Whose Communist Plot Is This, Anyway?
Originally published in The New Colonist

Before I started writing this, I did a cursory Internet search to see whether many people actually did believe that "Smart Growth" was some sort of socialist attack on freedom and individuality...and the answer is a resounding "Yes!"

Typical of the thousands of entries in this Booby Prize competition was the following, from a Realty Times article published this morning, February 28, 2005--though it is a reprint of an article by Lesley Hensell from May, 1999:

Hensell goes on to rail against the suppression of "property rights," the "blatantly socialistic" public transit system, "whereby users pay a pittance and those who do not even use the bus or rail must subsidize others," and the spectre of ever more subsidies for "'saved' downtowns," affordable housing, and other such Stalinist horrors.

If the hypocrisy weren't so grotesque, and so ingrained in our culture, it would be laughable.

No suburb pays its way in taxes. It can't; the infrastructure form itself is inherently inefficient, not only in terms of land and energy use but financially. All those spread-out houses on big lots way out on the fringes require lots of concrete to be laid down for roads in them, roads leading to them, and freeways leading to those roads leading to those streets surrounding the McMansions swimming in their big McLawns. Water, sewer, and energy supply infrastructure multiplies, with miles of pipe and wire required for the relatively few people served.

After all, in my neighborhood, a hundred feet of sewer pipe serves several hundred individuals; in the suburbs that same hundred feet of pipe serves maybe eight. Costs just as much--hell, if you consider the longer collector lines, the whole thing costs more. Likewise police and fire protection, traffic control, etc. It's all more expensive out in the sticks, where there's so much more road surface per resident than in the city--and where auto accidents take a greater toll, not just in human suffering but in emergency services, that is, tax money, than in downtowns, "saved" or not. (In fact, proportionately more teenagers die from car wrecks in the suburbs than from gang violence in the ghettoes.)

Oh, and those noble drivers, rugged individuals cruising free on the open (that is, subsidized) roads? Yeah, their gas and car taxes pay about 40% of infrastructure construction and maintenance costs, and motorists pay nothing to ameliorate the effects of pollution, noise, and oil depletion, not to mention those pesky oil wars like the billion-dollar boondoggle in Iraq, not to mention the effects of tax base lost to road and parking infrastructure that, in a "Smart Growth" community, would be home and businesses, or at least parks, schools, and libraries.

Yet taxes are low in the suburbs...so where does the money come from? Oh, yeah, the cities! You know, those places that are so awful that real estate costs 20 times per square foot what it does in the 'burbs, where living and doing business are inherently more efficient than in the 'burbs, where the tax money is generated to subsidize suburbia.

Yes, folks, for over seventy years now we've been draining the hard-working folks of the inner city so suburban dwellers could spend more time sitting in their cars listening to right-wing radio talk show hosts bite the hand the feeds them!

"But America wants suburbs," cry the imbeciles.

Bullshit. The development and real estate cabals, hungry to buy undeveloped land cheap and be able to sell it dear (once the county puts in sewers, roads, and schools), have connived to change zoning codes so that it is illegal in most of the US to build anything but suburban-style developments!

Yes, folks, the real Stalinists are these right-wing pseudo-libertarians who use government regulation to tell you how you must live, what you must buy, where you must work.

When, after battles, bruises, and variances, "Smart Growth" communities actually appear on the ground, they sell out instantly! When, after weathering the bitter rain of deprecation, vituperation, and accusation that drools from the cloudy minds of the Sprawlmasters, we actually get the transit we want put in, people flock to use it. Yes, in liberal Portland, in car-addicted Los Angeles, in rugged Denver, they flock to it and want more built--and vote themselves taxes to do so!

So, I say to you faux individualists: quite telling me what I and my neighbors can or can't ask our own governments to do. We've seen what your way does to our lives: the Littleton school shootouts that all took place in the suburbs, all; the war in Iraq, with over 500,000 dead so far, which had nothing to do with Osama and everything to do with your lust for subsidized oil; the dreary state of many downtowns and ethnic communities that resulted from your robberies. Sixty billion a year to highways, 500 million to Amtrak, and you call trains socialistic?

Just shut your lying faces up and let us move on into the future without you. We don't need your dictatorial master plans and stucco jails. So go away!