The Green Scam that Keeps on Scamming

It’s been quite some time since I wrote my last installment of the Green Scams series.  The series was dedicated to uncovering twisted facts and liberal agendas behind ‘green’ movements.  It ended up getting cut short simply due to my personal lack of focus on the series, but could have covered hundreds of topics.

This past Monday, when I was doing some research on New Urbanism for a project at work, I decided to do one last Green Scam article. 

I’m not necessarily against New Urbanism in theory, but like many other ‘green‘ movements it has been warped and twisted by liberal agendas.  If there is one green scam that fully embodies the entire liberal ‘green’ agenda, New Urbanism is it.  It denounces the automobile and cheap, reliable sources of energy, forces massive government programs, and promotes a forceful movement of residents to more liberal, urban cores.

New Urbanism is a movement to build walkable, mixed use neighborhoods where people can work, live, and play.  It doesn’t sound too bad when you think about it, but like alternative energy and environmental awareness in general, new urbanism has been hijacked by the liberal left and twisted in a way to support their political agenda.

Before I get started on how out of touch many new urbanism backers have become, I want to get into one serious issue I have with the entire movement in general.  As a designer whose graduate thesis was done on the redevelopment of an existing residential neighborhood, I am blown away by how many new urbanism developments completely ignore the existing fabric of a community and build an entirely new section of the community.  This atrocity is often times covered up by advertising how the site is a redevelopment of an old industrial portion of the city or some other type of ‘Brownfield’ site.  The question I have is what happens to the existing residential neighborhoods?

http://thehighpoint.com/Friendly_High_Point.php
http://bettercities.net/places/placesnewurbandevelopment/pentagon-row
http://bettercities.net/places/places_new_urban_development/rino-river-north
http://www.northwestcrossing.com/bend_oregon_real_estate/The_Concept/

Rather than addressing the existing neighborhoods, an entirely new neighborhood is built next door.  I don’t see how this can do anything but lead to further decline in an already depressed area.  True redevelopment is not to simply build on a now vacated site.  It is how to inject new uses and excitement into a stale part of the city.  If the same energy, time and financial investment that is placed into building a new development was placed into an already existing, yet suffering area, the benefits would reach much further into the community, while requiring significantly less government intervention.

I currently live in a portion of the City of Port Huron that could be considered urban.  It’s by no means a big city, but the way the neighborhood was developed meets many of the criteria laid out by new urbanist developers.  What they may find the most interesting is the fact the neighborhood was developed over time through simple principles of capitalism.  Jobs were located in the city, so people built their houses near the jobs.  As people moved in, places of worship, schools, corner stores, and parks popped up nearby.  Today, as the automobile has become more and more prevalent, many of those corner stores are gone and the aged housing stock has suffered with the development of suburban homes.  Rather than address these issues at the core, new urbanism backers would prefer to focus on building new neighborhoods or developments with extremely expensive mass transit lines, completely relocating commercial cores, strangling existing automobile thoroughfares, all while turning their back on residents in the existing neighborhoods.

Considering this core problem with new urbanism, let’s take a closer look at how these developments have become the biggest green scam of them all. 

Liberals have taken the opportunity to use these developments to push their agenda on everyone.  I believe they have a goal of destroying rural America and repopulating the central core of cities where they believe the government can have far more control over your life.  Through higher energy prices, the attempt can be made to force people into these developments where big government is the way of life.

NewUrbanism.org lists 10 principles of New Urbanism on their website.  As you run through these principles, many of them are simply design criteria that can be hard to argue with but as you get to the end of the list, I have a couple issues. 

Principle number nine claims new urbanism is a key to sustainability.  I struggle to see how new developments are more sustainable than reusing existing areas, even if the density is kept tighter.  I also find it interesting how the neighborhoods they use as examples on their site are often European neighborhoods developed over the course of centuries, yet they are often promoting the construction of entirely new neighborhoods.  I would go as far as arguing that the time it would take for the benefits of a newly constructed new urbanist development to outweigh the negatives of an existing suburban neighborhood would be significant.  The amount of energy and resources going into construction and development are often overlooked in these situations.  I have also always taken issue with the thought that urban areas are more ‘green’ than rural areas, especially considering the fact many of the most basic forms of sustainability we have today were developed in more rural settings.

I take major exception to principle number ten as well, where developers of new urbanist neighborhoods lay claim to a better quality of life.  This comes back to the capitalism part of the argument.  If you leave it up to the buyer, they will ultimately purchase what they feel offers them the best quality of life, and obviously, many people don’t believe that comes in a more dense setting.  Claiming a select few know what brings others a greater quality of life is starting to flirt with some pretty scary political beliefs.

As you search further through the new urbanism website, you come face to face with more holes in their plan.  A major high speed rail system is proposed in their plan at the cost of the taxpayer.  As usual, fuzzy math is used in the cost of the system, the job creation from the system, and the dependability of it.  Personally, I like to use real life examples and I have never seen a dependable and profitable mass transit system.

If the train doesn’t work and you are looking for a good laugh, the website also suggests scooters and roller blades and their number three and four alternative transportation choices, respectively.

To finish up showing how loony this plan really is, take a look at some of the other top 10 lists included on the site:

10 sustainable, feasible and safe solutions to creating sustainable communities
(scroll down the page about half way)

There are some real gems on this list, like a permanent moratorium on all road construction, a ‘huge’ increase in funding for the financially unsustainable Amtrak, a government focus on new urbanism, tripling mpg standards, a moratorium on coal and nuclear energy,  and solar panels for EVERY building in America.  In my opinion, none of these ideas are feasible.  Not only will our cost of living skyrocket, but we will expected to pay more for all of these programs.

10 step program to raise the quality of life (aka Kill the automobile)

More big government ideas are tossed around in this list while completely contradicting some of the claims in their mass transit plan.  Magically, with money from the Obama tree, streets will be redeveloped into pedestrian thoroughfares and parking lots will be transformed into public squares.  I’m thinking the job losses by the auto and road construction industries weren’t calculated into the jobs forecast for the mass transit plan.  It looks like Liberals plan to continue the destruction of Detroit, a city they have held hostage for 50 years.

On top of ruining the auto industry we just bailed out, the new urbanists will be looking to ‘populate’ the core (principle #6).  That just sounds scary doesn’t it?  At least you will be able to ride your government purchased and community shared bicycle!

No good Liberal “green scam” is complete without some horribly skewed statistics of how their plan will save the planet.

Check out the list of 10 ways new urbanism promotes sustainability

Please don’t look at this list if you are a UAW worker.  You just might realize how much Liberals really despise what you do.  I think number one might be my favorite…despite the fact that killing a million or more babies every year is a woman’s right, new urbanists care about you and claim they can save the lives of 42,000 people per year due to reduced auto accidents.

Please take the time to check out the rest of the New Urbanism website to see how crazy these people are.  This movement, as far as this organization is concerned, has nothing to do with quality of life and sustainable neighborhoods.  It has everything to do with government intervention and control.  As my personal profile states, I am all for ‘green’ plans and technology in the instances that is makes financial sense for me and provides a similar or superior quality of life than I currently live.  Let’s allow the market to be the judge, and not the government with their political agendas.

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