Amerika

Keep an eye out on coming issues as the Left plans its next strategy to pack the vote and gain total control, because apparently Leftists never do anything except to gain power for its own sake.

Their latest agenda, like social democracy in Europe, fuses consumerism and socialism into an ideal of people living in tiny rented boxes, making microtransactions for daily needs, and working on an endless treadmill in order to continue economic growth.

It combines the worst of all systems to date and relies on densification to achieve its goal:

Urban “densification” is one of the most transformative — and cruel — epic policy trends in American history. And hardly anyone is talking about it.

Densification is going to destroy tranquil residential neighborhoods, everywhere, and it is backed by socialists in the name of providing affordable housing, by environmentalists in order to prevent “sprawl,” and by powerful financial special interests that benefit from an ongoing real estate bubble.

Libertarians support densification on principle, without even recognizing that they are ignoring—much less opposing—the flip side of densification, which are new policies to suppress land development outside of the “urban containment boundary.” Densification, also known as in-fill, or “smart growth,” will never provide sufficient new housing to make homes affordable unless it is balanced by similarly relaxed approval processes for homebuilding on open land.

People have discovered that housing is too expensive. This should shock no one, since we keep adding more people to our societies while allowing foreign purchases of land, which effectively drives up prices just as high property taxes and income taxes force people to charge more for it anyway.

The utilitarian solution that Leftists have devised involves building more concentrated housing, in others words doing away with single-family homes and replacing them with apartment complexes and high-rises.

In first-glance theory — the worst kind of theory and the most prone to mistake “laboratory conditions” for reality — this makes sense, because that way you have more people in the same amount of space. Less driving, fewer roads, and so on.

In reality, what this does is to obliterate community because no one has peace of mind. Living on top of one another means noise, anonymity, and a concentration of waste instead of spreading it out over a wide area so it can dissipate and be absorbed.

It also means a loss of tree cover:

But tree cover in US cities is shrinking. A study published last year by the US Forest Service found that we lost 36 million trees annually from urban and rural communities over a five-year period. That’s a 1% drop from 2009 to 2014.

If we continue on this path, “cities will become warmer, more polluted and generally more unhealthy for inhabitants,” said David Nowak, a senior US Forest Service scientist and co-author of the study.

“We see the tree cover being swapped out for impervious cover, which means when we look at the photographs, what was there is now replaced with a parking lot or a building,” Nowak said.

This guarantees misery. However, we have boxed ourselves in. If people live in single-family homes, they might escape the misery, but they will not produce as much tax revenue as many more people stacked vertically in the same space.

Even more, they will want to use cars to isolate themselves from the rest of humanity, which is except in its most thriving segments, a total waste of time.

We cannot admit that public transportation fails because people want to stay away from lower classes and diversity, and do not want these groups shipped to their nice green neighborhoods while they are away at work.

In short, our cities have already produced a vast pool of toxic humanity and no one knows what to do with it except to keep subsidizing it. We are being held hostage by excess humanity, and now we cannot escape it, so the Left is cutting off our only avenue of retreat.

Tags: anonymity, densification, urbanization