Regional Sustainability Grows as Community Choices Whither

Agency Tyranny

In 2009, President Obama formed the Partnership for Sustainable Communities that merged the resources of HUD, DOT and the EPA to further push federal planning initiatives on local communities. Much of that planning involved forcing communities to adopt the government’s “Livability Principles” or face the loss of grant money.

While sounding beneficial on the surface, the Livability Principles actually force families into dense communities, trade valuable private property for public parks and shared spaces, and reduce the community’s ability to use their own automobiles.

HUD’s 2010 “Sustainable Communities Regional Development Planning Grant Program” made it clear, if your community took the grant money, you had to meet “mandatory outcomes from the creation of a regional plan for sustainable development.” 30 These outcomes often required recipients to alter their comprehensive plans, zoning laws and land use regulations, often against community wishes.

In spite of the governments’ increasing encroachments on property rights, the more communities became addicted to HUD grant money, the harder it was to decline and the deeper they slipped into compliance. As sustainable development, the embodiment of federal control grew, so too did regionalism, the embodiment of condensed living.

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Cities like Seattle WA, Portland, OR, and Boulder, CO formed regions and surrounded their cities with growth boundaries that controlled how much property could be developed and where people could live. Contrary to planner’s claims that growth boundaries improve living

conditions, in Portland, OR, the 2010 US census reveals a much different story. After 10 years of Regional Smart Growth planning, rising living costs forced over 10,000 minorities to flee their homes in the heart of the city for lower cost living elsewhere.32 Nearly all regional planning schemes like San Francisco’s Plan Bay Area, New York’s Capital Region Sustainability Plan and Twin Cities Region have one element in common. Unelected council members manage the regions by controlling the land use and zoning laws. Thrive 2055 is a proposed region that would cover 16 counties in TN, GA and AL33. In addition to melting away local political boundaries,

Thrive 2055, for the purposes of planning their single region, would erase state’s boundaries.34 This move creates severe jurisdictional issues in which state’s governors could be compelled to follow the dictates of a regional council rather than their voters. When Thrive 2055 planners talk about “pulling people together,” they are talking about the collectivization of what are now independent communities. Nowhere in their colorful materials do Thrive 2055 planners discuss protection of private property rights.

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Regional council members have immense authority to override local land use regulations and zoning laws, the very foundation of private property rights. Since nearly all council members are appointed, not elected, local property owners have little recourse when the council passes a regulation that alters their ability to use their own property as they choose.

But by the new millennia, many Americans were awakening to the dangers of lost property rights. One seminal point was in King County Washington. In 2004, King County passed an ordinance called the 65 – 10 Rule that forced homeowners with over 5 acres of property to return 65% of their land to its natural vegetative state35. Citizens were outraged at the taking of property with nothing in return. In the wake of the wrangling to pass the ordinance, local community members formed the Citizens’ Alliance for Property Rights.

(CAPR) Working with the Pacific Legal Foundation, CAPR sued King County.37 After five years of intense legal maneuvering, in March of 2009, the Washington Supreme court officially struck down what some termed “one of the most extreme assaults on property rights in the U.S.38”

CAPR is not the first property rights group. Citizens’ voices have emerging all over the country as people realize that regionalism and the strings attached to government grants are a slow path to the indentured America described in the Vancouver Action Plan decades ago.

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But, the government is persistent. As we will see in the next section, private property rights are at more risk than ever.

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