Stanley Kurtz has uncovered the government’s latest sinister plan: they’re coming to abolish the suburbs! Yes, an entire geographical mode of living is under threat from a small bloc of those most unctuous men: urban planners.
Anyway, the “missing link that explains his administration’s overall policy architecture” has been discovered at last:
The centerpiece of the Obama administration’s anti-suburban plans is a little-known and seemingly modest program called the Sustainable Communities Initiative. The “regional planning grants” funded under this initiative — many of them in battleground states like Florida, Virginia, and Ohio — are set to recommend redistributive policies, as well as transportation and development plans, designed to undercut America’s suburbs. Few have noticed this because the program’s goals are muffled in the impenetrable jargon of “sustainability,” while its recommendations are to be unveiled only in a possible second Obama term.
Oh, man, it sounds bad. I bet this shadowy cabal is even going to recommend putting light rail lines in highway medians.
Presumably one impetus behind the book is to motivate middle-class suburban voters to oppose the president’s re-election bid. But it’s this kind of every-angle paranoia that detracts from actual, existing threats to our culture and society, of which there are plenty. Alarmist rhetoric about everything becomes numbing, and opens our necessarily-grave tone about subjects—like, say, religious liberty—to parody and ridicule.
At another level, it’s frankly emblematic of an aging strain of American conservatism which is gradually becoming aware of its own disintegration. In being so dismissive of efforts to rein in suburban sprawl (oddly thrown into scare quotes like it’s some kind of code word and not a widely-recognized popular image of our postwar landscape) and think more broadly about how our interaction with the natural world, Kurtz actually cuts off a powerful conservative argument. Every attempt to roll back or rein in what are now widely acknowledged to be major missteps in our built environment do not need to elicit visceral anger, or cries of collectivism and redistribution.
Rather than fantasize about losing our natural right to three-acre lawns, those on the right ought to be embracing calls for more modest and—yes—traditional forms of living. We can certainly debate the most efficacious ways of going about things like combatting wasteful, atomizing land use; I even suspect the specific policy Kurtz critiques does tend toward bureaucratic know-it-all-ism rather than genuine community engagement (the proposal to scramble municipal tax revenues around a region could certainly be a localist sticking-point). But it’s rather baffling for people who profess to be concerned about culture to jumpily exempt large swaths of its constitutive elements (like, say, the physical arrangement and daily routine of peoples’ lives, jobs, and commutes) from any sort of real criticism.
At the end of the day, it’s difficult to deny that for many younger people, a summons to restraint in architecture and urban planning goes hand in hand with other attempts to preserve and reinvigorate our neglected cultural inheritance, revive of the importance of aesthetic considerations, and even, for some, return to orthodoxy in religious matters. There is a growing realization that the way we live our lives, the practices and habits we daily undertake, and the way they ultimately manifest themselves in the political realm, can no longer be conceptualized as dissociated points on a Cartesian plane. And defenses of gluttony ring less and less convincing.
August 2nd, 2012 | 4:26 pm
So you’re in favor of using zoning and other bureaucratic means in order to redistribute wealth away from suburbanites toward the inner city?
I don’t see why it’s self-evident that this author is ridiculous. If his claims are wrong (I had rather got the impression he made a point of footnoting well, but I don’t know), then please say that – and do so in a way that can be taken seriously. But certainly, if the arguments are making are legitimate, then it’s one more example of Obama trying to control choices that aren’t rightfully his.
August 2nd, 2012 | 4:53 pm
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August 2nd, 2012 | 5:23 pm
This summarizes my ongoing puzzlement with the Porcher-type mentality. I read the Kurtz article (don’t plan to read the book) and find it plausible in this way. It fits exactly how much of the academic world thinks. The author of this post even concedes the main point.
“I even suspect the specific policy Kurtz critiques does tend toward bureaucratic know-it-all-ism rather than genuine community engagement (the proposal to scramble municipal tax revenues around a region could certainly be a localist sticking-point)”
That is exactly point. It doesn’t just tend toward bureaucratic know-it-all-ism, it positively worships at the altar of it. The genuine problems with much of suburban development arise from the fact that this is exactly how they (the suburbs) were developed in the first place – so now more of the same (just in the opposite direction) will fix these problems? One of the reasons that the suburbs developed so quickly were that people were hungry to escape the machine style urban political culture and have an opportunity to own something.
