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Orfield, who is a Democrat, is also a passionate advocate of stronger metropolitan government as the answer to the challenges facing central cities and all varieties of suburbs. His agenda calls for tax-sharing, stronger land-use planning, campaigns for affordable housing and other measures he says would halt the decline in some parts of the region and relieve the growth pressures being experienced in others.

Allow me to rephrase the obvious:

Orfield, who is a idiot, is an advocate of making independent suburban towns subject to urban governments.
Orfield thinks that cities should be allowed to:
steal taxes from outlying suburbs,
control zoning and growth in non urban areas so no more suburbs are ever built,
institute rent control over landlord's property and restrict people's right to contract for housing, so as to destroy the housing construction business and insure that more housing is never built, and
institute local minimum wage laws that are not based on market forces or rationality of any kind so as to destroy those businesses that had the temerity to have fled the high-tax, low-sales, high-crime urban centers.

And all to halt the inexorable decline in urban city tax dollars, the impoverishment of the expanding urban welfare programs, and the further escaping of free citizens from urban tax slavery and property confiscation.

Orfield, who is a idiot, is an advocate of making independent suburban towns subject to urban governments. Orfield thinks that cities should be allowed to:
steal taxes from outlying suburbs,
control zoning and growth in non urban areas so no more suburbs are ever built,
institute rent control over landlord's property and restrict people's right to contract for housing, so as to destroy the housing construction business and insure that more housing is never built, and
institute local minimum wage laws that are not based on market forces or rationality of any kind so as to destroy those businesses that had the temerity to have fled the high-tax, low-sales, high-crime urban centers.

You read between the lines quite well. However, I think one of the things you are doing is attacking the author's broadly-stated (and secondhand) positions and not looking at the main subject of the article, which is the data and maps. I looked at some of the maps and some of them aren't very informative. Some of the others, such as the percentage of children in the free school lunch program, are informative. They show the pockets of lower income (and also higher crime) in the suburbs as well as the cities.

I grew up rural, a bit outside a mid-size city in Wisconsin. I went to grad school in a major city in California. I live outside a mid-size city in Maryland, not very far from the WashBalt metroplex. So I've been around a little. One of my observations is that suburbs don't normally have: cultural institutions (museums, major symphony orchestras); major events (parades, big fireworks displays); and major league professional sports teams. That's not all, but that's a start. Many suburbanites get used to enjoying the perks of living near a city but don't contribute much to the "upkeep" of the urban environment. (A few wealthier suburbanites do, of course.) Also, many suburbanites complain about things like traffic and growth but don't want to take some of the more painful steps required to change those situations. So while some of the things you say above are important concerns, I am in favor of some kinds of regional development planning, because I think that intelligent use of our resources is better than unintelligent overuse of them. Now, it's not always easy to get intelligent solutions out of government, but I think we can at least try to find some.

By the way, from what I've seen around here, most of the slow-growth proponents are suburbanites, not urbanites. They want to be in the outer suburbs and don't want to encounter the problems being faced by the inner suburbs.

Myron Orfield is a MN Democratic state senator representing the urban core of Minneapolis. He is a classic socialist with a long track record of trying to grab as much money as possible from the suburbs to transfer to his urban constituency. He is anti-growth and anti-suburb.

Some are of the bills he has sponsored in the MN state legislature:

SF 875: Redistribute income from the suburbs to the inner city ("fiscal disparties")
SF 786: Set "urban growth bondaries" to prevent more suburban growth
SF 788: Require all suburbs, rich or poor, to build affordable (i.e. low income) housing

And these are just for the current legislative session!

From The American Prospect

Massachusetts, California, and New Jersey have enacted laws against "snob zoning" that enable developers of low-income housing to override local zoning restrictions. The Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area has gone even further. State Representative Myron Orfield, acting on behalf of the communities in the metro area, sponsored legislation to create an elected metropolitan council with the authority to establish "fair share" housing goals for each municipality. This legislation gave the council the power to withhold sewer, highway, infrastucture, and other state funds from communities that refuse to comply.