Free Republic

It will come as a surprise to most Americans that President Obama wants to change the shape of our homes and neighborhoods. So how does Obama hope to make us live? The short answer is, “like sardines.” At least that what the libertarian Pacific Legal Foundation said as it filed a lawsuit last week against the Obama-supported bureaucrats who created “Plan Bay Area,” an ambitious blueprint to block the creation of new suburbs and force the next 30 years of development in the nine-county San Francisco metropolitan region into a few hyper-dense, Manhattan-style enclaves.

Progressive observers treat the Tea Party’s forays into land use planning as the work of paranoid reactionaries. The March-April 2011 issue of Mother Jones ran an article by Stephanie Mencimer that portrayed Tea Partiers as “nutters” whose opposition to increased density and mass transit is rooted in “a hostility to what it sees as elites” and a pro-sprawl, suburban lifestyle. Last December, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy’s Anthony Flint riffed off of Mencimer’s piece in a post on the Atlantic magazine’s “Urban Wonk” blog that decried Tea Party disruption of planning efforts from California to Maine to Florida. The...