Free Republic

In the name of "protecting" and "enhancing" our neighborhoods, community planners and local busybodies are fanning out all over the country to change our towns and neighborhoods They call it "visioning". An existing town that has excited the interest of community planners is the small town of Corralitos, located in an unincorporated area of Santa Cruz County, California. The Corralitos Valley Community Plan follows the same guidelines and values as groups like the Congress for New Urbanism and the Smart Growth Network whose stated goals are to reshape our values from an individual rights-oriented society to a "community" or collective...

Summary: Community plans are specifically designed to reflect aesthetically the collective values they seek to impose -- at the expense of individual expression and privacy. Full text: Community planning (including growth management, comprehensive planning and smart growth) is suddenly all the rage. Just a few years ago, the words "charrette", "visioning council", and "consensus planning", were virtually unknown to most Americans. These words have been introduced to our neighborhoods by a coterie of community planners, who've fanned out across the country to confuse Americans into accepting a different political philosophy and a different way of living. Most politicians have adopted...

Perhaps some of you who are veterans at planning issues have seen this, but the other night I witnessed my first community plan meeting that was moderated in the "Assets, Issues, and Solutions" format. Here's how it works. Community members don't get three minutes to address the meeting. A moderator stands in front of the room and asks questions such as "What do we like about our community?" (The assets column) Another question is "What problems do we have in our community?" (The issues column) and "How can we solve our problems?" (The solutions column). Community members raise their hands...