Free Republic

For those who may not know, (and those who do) here is a primer on The Great Reset.Buckle your seat belts for this one because it’s more chilling than any horror movie you’ve ever seen. You’ve heard your “crazy” friend at work bring it up in conversation. Perhaps you heard it briefly mentioned on TV the other day. And now you’re left wondering, “Just what on earth is The Great Reset?”Meet the World Economic Forum (WEF)You’ve heard of the WEF before. They’ve been in the news quite a bit for the past year or so. The reason? The Great Reset...

20 Most Miserable U.S. Cities to Live In Forbes magazine released its dubious 2013 list of the most miserable cities in the United States of America. With the new list for the new year came a new city listed at the top of the list as Detroit, Michigan replaces last year’s most miserable city of Miami, Florida. The magazine cites Detroit’s high unemployment, violent crimes, shrinking population, and its financial crisis as reasons for giving the city the title. The list created by Forbes involves the scrutiny of the country’s largest urban areas which are then ranked via factors such...

Urbanists have won an important victory in their campaign to reverse Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s bias against mixed-use development, enlisting the National Association of Home Builders to help push for a critical reform to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s lending standards. The mortgage giants currently require that projects they finance be no more than 25 percent commercial (20 percent for Fannie and for multifamily HUD projects.) The Congress for the New Urbanism has waged a battle against these mandates. “Every Main Street in America violates Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s rigid standards,” CNU President John Norquist has said. According...

Think there's no such thing as too much parking? Take a look at Tysons Corner, where there's more parking than jobs, more parking than office space, more parking than in downtown Washington. That must change, said advocates and politicians seeking to transform Virginia's largest business hub from suburb to city. Reducing parking, charging for parking and finding new uses for the acres of parking that separate Tysons' buildings and the people inside is at the heart of plans to remake the area.... "Who wants parking spaces to be the hallmark of a development?" said Clark Tyler, chairman of a Fairfax...

... In Barbour's state, New Urbanists dominated a weeklong charrette held in October at the Isle of Capri casino in Biloxi. Led by Miami architect and CNU mainstay Andrés Duany, the so-called Mississippi Renewal Forum architects and planners from around the country who are loyal to the group's cause. Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco has also begun relying on New Urbanists for rebuilding advice. This week the newly formed Louisiana Recovery Authority tapped Duany to lead a statewide charrette and chose Berkeley-based architect and planner Peter Calthorpe, a CNU founder, to develop a long-term regional plan for areas devastated by...

Because the old New Orleans is no more, it could resurrect itself as the great new American city of the 21st century. Or as an impoverished tourist trap. Founded by the French in 1718, site of the first U.S. mint in the Western United States, this one-time pride of the South, this one-time queen of the Gulf Coast, had been declining for decades, slowly becoming an antiquated museum. Now New Orleans must decide how to be reborn. Its choices could foretell the future of urbanism. The sheer human tragedy - and the fact that the Gulf Coast is critical to...

PASADENA -- Eric Jacobsen speaks passionately about things like sidewalks and store fronts. But he's not an architect or a developer. He's an ordained Presbyterian pastor who says city planning can have an important influence on religious experience. Jacobsen is an advocate for New Urbanism, the movement that calls for interdependence among residents by promoting pedestrian-friendly streets, parks and town squares in neighborhoods where shops and homes coexist. The values of New Urbanism, whose national leaders gathered in Pasadena last week, are consistent with those of Christianity and a possible antidote to the isolation experienced by many churches and Christians,...

“Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency.” --Daniel Burnham, Architect Sitting at a Borders Bookstore in Marlton , New Jersey —suburban nation USA —I overheard a couple talking about the banality of living in the ‘burbs. The young woman talked about the traffic, the generic houses, and the destruction to the wooded...

The mound of freshly turned earth, lined by a row of shovels, looked more like a cemetery plot than a ceremonial groundbreaking in a long-forgotten minority enclave in Nassau. Then again, cloutless New Cassel had been dying for decades, a victim of white flight, industrial pollution and malign neglect at every level of government. But for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), who presided over the upbeat ceremony, the vacant tract in one of America's oldest suburbs offers a chance for rebirth - for more than the people of New Cassel. If she can sell her vision for reviving the aging...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Richard Nixon was born 22 miles from this historic, graceful city. As president and a Southern Californian, Nixon saw the threat posed by a rapidly growing population. He warned Congress in 1969 that if America continued to expand at current rates, the nation's "social supplies — the capacity to educate youth, to provide privacy and living space, to maintain the processes of open, democratic government — may be grievously strained." It's probably just as well that Nixon isn't around to see what has happened since. The population of California has grown 70 percent. Here in Riverside County,...

FREEDOM, Calif. -- Traffic calming is not just physically hazardous. It harms our way of life as well. Most people have experienced nightmares at some point in their lives. One that’s quite common is to dream you are trying to get somewhere, but can't. One version of the nightmare goes like this: You are driving home from a very long day at work. The freeway is normally congested at this hour because few improvements have been made to increase traffic flow in decades even though the population of your town has grown significantly. Unfortunately for you today, the traffic is...