if you plan to read Bloomberg Businessweek‘s five-page article featuring planning experts’ recommendations “about how to make our cities more sustainable, efficient, and prosperous in the years ahead,” be sure to consult Michael Sanera’s planning glossary, compiled for the John Locke Foundation in 2010.
Planners are doing more than using technical jargon common to their profession, Sanera said. “They are distorting language intentionally to serve a political end,” he said. “They are using language to cover the reality that their recommendations attack basic individual freedoms.” …
… The glossary tackles more than two dozen terms, including “affordable housing.” “Affordable housing is an Orwellian term used by planners to justify extorting homebuilders to sell houses they build at below-market prices,” Sanera said. “The political demand for affordable housing is created by restrictive land-use policies that drive up prices. High prices effectively force low-income families out of the housing market. Absent excessive land-use policies, housing in all price ranges would be available.”
Sanera also tackles the term “stakeholders.” “Stakeholders are special-interest groups who are consulted in developing land-use plans and regulations,” Sanera said. “The general public or the broader public interest or constitutional rights are not considered.”
Some planning terms attack development patterns that most people support, Sanera said. “What planners label ‘cookie-cutter subdivisions’ are the places where the vast majority of people want to live,” he said. “This term shows the disdain planners hold for the tastes of average Americans who want single-family homes at affordable prices.”
Even a term such as “community” is subject to distortion, Sanera said. “Planners use ‘community’ to hide the fact that they and the most active special-interest groups actually control land-use policies in the city,” he said. “While Raleigh’s planners like to boast that the new Comprehensive Plan was formulated with widespread public input, the reality is that only a narrow segment of the population even knew it was being considered.”
“Planners also use ‘community’ to signal that it is the community — meaning planners and interest groups — that controls private property in the city,” Sanera added. “If the city adopts some of the recommendations in the consultants’ report, the ‘community’ will control the location and form of new development, along with buffer requirements, architectural styles of new buildings, even the type of transportation people will use.”