Is Kurtz’s writing overwrought? Probably. But is the “Sustainable Communities Initiative” (you can call these scare quotes, I prefer to think of them as a grammatical eye roll) anything other than a giant sinkhole of ill-advised social engineering that coincidentally funnels lots of dollars to Democratic client groups? If you think so, I have some beachfront property in Kansas that I would like to sale you.
August 2nd, 2012 | 5:55 pm
Blake,
It’s not necessarily the author’s point that Matthew is contesting, it’s his tone and use of rhetoric to imply a secret agenda and socialist conspiracy behind every single action and policy of the administration, no matter how trivial or small.
If this tone is used to attack every action of the Obama administration, then people will stop taking conservatives seriously when they attack the more serious policy problems. That is Matthew’s point. It’s “boy who cries wolf” syndrome.
That said, I don’t support the bureaucratic approach to changing people’s behavior.
August 2nd, 2012 | 6:24 pm
If suburbs weren’t the result of almost a century of federal and state judiciary and legislative policies in favor of suburbs, this argument might make sense. As it is, in this reality, arguments about the government infringing on property rights against suburbs deserve no sympathy. If the government wants to undo the harm it did by creating suburbs and sprawl in the first place, good for them.
August 3rd, 2012 | 7:22 am
Do I sense a dopey romanization of city life with taxis, subways, crowded expensive apartments and corner stores? I point out that New York City is not America—it is a small part of it with its own peculiarities. The suburbs serve as a compromise for rural folk between distasteful city life and farms that can no longer provide enough income. Suburbs exist because there is a felt need for them. And very few people want to wake up one day and find someone else is building a car wash or pawn shop next door.
August 3rd, 2012 | 8:16 am
[...] Matthew Cantirino throws some much-deserved cold water on Stanley Kurtz’s latest hysterical ravings: Rather than fantasize about losing our natural right to three-acre lawns, those on the right ought to be embracing calls for more modest and—yes—traditional forms of living. We can certainly debate the most efficacious ways of going about things like combatting wasteful, atomizing land use; I even suspect the specific policy Kurtz critiques does tend toward bureaucratic know-it-all-ism rather than genuine community engagement (the proposal to scramble municipal tax revenues around a region could certainly be a localist sticking-point). But it’s rather baffling for people who profess to be concerned about culture to jumpily exempt large swaths of its constitutive elements (like, say, the physical arrangement and daily routine of peoples’ lives, jobs, and commutes) from any sort of real criticism. [...]
August 3rd, 2012 | 9:41 am
Mistaken title to this post. As a lifelong suburbanite, I know the culture is more about getting off of YOUR lawn. People moved out to the suburbs partly to be able to tell their neighbor what to do with his property (zoning laws).
August 3rd, 2012 | 11:31 am
Nobody’s looking for “three-acre lawns” as much as they’re looking for schools with little to no “urban youth”.
August 3rd, 2012 | 12:14 pm
Mr. Cantirino is right to denounce the tendency of some to present policy disagreements in paranoid language. He says the author wishes to incentivize the reader to vote against Obama. Perhaps it’s possible that this sort of presentation is helpful in selling books. In either case it’s silly and counterproductive.
He thens turns to the suburbs themselves, toward which he seems to hold some distaste. Since he seems to think that most suburbs consist of three acre lots and are populated primarily by gluttons who are ignorant of their cultural inheritance, I wonder whether he has the expertise to subject these communities to the “real criticism” he believes they deserve.
August 3rd, 2012 | 4:11 pm
It’s not necessarily the author’s point that Matthew is contesting, it’s his tone and use of rhetoric to imply a secret agenda and socialist conspiracy behind every single action and policy of the administration, no matter how trivial or small.
So he fights fire with fire.
But I don’t believe two wrongs make a right.
