Something to think about as a local option transit tax for Forsyth and Guilford counties makes its way through the General Assembly, via Antiplanner:
Ron Utt, the Antiplanner’s faithful ally, has uncovered the first steps of President Obama’s plan to force smart growth on those parts of the country that managed to escape the housing bubble. The departments of Transportation and Housing & Urban Development have signed a joint agreement to impose smart growth on the entire nation.
Under the agreement, the departments will “have every major metropolitan area in the country conduct integrated housing, transportation, and land use planning and investment in the next four years.” Of course, nearly all of the metropolitan areas that already did such integrated planning suffered housing bubbles, while most of those that did not did not have bubbles. The effect of Obama’s plan will be to make the next housing bubble much worse than the one that caused the current financial crisis.
Note Obama’s praise of the couple local who, as the president tells it, were forced by the recession to make big ‘sacrifices’ and ‘sold their home and moved into a smaller one,’ not to mention the fact that Antiplanner’s unsure if Obama “was bemoaning or celebrating their sacrifice.”
