'New Left Urbanists'
Want to Remake Your City
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As if to underscore the point about control
made in the opinion piece below, another article in the WSJ covered
plummeting bus ridership in LA.
Deep in the article, Mr. Phil Washington,
Chief Executive of LA Metro, is sharing all the ways he would change behavior
and LA to compel bus ridership (e.g., dedicated bus lanes, bike lanes,
etc.....). Then he says...Those types of changes would require a shift
in many Angelenos’ attitudes toward the road, which Mr. Washington said city
leaders need to try to make happen. “Sometimes you have to tell people what’s
good for them,” he said. See below.
‘New Left Urbanists’ Want to Remake Your City,
By Christopher F. Rufo, 8/22/19, WSJ.
It’s about control using infrastructure to
make the masses conform to one vision of how to live. America’s big cities
are almost all dominated by the Democratic Party, but the politics of urban
development are far from monolithic. In the past few years, a new faction has
emerged across the country. Call them the new left urbanists.
These activists have big dreams. They want
local governments to rebuild the urban environment—housing, transit, roads
and tolls—to achieve social justice, racial justice and net-zero carbon
emissions. They rally around slogans such as “ban all cars,” “raze the
suburbs” and “single-family housing is white supremacy”—though they’re
generally white and affluent themselves, often employed in public or semipublic
roles in urban planning, housing development and social advocacy. They treat
public housing, mass transit and bike lanes as a holy trinity, and they want
to impose their religion on you.
“The residential is political,” wrote new left
urbanists David Madden and Peter Marcuse in 2016. “The shape of the housing
system is always the outcome of struggles between different groups and
classes.” By dictating how cities build new housing, the logic goes,
urbanists can dictate how people live and set right society’s socioeconomic,
racial and moral deficiencies.
One widely circulated left-urbanist
plan from April 2018 comes from the People’s Policy Project, a
crowdfunded socialist think tank. The authors, Peter Gowan and Ryan Cooper,
envision the construction of 10 million “municipal homes” over the next
decade. The proposal imagines local governments building more housing units
than the private construction industry and becoming the largest landlord in
many cities.
The abysmal record of public housing in the
U.S., from crime to decay, makes no difference to these urbanists. They
rebrand “housing projects” as “municipal homes” and assert that new units
will resemble neighborhoods in Stockholm, Vienna and Helsinki, rather than
Detroit, Newark and Oakland.
Activists are concerned not only with the
quantity of new housing but also with who builds and lives in it. New
developments must be government-run and tick off the boxes of identity
politics. In San Francisco, some activists oppose all private housing construction.
A 2017 essay in the San Francisco Examiner called advocates for more market
housing part of a “libertarian, anti-poor campaign to turn longtime sites of
progressive organizing into rich-people-only zones” and compared them to
white nationalists.
One might dismiss this as radical posturing,
but public-housing advocates have seized real power in city halls. They’ve
learned how to use the zoning and permitting bureaucracy to stanch private
development. In San Francisco’s Mission District, laundromat owner Bob
Tillman had to spend $1.4 million and nearly five years to gain permission to
convert his business into an apartment building. Activists and their enablers
in City Hall claimed the laundry business was “historic” and that development
would displace minority residents. At one point the planning commission hired
a “shadow consultant” to assess whether the shadows cast by the proposed
building could cause harm to the community.
In New York City, progressive urbanists have
focused on public transportation. The subway system was designed mostly in
the early 20th century to serve the practical needs of New Yorkers, but
today’s activists see it as a grand instrument for cosmic justice.
In the Straphangers Campaign’s
2018 “Transportation and Equity” report, the advocacy group begins from
the premise that “the most vulnerable New Yorkers suffer disproportionately
from high fares, long commutes, polluted air, and dangerous streets.” It ends
up estimating that an additional $30 billion in tax revenue would be needed
for its desired overhaul: upgrading 11 subway lines, building 130 new
accessible stations, and purchasing more than 3,000 new subway cars, along
with nearly 5,000 new buses, over the next 10 years.
While state and local leaders haven’t signed
up for this ambitious plan, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Mayor Bill de Blasio and other
local politicians have expressed support for some of the activists’ funding
proposals, including congestion pricing, a “millionaire’s tax,” a marijuana
tax, a stock-transfer tax and even a $3-a-package tax on Amazon deliveries.
There’s a reasonable argument for congestion
pricing in traffic-glutted Manhattan and for more investment in mass transit.
But the Straphangers’ long-term vision involves elimination of the automobile,
which remains a middle-class staple in the outer boroughs. Their plan would
restrict curbside space for cars by building “protected bike lanes on all
major arterial streets across the five boroughs,” “giving developers
incentives to contribute toward sustainable transportation over private
vehicle usage,” and eliminating parking requirements for new housing.
Activists use euphemisms like “transportation
alternatives” and “transportation choices,” but at heart their vision is
about control. They want to remake the urban infrastructure in their own
image: green, moral and in solidarity with the masses—at least as those
masses exist in their imagination.
The new left urbanists’ fatal mistake is to
view cities as collections of buildings, roads, tunnels and bike lanes.
Urbanists can demolish and rebuild physical environments, but they can’t pave
over the people. Life in a metropolis is simply too complex, too variable and
too ephemeral—it will evade even the most careful planning. Making cities
better and more beautiful requires bringing neighbors, developers, employers
and governments into the conversation. Thriving cities are built through
cooperation, not compulsion.
Mr. Rufo is a contributing editor of City
Journal, from whose Summer issue this is adapted.
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Norb
Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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