Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Making Brookfield (and Fox Point) Into Milwaukee

You all recall "smart growth" plots, of course. 

They're back--on steroids--with the Obozo Regime.

...What if Obama’s boldest policy initiative is merely something he’d rather not discuss? And what if that initiative is being enacted right now?

A year ago, I published Spreading the Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities. There I described the president’s second-term plan to press a transformative “regionalist” agenda on the country. Early but unmistakable signs indicate that Obama’s regionalist push is well underway. Yet the president doesn’t discuss his regionalist moves and the press does not report them.

...The most obvious new element of the president’s regionalist policy initiative is the July 19 publication of a Department of Housing and Urban Development regulation broadening the obligation of recipients of federal aid to “affirmatively further fair housing.” The apparent purpose of this rule change is to force suburban neighborhoods with no record of housing discrimination to build more public housing targeted to ethnic and racial minorities.

*Ahem*  Remember that every single township, village, and municipality in the USA is a "recipient of federal aid" by one route or another.

Your New Berlin problem is about to become your Brookfield and Fox Point problem.

The skulduggery is operative in the San Francisco Bay area.  (Yes, they deserve it.  Nonetheless....):

...In effect, by preventing the development of new suburbs, and reducing traditional single-family home development in existing suburbs, Plan Bay Area will squeeze 30 years worth of in-migrating population into a few small urban enclaves, and force most new businesses into the same tight quarters. The result will be a steep increase in the Bay Area’s already out-of-control housing prices. This will hit the poor and middle class the hardest. While some poor and minority families will receive tiny subsidized apartments in the high-rise PDAs, many others will find themselves displaced by the new development, or priced out of the local housing market altogether.

A regional plan that blocks traditional suburban development, densifies cities, and urbanizes suburbs on this scale is virtually unprecedented. That’s why the Obama administration awarded the agencies behind Plan Bay Area its second-highest “Sustainable Communities Grant” in 2012.

Tom Barrett is grinning ear-to-ear.

HT:  Cold Fury

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