Look, it's not that "walkability," "community" and other aspects of the drive for redevelopment are bad. But confiscatory taxes and eminent domain are incredibly corrupting tools. And they just don't work.
So what does? It's interesting that some of the freshest ideas are coming from the Right. Here's Mark Krikorian from National Review's The Corner today:
Call me a crunchy con, but I've long been fascinated by New Urbanism the movement to develop more traditional, human-scale communities instead of the soul-sapping sprawl of a place like Manassas, where I used to live. Conservatives have long been suspicious of it because it attracts a lot of tree-huggers and the like, but William Lind makes a case for a conservative, free-market New Urbanism in the new issue of The American Conservative (subscribe to NR!). And in any case, the godfather of New Urbanism, Andres Duany, is deeply conservative in his worldview, as this interview suggests from a few years ago in The American Enterprise.
Recall that The American Conservative is the brainchild of one Patrick Buchanan. Strange, no? A blog called The Daily Eudomon has more on the article here.
It's worth noting, as author James Howard Kunstler has done, that one of the big culprits behind suburban sprawl and auto-centric communities are onerous zoning codes that forbid mixed-use development. There are also a host of other government policies, some aimed to help cities, that have contributed to their destruction.
Posted by: Jonathan Potts | July 15, 2005 at 07:14 AM