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!

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.

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!)

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.