Cities Restricting Expansion : Subsidizing High Density Urban Projects

What a joke - there is no man-made green house gases destroying our planet and then worse, implementing such urban development incentives by government based on such nonsense is an open door for restricting an individual right of free movement.

This is one of the first steps for restricting or completely removing individual freedom of choice. Little by little the frog in the pot of water understands that as the water gets hotter he has to decide what his options are or parish.

Did you ever wonder why there is such a big push for small cars, limiting access to gasoline through high prices and restricting electrical generation by demanding more solar, wind and bio fuels?

Have you paid any attention to what the discussions are in your local meetings of city councils concerning the massive purchases of land by cities to restrict development and then subsidizing urban design and development of high density inner city housing? It just feels like the right thing to do.

Does this all sound like a plan to restrict freedom of movement? It's called control of outcomes. It's called socialism. It's called government deciding what and who we are or ever will be.

Reducing Livability
Source:  Randal O'Toole, "Reducing Livability: How Sustainability Planning Threatens the American Dream," Cato Institute, October 28, 2013.
November 1, 2013

In response to state laws and federal incentives, cities and metropolitan areas across the country are engaged in "sustainability planning" aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In many if not most cases, this planning seeks to reshape urban areas to reduce the amount of driving people do.

In general, this means increasing urban population densities and in particular replacing low-density neighborhoods in transit corridors with dense, mixed-use developments.

Such planning tramples on property rights and personal preferences, says Randal O'Toole, a Cato Institute Senior Fellow. Owners of land outside these boundaries are restricted from developing their land. Inside the boundaries, housing prices rise, making homeownership in general, and single-family homes in particular, unaffordable to large numbers of people. To make matters worse, these policies are simply not effective at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

• Plan Bay Area, a plan recently approved for the nine-county San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose metropolitan area, proposes to spend $14 billion in subsidies for high density housing and $5 billion in subsidies for rail transit.
• Yet the combined effect of these subsidies will be to reduce the region's greenhouse gas emissions by less than 2 percent, at a cost of nearly $1,200 per ton of abated emissions.
• By contrast, a separate "climate initiative" program for the region includes projects such as car sharing, van pooling, and incentives for people to buy more fuel-efficient cars.
• It is expected to reduce the region's emissions by nearly 3 percent, at a cost of just $22 per ton of abated emissions.

Laws passed in California, Florida, Oregon, and Washington require cities to implement such programs no matter how costly, and the Obama administration is offering cities in other states grants to encourage them to write such plans as well.

These plans should be abandoned because they intrude on property rights and personal housing preferences and are cost-ineffective at saving energy and reducing emissions.