Agenda 21 and Rising Cost of Living

This morning, we read this piece from Stanley Kurtz:

A year ago, I published Spreading the Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities. There I described the president’s second-term plan to press a transformative “regionalist” agenda on the country. Early but unmistakable signs indicate that Obama’s regionalist push is well underway.

....

The new HUD rule is really about changing the way Americans live. It is part of a broader suite of initiatives designed to block suburban development, press Americans into hyper-dense cities, and force us out of our cars. Government-mandated ethnic and racial diversification plays a role in this scheme, yet the broader goal is forced “economic integration.” The ultimate vision is to make all neighborhoods more or less alike, turning traditional cities into ultra-dense Manhattans, while making suburbs look more like cities do now. In this centrally-planned utopia, steadily increasing numbers will live cheek-by-jowl in “stack and pack” high-rises close to public transportation, while automobiles fall into relative disuse.

....

[discussing one such example in the San Francisco Bay Area]

In effect, by preventing the development of new suburbs, and reducing traditional single-family home development in existing suburbs, Plan Bay Area will squeeze 30 years worth of in-migrating population into a few small urban enclaves, and force most new businesses into the same tight quarters. The result will be a steep increase in the Bay Area’s already out-of-control housing prices. This will hit the poor and middle class the hardest. [emphasis ours]

 This got us thinking about some of our recent efforts locally and at the state level.  One common denominator all this crap shares is that the policies we're fighting increase cost of living.  That's true whether the proposed policies emanate from your local city council, Washington, or the United Nations.

And that's how you fight it.  Americans are too apathetic to learn about some obscure policy coming out of the U.N.  But if you tell them "project 'x' is going to cost you $300 per year, project 'y' is going to cost you $500, and project 'z' is going to cost you $200" then they'll care about that tangible $1000.

Cost of living is a tangible mechanism to fight land-use central planning, whether the central planners are your local city council, the United Nations, or anyone in between.