Monday, November 25, 2013

The Collective Mindset

"We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile."

Here's another, if you need it:


That's really all the commentary you need from me about this story:
A plan to squeeze most residents of the San Francisco Bay Area into multifamily housing offers a test case of whether land-use bureaucracies nationwide, encouraged by the Obama administration, should be allowed to transform American lifestyles under the pretext of combating climate change...

Owning a single-family home has long been part of the American dream, but Plan Bay Area embraces a dramatically different vision of the ideal community: crowded rows of high-rises and mass-transit platforms.

Population density in the region’s urban areas would increase by 30 percent during the next two decades under the plan. Nearly 80 percent of all new housing and 62 percent of new jobs would be located in just 5 percent of the region’s surface area.

Planners admit this will make single-family housing in the already high-priced Bay area even less affordable.
Who would want to live like that? And of those who do, why would you want to compel others to live that way?  The answer to the 2nd question is simple:  compulsion is central to the liberal way of thinking.

6 comments:

maxutils said...

If this were desired? Then it would be profitable. SF's work lofts in SOMA worked really well, and, though not multifamily ... definitely a smaller living space for single/couples. Obviously the city has a right to zone...but the problem is, SF is about 5 miles square. There literally is no land to develop, unless you want to tear something down ... and you can't pull an ex post facto. So the landlords and homeowners will never agree to this, unless people want it.

allen (in Michigan) said...

Ah, I see you've accepted the lefty portrayal of their vision of the future.

Unfortunately for you and all other conservatives who've fallen for that phony vision of a Borg-like enforced egalitarianism the true beliefs of lefty's are on display in Star Trek: First Contact. That's the movie in which we learn that the Borg Collective has a queen - first among equals I presume - and she's hot and wears a skin-tight, leather cat-suit.

It's a plan to squeeze most residents of the San Francisco Bay Area into multifamily housing. I'd be willing to give odds that most of the feverish supporters of this plan don't see themselves stuffed into the Soviet-era housing they have planned for most San Francisco residents.

If there's one thread that's common to all socialist societies it's that they all result in a privileged class that "earns" its privileged status via their political power.

Steve USMA '85 said...

Wow, is there no limit to what left-coasters will do?

Anonymous said...

Hi Max,

You write: "the problem is, SF is about 5 miles square." Actually, closer to 7 ... SF proper is 46.9 square miles, according to Wiki :-)

But ... this article is about the SF Bay Area, not just the city of San Francisco. Note that the article talks about the "56 percent of households in the nine-county Bay Area live in single-family homes."

The nine counties in the SF Bay Area cover almost 7,000 square miles (again, see Wiki). This isn't a 'space' issue, per-se.

-Mark Roulo

Anonymous said...

This is part of the regionalism push from the federal government. It includes mandatory revenue sharing: the suburbs pay the cities because the cities have driven productive people to the suburbs and have destroyed their tax base. This has already begun in the Twin Cities. Other locations, such as Montgomery County, MD (DC suburb) is forcing SES integration onto developers.

maxutils said...

Mark Ruolo ... you are correct on both points... I misread.allen, dead on. The only way this can happen is if people vote to let it. And, given how horrible Bay Area traffic already is? I don't see it.