walk alone at night. Most of my friends already moved away for this reason. I live on the DMZ and will never give up this property to the wild animals as long as I'm single. I can take care of myself and would give my life to defend civilization but don't want to ever put my loved ones into a potential war zone.

I grew up on streets like this. It builds character but many of my childhood friends were ruined. Not to mention how much homo pedophiles have been enabled over the last 2-3 decades.

[cripplecreek]

Unfortunately, some only want to fight the convenient battles while our enemies fight every battle. There’s just no possibility of us winning like this.

[cripplecreek]

While it's personally good for me, it's bad policy. If this goes to its full intentions, I'd have to either live in an Ypsi ghetto, pay big bucks for Ann Arbor, get lucky with a spot in a small town, or go past the county line and pay for it in transportation costs as well as increased housing costs from supply.

Exactly. I personally like having state land around that I can wander on but its land that produces little to no revenue. If you want a small town you better hurry because they're strangling us with new state land right up to our backyards. (never mind all the connecting corridors)

Claiming its land being preserved is foolish in this case. Its already rural and isn't threatened by urban sprawl. I was out and about the other day and can't for the life of me figure out why the state has to have this land. Aside from all the oil and gas drilling going on in the area.



They appear to be building a green wall right down the Jackson/Washtenaw county line.

[SCalGal]

Unfortunately, some only want to fight the convenient battles while our enemies fight every battle. There’s just no possibility of us winning like this.

Too many of them don't even see the whole picture; the convenient battles aren't event the tip of the iceburg.

And watching people stick their heads in the sand like a bunch of ostriches.... I can't even look at them anymore.

"May the chains rest lightly upon them...."

[southernnorthcarolina]

Kurtz's book is aimed directly at an issue which had long concerned me. The concept of suburban towns being forced to subsidize cities has been batted around for decades, but (as far as I knew) only at a local, city-by-city level. No more, apparently. I immediately downloaded the book onto my Kindle ($13.87 including taxes), and read half of it yesterday. It is chilling.

I live in Union County, NC, just over the line from Mecklenburg County, which contains Charlotte. The Charlotte metro area is like many others in the Sunbelt -- a blue city surrounded by red suburbs. Until a year ago (with the GOP takeover of the NC Senate and House), North Carolina had one of the nation's most liberal annexation laws. If Charlotte wanted to annex land near its city limits, if said land met a (rather modest) population density threshold, and if the city promised to begin providing municipal services to the area within two years(!) of annexation, they were free to annex without the consent of the residents affected, and begin charging Charlotte property taxes. Charlotte could annex across county lines, but not across the SC state line; they could not, however, annex other incorporated communities -- which explains the rush to incorporate areas of previously unincorporated areas of Union County -- we now have something like 16 incorporated towns, mostly in the western and northern parts of the county, closest to Mecklenburg.

So, a wall of incorporated towns has been set up at the county line. Charlotte is running out of room to annex prosperous areas to its southeast, and it needs more revenue to support such idiocy as its light rail system, a separate trolly line, its NASCAR museum, its Black Arts and Cultural Center, its Convention Center, its basketball arena (where a certain convention will open soon, so I'm told), in addition to more mundane things such as schools, streets, firefighters, and police force. What to do?

Two words: regional government. This idea has been discussed among Charlotte's politicians and business leaders for decades, but the end of easy annexation has instilled a sense of urgency in City Hall, the Chamber of Commerce, and at the City Club bar.

Charlotte's leaders do not, of course, insult those from whom they hope to gain revenue. They don't call people who live in surrounding counties selfish for being desirous of lower taxes, lower crime rates, and better schools while still enjoying the assets of the nearby city -- even if that's what they're thinking. No, instead they offer the prospect of "regional cooperation," which sounds a bit less threatening than "regional government."

Let's all play nice, and get on the same sheet of music. Let's make sure the zoning laws in various counties, and the road plans, and the water and sewer line extensions are coordinated. And, maybe just a small region-wide property tax. Or maybe a little payroll tax for those who live outside Mecklenburg, but use Mecklenburg's streets to commute to work. You know, just a little token of cooperation.

In return, you'll get some express bus service to downtown Charlotte. Or maybe we could even extend our way cool commuter rail lines into your neck of the woods -- wouldn't that be nice? Of course, now that there's public transportation, we can locate some Section 8 public housing out in the burbs. It's only fair, don't you think? Oh, and let's talk about merging the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School System with those of surrounding counties one day. No, not now, but let's keep it in mind. It would be better for everyone, right?

I have long been confident that the Trojan Horse scenario I describe would be seen for what it is if conducted, even with the greatest subtlety, at the local level. "We're from Charlotte, and we're here to help you" would do nothing other than cause laughter.

But federal policies permitting, encouraging, or mandating "regional government" are a whole 'nother animal. If you live in the suburbs or exurbs by choice, if you made the conscious decision to escape higher taxes, higher crime, and declining schools, be afraid. Be very afraid. Under Kurtz's scenario, the fact that a suburb is incorporated, and/or in a different county than the center city, would avail little. Perhaps we need to begin thinking not only of the rights of self-governance for the states, but also for counties and suburban towns as well.

[Wuli]

Big cities, most of all, have more “income inequality”, demonstrating a higher level of economic dysfunction demanding public subsidies to make them workable.

Yet Liberals, who claim to hate “income inequality” are normally large majorities in big cities.

[Lorianne]

This article is silly.
It was the cities that annexed land in order to bring in more taxpayers. The existing taxpayers were advance-taxed to build new roads,schools, infrastructure in the newly annexed areas ... the developers often got sweetheart deals to build out these areas ... infrastructure paid for and taxes reduced or deferred etc. Then the same thing would happen again and again as cities grew and incorporated more area around them and increase their tax base through property taxes

The writer has it backwards.

[MichaelP]

Looks like a good ad to use against Obama. This is his true agenda, the useful idiots that think he is well meaning and harmless are going to get a huge chunk of their own a$$es bitten off by these commies!

Mike