Aitken: How The High Density Craze Will Destroy The Middle Class
January 23, 2020 in News by RBN Staff
Source: Patch.com
Governor Sununu channels the policies of Governor Gavin Newsom of California
By Jane Aitken, Patch Contributor
Logos of the various left-wing “YIMBY” groups across the country (Yimby Wiki)
I came across two excellent articles by Edward Ring, senior fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He explains perfectly what we have been saying all along — the high density craze will help destroy the middle class and make single-family home ownership even more difficult.
Currently in NH, the Governor is pushing high-density by promoting two bills that will impose mandates on local boards, and reward developers further for high-density projects.
What’s wrong with this? To start with, the taxpayers will take up the slack when services are overburdened and in need of expansion. And not everyone wants to live in a city, or have their rural, semi-rural town be attached to one.
“Most Americans aren’t racist. But they rightly have an aversion to spending their life’s savings to purchase a home in a neighborhood with a certain ambiance, only to then have their taxes increased so people who could never earn enough money to live in their neighborhood come in and live there anyway.”
“Why should anyone work hard their entire life, creating generational wealth, if the neighborhoods where they’ve fought so hard to be able to live are suddenly filled with people who in many cases didn’t have to work at all to live there?”
Read more… Density Ideology Will Destroy America
But there are more ramifications in the long term. “Unlike the healthy debate being waged across America on the topic of healthcare, the debate over housing solutions—if one even wants to call it a debate—is decidedly unhealthy. Basic premises go unchallenged. Basic assumptions and options are off the table, considered beyond debate. If the debate over housing policy remains a stunted facsimile of genuine debate, Americans will not only be condemned to purchase barely affordable housing, but their new housing options will be almost exclusively limited to homes on ever-smaller lots—or apartments—in increasingly crowded cities.”
Read more… The Density Delusion
Both articles feature informative charts and graphs showing statistics on the current state of land use in the US.
Another phenomenon is “YIMBY” groups — something cooked up by millennials.
The YIMBY program philosophy is eerily similar to what our supposedly Republican Governor is attempting to do. Is he channeling the policies of the liberal Governor Gavin Newsom of California?
One resident who wrote about the YIMBYs in CA said;
“YIMBY, along with a coalition of leftist activists, successfully lobbied for AB670, a new state law signed by Stalin (Gavin) Newsom that overrides and abrogates all local zoning regs…Along with the taxes that other homeowners pay, we also pay for the privilege of having our own regulations. And now a bunch of politicians who don’t live here and don’t contribute dues have abolished the very thing we’ve been paying for all these years.”
The resident further stated “But once again I’ll point out that Belgrade and our Democrat overlords have taken away the right of local neighborhoods to choose to have anti-density ordinances in their own “backyards,” and that “The battle against single-family-residence communities is a national one.”
Please keep in mind that Bedford, with its mostly upscale neighborhoods consisting of single-family homes on large lots, IS as diverse as any neighborhood might be, proving that “diversity” does not necessarily mean “poor”.
Democrats should object to the transference of tax dollars to wealthy developers, and Republicans should object to the basic unconstitutionality of laws that would effectively redistribute the wealth and regionalize decisions that should normally be under local control. The Governor’s plan would effectively nullify the Town Meeting vote.
The idea that Trump’s HUD would promote this while attempting to call it something else, is also disturbing.
Don’t Call Trump’s Housing Order a YIMBY Plan
Yes Governor Sununu, we’ll call it “YIMBY”, because that is just what it is… and it’s going on everywhere. But this is NOT why people move to New Hampshire.
Rise of the yimbys: the angry millennials with a radical housing solution
TPUDC was the out-of-state company hired to rework Bedford’s Master Plan. And it figures that the “Congress for the New Urbanism” (cnu.org), where TPUDC’s employees received their indoctrination, is all for YIMBYism too…
The views expressed in this post are the author’s own.
