Does President Obama Want to Abolish the Suburbs?
Stanley Kurtz, writing in the National Review, says yes.
You might think this is hyperbole, but I think Kurtz makes a strong case that this really is Obama's position. The following are some excerpts from Kurtz's essay:
President Obama is not a fan of America’s suburbs. Indeed, he intends to abolish them. With suburban voters set to be the swing constituency of the 2012 election, the administration’s plans for this segment of the electorate deserve scrutiny. Obama is a longtime supporter of “regionalism,” the idea that the suburbs should be folded into the cities, merging schools, housing, transportation, and above all taxation. To this end, the president has already put programs in place designed to push the country toward a sweeping social transformation in a possible second term. The goal: income equalization via a massive redistribution of suburban tax money to the cities.
Obama’s plans to undercut the political and economic independence of America’s suburbs reach back decades. The community organizers who trained him in the mid-1980s blamed the plight of cities on taxpayer “flight” to suburbia. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Obama’s mentors at the Gamaliel Foundation (a community-organizing network Obama helped found) formally dedicated their efforts to the budding fight against suburban “sprawl.” From his positions on the boards of a couple of left-leaning Chicago foundations, Obama channeled substantial financial support to these efforts. On entering politics, he served as a dedicated ally of his mentors’ anti-suburban activism.
...
One approach is to force suburban residents into densely packed cities by blocking development on the outskirts of metropolitan areas, and by discouraging driving with a blizzard of taxes, fees, and regulations. Step two is to move the poor out of cities by imposing low-income-housing quotas on development in middle-class suburbs. Step three is to export the controversial “regional tax-base sharing” scheme currently in place in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area to the rest of the country. Under this program, a portion of suburban tax money flows into a common regional pot, which is then effectively redistributed to urban, and a few less well-off “inner-ring” suburban, municipalities.
The Obama administration, stocked with “regionalist” appointees, has been advancing this ambitious plan quietly for the past four years. Efforts to discourage driving and to press development into densely packed cities are justified by reference to fears of global warming. Leaders of the crusade against “sprawl” very consciously use environmental concerns as a cover for their redistributive schemes.
I love the suburbs. Meanwhile, what I call "making governments compete to provide public services that people want" many of my professoriate colleagues call "a race to the bottom." As I've argued before, Obama thinks like a professor. The fact so many of my colleagues hold the latter view makes me think that Obama does too. It's another reason why I believe Kurtz has accurately captured the thinking of President Obama: he really does prefer to abolish the suburbs.
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Dec '10
Re: Does President Obama Want to Abolish the Suburbs?
Seems to be consistent with the principle of involuntary association, where citizens are forced against their will into groupings with people whose interests, outlooks and priorities dont match their own. Isn't that what ObamaCare does with jamming unrelated people into "pools"?
Jun '10
Re: Does President Obama Want to Abolish the Suburbs?
I grew up on a farm, but have lived in suburbia for four decades. I thought it was a compromise to live with actual next-door neighbors.
If I wanted to live in an apartment or a high-rise condo, I would. I don't. Obama and other social engineers need to mind their own d***ed business.
Oct '10
Re: Does President Obama Want to Abolish the Suburbs?
If he wants to do away with suburbia, what are his plans for the truly rural? I'm talking about the really bitter clingers that plan their jaunts to the city around a stop at Chick-Fil-A.
Mar '11
Re: Does President Obama Want to Abolish the Suburbs?
Will this really have the effect Obama wants? I live in a suburb. How does Obama stop the people who want to live in suburbs from moving farther out?
If his plan is implemented, what would stop me from moving to a smaller town a little further away and outside the regional tax authority.
This would be more driving so more green house gases and less tax revenue for the city.
May '11
Re: Does President Obama Want to Abolish the Suburbs?
The liberal elites in my area have been working on this agenda for decades. They call it smart growth. Which is another term for central planning which is another term for tyranny.
Mar '11
Re: Does President Obama Want to Abolish the Suburbs?
The virtues of the suburban homeowner may not be quite as dramatic as the virtues of the yeoman farmer of yesteryear, but anyone who supports a study, free civil society has a strong interest in preserving the modest and adult virtues of the household in suburbia against the forces that seek to make us all urban proletarians.
Sep '11
Re: Does President Obama Want to Abolish the Suburbs?
Yes, that is why he would like to see gas at $10 a gallon. To keep you from doing just that. And so far he has been doing whatever he can to keep supply down.
Aug '10
Re: Does President Obama Want to Abolish the Suburbs?
In Ontario, it's called The Greenbelt. Large tracts of land around the city of Toronto are designated by the provincial government as "Greenbelt" so that no development can occur on those lands.
The province doesn't OWN these lands, mind you. The government simply tells the people who DO own the land, "you can't build nuthin'."
Much of this land is hardly what one would call "wilderness". It includes family farms and vacant lots.
Edited on August 2, 2012 at 8:14pmAug '10
Re: Does President Obama Want to Abolish the Suburbs?
It's harder to control people in the suburbs, which is why they want us all in soviet style concrete apartments downtown.
