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Taking the Fifth
Maybe we should keep ‘urban planners' where they belong — out of the suburbs
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Business New Haven
4/19/1999
By: Laurence D. Cohen
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Take a trip back in time to the 1800s in Litchfield County and consider what you wouldn't see: the movie stars, the antiques stores, the nature preserves, the expensive restaurants.
No, what made the northwest corner hum in those days was the iron industry - a noisy mining and processing occupation that stripped the trees from the pretty Litchfield hills to fuel the furnaces, after the ore was gouged from the soil. It was an international colossus, that iron industry - a geologic gift for a portion of Connecticut otherwise noted for its cold weather and lousy farming.
The mining, the blast furnaces, the forges are gone now, and the brown hills, stripped of trees, have long since gone green again - better for recreation, not vocation. The demise of the iron industry was the natural evolution of markets at work. The furnaces shut down when the world found more efficient methods and more efficient places.
To our modern sensibilities, shaped by gushy environmentalism, the evolution of Litchfield is an improvement, because we have come to believe that squirrels and beavers and the unobstructed views from rich peoples' patios are more important than the lives of the blue-collar folks who used to make a decent living stoking blast furnaces.
It is the similar kind of snobby, protect-the-well-connected instinct, it is the same kind of mindless, nothing-is-better-than-something instinct that inspires folks like State Rep. Jefferson B. Davis (D-50) to legislate away our freedom, our liberty, our choices about where we live and what we live in and where we work and how we get there. You see, Jeff Davis lives in Pomfret, tucked away in the northeast corner of the state, which is called the “Quiet Corner” for a reason.
Davis, and others like him in other states and at the federal level, extol the virtues of government intervention, in cahoots with all sorts of shadowy consultants, regional planning cabals and environmental extremists, to use the force of law to contain this messy business of people building homes and driving cars, without the permission of the busybody bureaucrats.
As chairman of the General Assembly's Planning & Development Committee, Davis has the pulpit and the sermon: Regional government (although he doesn't call it that), state land-use planning, “urban-growth boundaries” (to guarantee that it will be artificially expensive to build houses in places like Pomfret), “livable” land-use patterns.
Al Gore is the national cheerleader for this stuff, with the promise that he will fix those liberty-loving suburbs that provide homes that people want to live in, that provide shopping and recreation that meet the needs and expectations of consumers, that insist on local schools that provide the intended service.
It's “sprawl,” the Gore team wails - an escape from urban centers that have less and less relevance to modern living patterns, that vote Democratic, love high taxes and stand as monuments to the failure of the same urban planners who now want to work their magic in the suburbs, as well.
The “smart growth” movement that so intrigues the shadowy regional-government types is perfect for the tax-and-spenders, frustrated by the increasing suburban sophistication about and hostility toward expensive and expansive government.
Does Connecticut, a three-hour ride (the long way), need “regional asset districts” to provide the politically well-connected with local slush funds? No, but it would place a layer of bureaucracy between the nonsense and the taxpayers, obscuring accountability.
The most interesting backlash against all this we-know-what's-best-for-you arrogance will come from minority legislators, not so enthusiastic about selfish efforts to preserve the landscape for squirrels and ex-urban gentlemen farmers. The minority legislators want subsidized buses to take their constituents to jobs in the suburbs; they want housing discrimination laws enforced so their constituents can “sprawl” like the white folks.
The move to the suburbs, to the “country,” has brought millions of Americans decent schools, safe neighborhoods, larger houses, more residential and retail choices and, increasingly, a quicker trip to the office. In the real world that is considered progress, the market at work, the preferences of a free people to decide the lifestyle that is best for them.
But to those who know only the thrill of control and regulation and power over others, a backyard barbecue in the suburbs borders on criminal behavior, unless they can tax it, choose the menu and acquire enough open space with taxpayer money so that their rich friends never have to smell cheeseburgers from the great unwashed who have sprawled to the gates of where they aren't invited.
Laurence D. Cohen is a senior fellow of the Yankee Institute for Public Policy.
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