If he wants me to believe Kurtz’s tone is overwrought, I might be very sympathetic to such an argument – but not if we’re going to skip honest argument in favor of the OMG!!!!!ism and inflammatory rhetoric (SECRET CONSPIRACIES!!11!!!1!)
August 6th, 2012 | 8:53 am
Cantirino makes a good point. I often wonder if the conservative noise machine has ever heard of the law of diminishing returns. Every action large or small taken by the Obama admin or Democrats generally for that matter is denounced in terms saturated with paranoia such that it’s essentially become wallpaper. Congress is the arena for endless meaningless maneuvering so that even those mildly interested in politics have ceased to pay attention. Was it really necessary for the house to have 30 odd votes to repeal Obamacare. States, including mine, are deluged with ads from Republican PACs and rather fewer from Democrats. No one pays any attention to them, except perhaps the most rabid bases of both parties. I’m not familiar with this program but urban sprawl is a problem, even many middle of the road people who live in suburbia know this, a life long resident of the burbs I moved into town about 10 years ago and know which I prefer. And I wouldn’t be surprised to find that Kurtz lives in metropolitan Washington or NYC and not 30 miles from the center of say Chicago or Baltimore.
August 6th, 2012 | 11:51 am
Yes, the conservative “EVERYTHING IS A SOCIALIST PLOT AT WORLD DOMINATION!” hysteric is extremely tiresome and does not advance the ends the authors of same would purport to want to advance.
Also, I think the likelihood that EITHER political party would actually try to effectively go to war with the suburban demographic that decides roughly 100% of national and state level elections is roughly zero. Despite what this NRO loon would intimate.
Nevertheless, my own guard starts to go up the minute I hear some ivory tower academic weenie pontificating from his perch on the Upper West Side of Manhattan as to why I need to live in some tenement in Brooklyn straight out of 1912 or whatnot.
I will never understand the odd fascination these people have for “high-density” “sustainable” living. Particularly in a country where we are in the top 5 worldwide in the ratio of arable land to population. Couldn’t a better economic argument be made for greater utilization of the resources we have vis-a-vis our international competitors? If you have a lot of good, cheap land, jamming more and more people into scarce expensive land in urban cores would not seem to make a whole lot of sense to me.
August 8th, 2012 | 12:56 am
I can believe that the “sustainability” programs being pushed are largely, unbeknownst to many adherents, serving an agenda of centralization of power– and yes, much of this stuff does come down from the UN, just like global warming and a lot of other bright ideas. Also note the allied growth of global code organizations that literally want to code your entire life: safety, environmental, building …………
However, it does not follow that every aim of those programs is undesirable. In fact, most of the aims may be desirable, as long as we’re not trying to force the changes through police or pseudo-police power.
I don’t want government forcing people to clump together, but OTOH many people don’t realize that suburbia itself is a product of various government manipulations. The one libertarians are most likely to complain about is restrictive zoning. (Millions of American are only vaguely aware of the ways in which zoning has helped make their lives miserable.) Zoning that allows, say, only large-lot single-family housing, for instance, is nothing short of fascistic. Yet, suburbia is full of such communities.
The least visible type of intervention is the special-interest engineering of the real estate tax to reward land speculation and space-wasting, while penalizing quality development – a double barrel of dumb.
Then, there was a documented conspiracy: the cartel of automobile, tire and oil companies that bought up and dismantled commuter rail lines across the country.
There is also the effect of the interstate military highway system and other subsidies to car culture. Rail built the original pre-automobile suburbs such as the area I grew up in outside of Chicago. (The Chicago area had 11 commuter lines already by 1873.) These are the towns people praise for their charm., livability, and walkability – the ones with centers, with a “there” there. The fact of rail-centeredness is an obvious reason for this. But another likely reason was that 120 years ago, we relied more on real estate for revenue; and of that, taxed the site value — which typically is higher in the center of town — more than the improvements. Therefore, the tax code incentivized density at the core, building upward rather than outward; while at the same time, encouraging quality in construction.
So, a simple tweak in the real-estate tax (or perhaps not so simple, if there are State laws blocking it, which is frequently the case) can begin to allow the market to supply smarter growth.
Introducing the New Urbanist shopping mall!
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