I live with the pernicious Metropolitan Council here is the Twin Cities which is mentioned in Kurtz's article. I live in the suburbs and can attest that the purpose of this group is indeed to make life more expensive in the burbs and easier in the cities. They are another layer of government on top of the city and the county and they love to add taxes and mandates on us suburbanites.
They also mandate that each suburb have a certain amount of section 8 (subsidized) housing so that the homies from downtown can see how the other half lives.
Getting people out of the suburbs is a long standing goal of Obama and his ilk. It's all about the power!
Jun '10
Re: Does President Obama Want to Abolish the Suburbs?
Parasites go where the blood is.
Jan '11
Re: Does President Obama Want to Abolish the Suburbs?
I don't think they care whether people live outside the city, so long as they pay.
Time for a refresher course in the notion of public goods. That seems to have come up a lot lately. Why? Because apparently the Democrats, especially Obama, don't understand the concept.
Feb '11
Re: Does President Obama Want to Abolish the Suburbs?
"I love the suburbs. Meanwhile, what I call "making governments compete to provide public services that people want" many of my professoriate colleagues call "a race to the bottom." "
The work of Charles M. Tiebout in the mid-1950s on local choices and local options is what you may be looking for as an answer. [Tiebout, Charles M. (1956). A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures. Journal of Political Economy. 64(5): 416-424.] And it's anything but a race to the bottom. Look at how New England is segmented and the amount of choice available. Romney could use this to peel away New England voters.
Jul '12
Re: Does President Obama Want to Abolish the Suburbs?
Jager: Will this really have the effect Obama wants? I live in a suburb. How does Obama stop the people who want to live in suburbs from moving farther out?
If his plan is implemented, what would stop me from moving to a smaller town a little further away and outside the regional tax authority.
This would be more driving so more green house gases and less tax revenue for the city. · 34 minutes ago
Here in Oregon, our politicians have already taken care of the "move farther out" threat for Obama. It's called the Urban Growth Boundary (UGB). They haven't regionalized yet, but they are working hard on it.
In fact, there is a huge fight going on right now in Clackamas County (east/south Portland metro), primarily related to transit issues. Predictably, the transit agency wants to vacuum up all the transportation money so they can ram yet another light rail line through a bunch of suburbs that can't and/or don't want to utilize it.
Aug '10
Re: Does President Obama Want to Abolish the Suburbs?
It's been a while since I read it, but isn't there some electro-therapy in Brave New World that caused the World State citizens to be averse to nature? A flower and a baby and electricity? Or is that some other dystopian novel? Or my own feverish imagination?
Mar '11
Re: Does President Obama Want to Abolish the Suburbs?
Republicans ought to. In the past, especially during the "busing wars" of the 1970s, there was a strong outcry in New England--even in blue Massachusetts--against policies that took suburban children from their neighborhoods into inner city schools for reasons of 'diversity'.
Leftists contended that the opposition was only motivated by racial animus, but that theory never held water among the voters--even in Leftist Massachusetts. Parents (of all stripes) didn't want their children sent to inferior schools over which they had no control as a result of a policy in which they had no say. It was as simple as that.
And you know what, school choice remains one of the issues today that strongly cuts against the broader trend of "race politics" that the Leftist arsonists try to use to divide Americans from one another, and alienate us from the common good.
Apr '11
Re: Does President Obama Want to Abolish the Suburbs?
"If his plan is implemented, what would stop me from moving to a smaller town a little further away and outside the regional tax authority. "Many suburbanites need to commute to the metropolitan area for their jobs. Obama's plans will limit our choices and make it more difficult and expensive. Those already established will be OK, but the upcoming generations will be stuck. We must defeat this monster in Nov.
Aug '10
Re: Does President Obama Want to Abolish the Suburbs?
My city simply annexed all the surrounding suburban/rural municipalities, so that the city that used to be about 15 miles from end to end is now over 50 miles from end to end, with a huge proportion of that land being farmland. The downtown urban politicians now have an iron grip on the rural and suburban communities. It's possible to live outside the city, but it's a dang long commute.
Feb '12
Re: Does President Obama Want to Abolish the Suburbs?
Matthew Lawrence
It's been a while since I read it, but isn't there some electro-therapy in Brave New World that caused the World State citizens to be averse to nature? A flower and a baby and electricity? Or is that some other dystopian novel? Or my own feverish imagination? · 43 minutes ago
Brave New World. The infants crawl towards pictures of flowers and nature and get electric shocks to associate nature with pain.
They are also taught to love outdoor sporting games that use lots of equipment to help prop up that sector of the economy.
Re: Does President Obama Want to Abolish the Suburbs?
This nicely shows how reactionary the left has become. They want to take us back to 1936. But modern communications -- especially, the internet -- have subverted downtown. You can live out of town and work out of town. All that this will do is to kill the inner suburbs.
Re: Does President Obama Want to Abolish the Suburbs?
I take issue at least in part with Kurtz. Those who fight hardest against suburban sprawl are those who live in the suburbs. Can't blame that on the President.
Also, the suburbs do their fair share of market tampering and wealth shifting through taxation: Open Space acquisition. The tax money for that comes from folks in the city, too.
Glass houses, and such.