something I heard Beck mention one day when I was channel surfing. One of Bh0’s buddies has published a book about the need to force people back into central cities. One way will be to pass state laws and or to get big cities to annex more and more suburbs, and then raise taxes on those folks, so it is cheaper to move into empty apartment buildings in the cities. And it is also justified as a “Green” initiative.
Urban planner types have been on the warpath against cars and suburbs and messy, people-enabling freedom since at least the 60's. That's when I picked up an architecture or urban planning magazine and was surprised by the undercurrent of hostility toward mobility and freedom and suburbs. They HATES it .....
Portland, Oregon, is the test case. The key is city-county government that allows the city crowd -- the "downtown boys" as Paul Newman called them in The Verdict (Newman, Jack Warden, Charlotte Rampling, James Mason) to forbid people building permits out in the suburbs. Portland is a totalitarian microcosm. Pen people up in the city, then milk them like cows. Shades (as long as I'm comparing things to movies) of The Matrix.
We shouldn't be surprised. All this stuff goes back to LeCorbusier and the Bauhaus School. They were socialist as hell. Le Corbusier himself was the guilty party who thought up the idea of "the projects", vast tenements for housing the Proletariat -- iirc his basic tenement squat was a rat-cage of about 500 or 600 square feet. San Francisco architects are cutting up apartment buildings right now into 200- and 400-sq. ft. squats that they propose to rent for $1500-2000/month. Ain't crony capitalism grand? Of course, a little bit of muscle has to be applied, to convince the victims to give up their suburban greenery for the more austere pleasures of High Totalitarian Socialism.
Where in the city will they produce their food?
Soylent Green?